| Not to sound like a guy, but here goes. No. Do male executives drive start-up success? No. Do smart people drive start-up success? No. Do great coders drive start-up success? No. Do great salesman drive start-up success? No. Does great funding drive start-up success? No. Any or all of the above could in certain situations, but not all situations. If you could mathematically model startup success, you'd probably end up with something that looks and feels a lot like the Google Search ranking algorithm. You'd have possibly hundreds of factors you might tweak up or down over time to try to best fit the data set, but ultimately it's not even close to a guarantee of relevance and it would require some hand tweaking of results at times to be "correct". If someone could reliably define that you need so much of X, Y, Z factors to be the next Facebook, Google, Dropbox, or even Instagram, they would build a factory to build companies that print money. So far no company has truly built that yet. |
Pretty much YC in a nutshell.