| "He was lucky." Luck plays a part in everything. It's lucky that we live on the third planet from the sun, which is habitable, so you were able to get your PHD. However, I'm really tired of people attributing success to mostly luck, which is what it sounds like in your post. Winning the lottery or gambling is mostly luck. A successful business takes about 1%-5% luck. The rest is skill and/or intelligence. Everyone has potential opportunities that pass them by on a daily basis. The ones that can recognize them (with the skills/intelligence) and actually decide to act one them are successful. I had many at my last job and nobody else saw them because they just didn't have the skills. "Netflix didn't become a giant through streaming content. They parlayed DVD money into a streaming business because the whole industry was making a very obvious shift in that direction. I mean hell, if they were half the geniuses that the author makes them out to be they wouldn't have selected Silverlight as the backbone of their service." If it was so obvious why didn't someone else do it? It's not like they had the most money? Also, everyone makes mistakes, even "geniuses". If it was mostly luck. I could sit here and do nothing and I would have a successful company tomorrow. You and I both know this won't happen. "All I saw was a group of lucky people in one industry try to jump into another industry that appeared deceptively similar, and just because Hastings is their CEO doesn't make me think he's intelligent. If anything he's demonstrated that he doesn't fully understand the economics of splitting media." Strange how "luck" as you say seems to follow them around. You get lucky in one industry and make millions of dollars and then you get lucky in another similar industry and have the most popular streaming service in the world. "The Quickster Announcement came off to me as a very stubborn businessman, tricked into thinking himself intelligent and a captain of industry by his fabulous luck, making a rash decision to vindicate a strong opinion he had behind closed doors." Yeah, that was a dumb decision. |
I'd put it considerably higher than that, especially in markets that have strong dynamical-system type effects (winner-take-all markets, strong dependence on feedback factors like visibility/brand, etc.), where small differences early on that are nearly impossible to predict can magnify arbitrarily to large differences later on. If I had to put a number on it, probably 60-70% luck, once you pass a baseline level of competence.
Even in my own personal endeavors, it's really surprising, and---even in hindsight!---seemingly random what stuff succeeds and what doesn't, and which factors turn out to matter. Especially true of any sort of online commerce, where the difference between successful and unsuccessful websites is in part the quality of the content or product, but also strongly dependent on the vicissitudes of information flow, "virality", etc. Nonlinear dynamical systems have complex dynamics, and they don't always correlate very strongly with anything except the system's internal dynamics...