I think its an insult to successful people, when others go around branding their achievements as "luck".

The fact that we were born in North America and not into a war torn anarchy based country like Somalia, we should all consider ourselves lucky. From that point on what you choose to do with your time and the results of that time spent ain't got nothin to do with luck.

You should give The Black Swan a read sometime. Lots of people are smart, well prepared, work hard, but few get the phenomenal returns that Mr. Cuban has. That's luck.

One example is doctors: they are people who work hard to achieve, do an important job, and certainly earn well, but they don't seem to get these stratospheric startup paybacks, just a good, steady high return on their investment in learning and practice.

To me "luck" is like the word "love", the moment you start using it to describe things, you stop thinking about it. Perhaps in the case of love thats a good thing, but when trying to be succesful at something, going around calling things luck instead of trying to find the source does not do you any good.

my definition of luck is at the intersection of preparation and opportunity. Therefore, a better thing to say is "He was prepared". He had actually put himself in a position, through starting MicroWhatever to reap more through Broadcast.

That is not your definition of luck. It is Darrell Royal's definition of luck.

Probably Shakespeare's too.

Would a buying a lottery ticket be an intersection of preparation and opportunity?

I don't think broadcast.com even exists anymore. Yahoo spent almost 6 billion dollars for a company/website that doesn't exist less than 10 years later (if I remember my facts right).

So I'm sure not everyone agrees with his definition of "right".

Still, I think the point is that you only have to get lucky once. Sure, his last company was lucky. But if you start 10 companies, how lucky is it that one succeeds? Much less so than if you only started 1.