[brailsafe]

What a lot of loud successful people wouldn't like to admit, is that even if you show up and do the work, you have to be very lucky to get traction for anything, regardless of novelty. True for being an employee or a business. For the latter, it helps to be very lucky and opportunistic with timing to begin with.

[jamestimmins]

Maybe with consumer tech, but this isn’t the case with enterprise. Successful companies identify a market need then figure out how to sell it. It’s appealing to say it’s luck from the outside, but the successful playbook is consistent enough that it seems naive to attribute it to luck.

[brailsafe]

Well, it depends what you mean, but I certainly didn't attribute it to luck. I attributed a certain amount to luck, which is always involved no matter how you spin it.

I know someone who runs a successful enterprise consulting business for example. He's a relentless worker, and has earned it, but he'd be delusional to not admit that there's luck involved at every point in the delivery chain; starting of course with being lucky to never run into any problems on his first few steps into the job world where he developed connections he could later sell to. If you're a relentless worker, you have probably never been given a reason to question the merit of hard work, because it's always paid off for you somehow.

Doesn't even matter whether it's tech related or not. If you're on your way to being a successful mountain climber, you're going to need be lucky to not develop debilitating foot problems.

Back to your example, there's a certain amount of luck involved in finding out about the apparent enterprise playbook in a time and place where you can put it to use, and of course in finding a market. I don't know a thing about enterprise sales or business because my dad conveniently doesn't run one and I was never hired at IBM in the 90s.