[pp]

Luck is disguised as genius all the time! Not only do we tend to see just the winners (survivorship bias), those winners honestly mistake their lucky guesses for great decisions (hindsight bias).

I would love to study more examples of failed startups. But people are not that fond of sharing with others how they screwed up (again, it's easy to see your own mistakes in the past). We need Anti-TechCrunch.

[DanielBMarkham]

And with selection bias it's all so subtle that most times everybody fails to find it.

For instance, in this article one of the points was "make friends with the press" That's all fine and dandy, but a zillion other guys are also making friends with the press. If you're a YC alum, know a bunch of other "friends", live in the Valley, etc, you're going to have an easier time of it.

Lots of seemingly insignificant factors work cumulatively to make an easy piece of advice actually doable. Too often when the winners throw out the advice, however, there's no mention of all the dozens of little supporting pieces -- most of the time because they don't know or haven't really thought about them.

It can be extremely misleading.