[edmondlau]

I like the bottom-line perspective you provide at the end, of "success = preparedness + luck."

Preparedness is what we can train ourselves for, and preparedness also has the effect of making you more able to see and take advantage of opportunities that come your way. And to someone who doesn't know how much you've prepared, it appears that you're just luckier.

[KKKKkkkk1]

I used to work for a startup whose founder loved quoting Louis Pasteur: "Fortune favors the well-prepared mind." Then again, that dude was building a medical device based on his PhD research. Most Silicon Valley founders would scoff at that quote.

[phillc73]

What was the outcome of that startup? Did the product make it to market?

I'm currently working on commercialising a pharmaceutical manufacturing monitoring device[1], based on the work from someone's PhD.

[1] https://www.phyllon.at

[brucephillips]

But these examples are cherry picked. Was Google lucky? Oracle? Hotmail? Take away what luck might exist, and would they not still be billion dollar companies?