How much luck in a startup's success?

Originally published on Tumblr.

It’s hard to watch the World Cup and not think about luck. If you’re working at the same time, you’re likely working for a startup, in which case you might also be thinking about luck in that context.

I’ve recently had a couple of “failure” posts cross my Twitter feed. The first is local. Erica Douglass shut her company down, and wrote about it. The post was read by everyone in Austin, and everyone in the TechStars network. The second was (re)tweeted by a Who’s Who of the startup world: Nikki Durkin wrote about the failure of 99dresses.

In Erica’s case, the loss of a big customer put an end to MarketVibe. In Nikki’s case, 99dresses got caught in the awkward spot between Seed and Series A. Bad luck.

I used to think it was superstitious and un-modern to believe in luck. If not superstitious, weak. I thought bad luck was an easy way to explain lack of skill, hard work, and focus. Then I picked up the book Luck: What it Means and Why it Matters. It discussed luck in the context of sports. It explained the difference between sports in which luck matters very little, like tennis, and sports in which luck matters a lot, like soccer/football. With those examples – you really have to read the book to understand the subtleties of the argument – luck starts to make sense. Sure, skill, hard work, and focus matter, but so does luck.

In the past year I’ve spent a lot of time talking to successful startups. At first you get the myth: the planning, the perfect execution, the inevitable hockey stick. But if you’re lucky enough to talk to a confident founder or investor, you’ll quickly get to the real story, and you’ll hear all about the luck that got the company where it is today. You’ll hear about the luck that allowed them to avoid the apparently inevitable shutdown.

A few weeks ago, reading The Hard Thing About Hard Things I couldn’t help thinking two parallel thoughts. One part of my brain was full of admiration for Ben Horowitz’ skill and grit. And another part kept thinking: “Wow, was he lucky!” I think both of those thoughts are true, which makes it a lot more difficult to categorize people. It’s easy if you draw a straight line between quality and outcome. It’s a lot harder when you add luck to the equation. “Did they win because they were better than their competitors, or because they were lucky?”

I think it’s great that founders are starting to talk about failure. But let’s not be afraid to talk about luck.