That's definitely the reason we applied. When they came out, reviews of Fooled By Randomness and The Black Swan said wisely that for people who want to get into scalable jobs^, the main lesson of the books is to expose yourself to as much randomness as possible and to just get out there and do your thing. Success is built on a small number of big breaks, so you need to put yourself in a situation where your chances for lucky breaks are as big as possible. YC fits into that brilliantly, as does the argument in favor of moving to a startup hub.

^A scalable job, according to Taleb, is any job where given success, the amount of money you make is vastly disproportionate to the amount of time you put in--like starting a company, or becoming an actor or musician. A non-scalable job is something like dentistry, where the amount of money you make always stays pretty closely tied to the hours you work.

"A scalable job, according to Taleb, is any job where given success, the amount of money you make is vastly disproportionate to the amount of time you put in--like starting a company, or becoming an actor or musician. "

That's a terrible misuse of the term scalable.

In fairness (and in context), Taleb is quoting some random b-school guy he encountered. He reuses it, but I suspect he does so that he doesn't have to mess with the original story and/or quibble over definitions.

i think that is a great point. people look to incredibly successful people like steve jobs and bill gates, and they hear their stories and think 'hey, if i had gotten that lucky i could've done that too.'

it's not about luck, it's about odds. successful people fail on a consistent basis. the more you put yourself out there the more likely it is that the next time you do you'll get lucky.