[JonFish85]

I know it's not the point of the article, specifically, but it's very difficult to draw any startup conclusions based on a game company. Games are notoriously difficult to make into successful products, even more-so than your average startup.

That said, I do think the author has a lot of good points. Surely there is a portion of "randomness"/luck, but there's also a healthy dose of focus & determination that make things work.

To play a bit of devil's advocate, I do feel that in the last few years the idea of "success" has somewhat diverged from what it used to mean. Is Twitter successful? To their founders & early investors, certainly they are. In 5 years, will Twitter still be relevant & a worthwhile investment to their millions of new stockholders?

Was Zynga "successful"? Again: to early investors, they were wildly successful. They were able to dump their shares onto a greater fool.

To me, those are two examples of "lucky" startups. A startup like Salesforce is less "lucky" and more a well-executed product. It's not as sexy as a Facebook/Twitter/Zynga, but it's a solid business addressing a specific need. It isn't reliant on "scale massively and figure out a sustainable business model later", which to me is what the aforementioned companies are.

To paint a picture, some startups have fisherman tactics: throw as wide of a net as possible, catch as many things as possible and some small portion will be valuable. These would be startups to whom luck would seem to play a larger role (in my opinion).

Others are more focused: identify a specific set of targets to go after, and hunt them down. This would be more like Salesforce. To me, these are the startups that don't rely as much on luck.

[acemtp]

I'm the author. Thanks for the comment.

I agree with you, I don't know the Saleforce history but I'm quite sure that at the beginning of the company, they had lot of luck. I'm sure at least 10 other companies tried to address the same problem on the same market and failed.

Execution is mandatory but lot of the execution is also based on lot of uncontrollable parameters, hire the right guy at the right time.

Look at Evernote for example, they were almost bankrupt even if the execution was good, the market here and so on. It's a pure luck if the are still there and so strong.

[wj]

Have you heard of the concept of increasing your luck surface area? If my memory serves me correctly is that all of the work, networking, etc. you do the more opportunities you have to get lucky. You can't have chance encounters in your basement. You can't stumble onto investors for a product that doesn't exist.

I think it goes along the lines of the quote from The entertainment industry that every overnight success is a result of years of hard work (paying your dues in the form of acting/music lessons, community theater/coffee house performances, tons of auditions).

[acemtp]

Yes I heard of the concept of increasing your luck surface area and yes it's clearly what everyone should do.

[georgeecollins]

The game industry is a special case because it is at an intersection between technology and entertainment. Success is very difficult to predict or repeat. You can't just fill a need in a niche because any other game, really any other form of entertainment, is a substitute for your product.