Things I will tell my kids if they become entrepreneurs [slides]

Re:Things I will tell my kids if they become entrepreneurs [... by kowdermeister on Monday October 31, 2016 @10:14AM (#12836839)

I think luck has two meanings. One is the traditional sense, when you buy a lottery ticket and you end up $1M richer. That's luck by pure chance. Luck on the other hand can be more deterministic and people still call it that. For example you start a chain of events that end up hugely in your favor. If you don't know what caused it, you might call it luck, but in fact you put yourself on the course to make that happen.

For me the other meaning of luck is when opportunity meets potential/preparedness. If you are 100% capable of going live next day and you bump into a reporter it's much more likely that they will feature you. And you can put yourself into situations when it's more likely to meet reporters if that's what you think need next. From the outside it will still look like "oh Zifffify was so lucky that they got featured on XY".

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Re:Things I will tell my kids if they become entrepreneurs [... by jakewins on Monday October 31, 2016 @03:44PM (#12840222)

I think luck here is referring, mainly, to risk taking - a giant corporation is not going to be the company on something that has a 0.5 probability of happening, but a startup might.

For instance: All these startups around self-driving vehicles. There's a non-zero chance the publics current unsettledness swings to full on majority disapproval, leading to gov't regulation killing self driving cars.

You can set yourself up to maximize the chance of that not happening, but but you cannot bring the probability to zero. Hence, these startups all rely on being "lucky".

Meaning, unlike what I felt you are implying in your comment here, startups are often and in many variables betting on probabilities that they are not in control of, aka luck in the exact same sense as a lottery ticket.

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Re:Things I will tell my kids if they become entrepreneurs [... by warbiscuit on Monday October 31, 2016 @03:19PM (#12840018)

One phrase I really liked was "success is preparedness plus opportunity". In that case, the equation would be...

prepareness = idea * execution * product * team * money

opportunity = connections * random-chance

success = preparedness * opportunity

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Re:Things I will tell my kids if they become entrepreneurs [... by kowdermeister on Monday October 31, 2016 @03:48PM (#12840257)

I like this breakdown too. If we want to add luck, random-chance as * ( 1 + random-chance ) where it can be anything between -1 and 1. It can be both negative or positive or no effect at all.

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