Location, timing, access and mistakes on the side of market players - are all a matter of luck.
Google could not have started in 1998 in Russia. Microsoft would not have been Microsoft, without landing the MSDOS from IBM. So on and so forth.
What, in your estimation, can be controlled then?
Sure, not just anybody could have founded Google, even if born to mathematics and computer science professors prioritizing their educations and offering enough of a safety net to start a company rather than toil to pay off student loans for their Stanford computer science graduate educations which facilitated a relationship with a professor willing to connect them with Andy Bechtolsheim right at the Internet’s precipice… but it sure did help.
What they did required hard work, intelligence, creativity and discipline to execute... But implying those are the only factors worth considering is garbage. Their circumstances guaranteed they’d be able to reap greater rewards than nearly anybody else for the same output even if google had failed. Just look at the Opportunity Atlas. Do you really think talent is that geographically focused? If you don’t consider their circumstances lucky or don’t think they made much difference, I’m not really sure what else to say.
It’s probably not psychologically feasible or even useful for them to precisely examine the unearned factors in their or their company’s success, but so many citing ‘hard work’ as the primary factor proves they don’t try. Implying they committed as much, let some hundreds of times more cognitive, emotional, or physical effort, or even as many hours as an NYC line cook aspiring to be a chef, is laughable. Not discounting these folks’ value, but asserting those with less simply have less ambition or work ethic without providing reasonable points of comparison is justification, not reason.