A better way of understanding the startup world is that everything has a high degree of uncertainty (which you can call luck), and so the smart strategy is to remain as agile as possible, and continually learn from the market in order to refine your strategy and vision. I prefer to think of it as Newton's method of product/market discovery, and the most successful startups are those who are able to iterate the fastest.
Most start-ups try to solve right place by moving to the Silicon Valley and then iterate on ideas/timing.
Leaves a lot of room for those who go down the path of finding a customer with a problem they can solve first and building from there.
Probably because it's not exactly true. The whole point of all that data is to see which aspects of a business work and which parts don't. The author is describing pivots a bit hyperbolically for the sake of drama/artistic license, but it's not like the C-level executives pivot by rolling the dice and seeing what they come up with. A successful pivot works by observing which parts work, dropping the parts that don't work, and building up the parts that people like.
Think about the last SV product/service you purchased. Did you buy it because you had a random thought, or did you buy it because it actually solved a need of yours?
When you realize that you have this kind of a system, you want to put in place institutions which underwrite failures, to allow your talented people the ability to try out big ideas that might be the next big winner. Such systems are hard (but not impossible) to put in place: There's a good argument to be made that academia is at its core one huge such hedge, allowing talented people (good enough to get through the tenure process) a long-ish leash to try out new ideas in the hopes of developing something both novel and (every once in a while) exciting. The flip side is that you need a gatekeeper system of some sort to minimize parasites, and hopefully also to ensure diversity in your boys club.
I think this is not always true, therefore wrong.
If you allow me to extend the notion of success to old writers, I can give the example of La Fontaine, whose poems are still read and learnt by kids and grown-ups 300 years after he wrote them. He is often considered as a lazy guy.
So hard working is certainly not sufficient, and not even always necessary for success. So long for this magical recipe. For me, luck (be there at the right time) is the best non-magical explanation for success-stories, and any non-superstitious book accounting the successes of our times should have one page and only three words on it: "He was lucky".
Sure, he was lucky. But being born into a wealthy family was his luck, not just writing a few lines out of the blue and being thought of as the first poet to understand the nuance of French.
What's the best way to improve your odds at this game? Be sure you get to roll more than once.
Or maybe s/he had a better idea than you had? Doesn't look like luck to me.
"When you combine all those things and still fail, most people will blame something besides just luck. [...]"
While I believe this (the luck part), I'm not sure most startup folks do. Or, there is at least some severe cognitive dissonance going on when they begin to discover it.
Even "the pivot" itself was made popular by The Lean Startup–the book that many take as the formula for startup success (very much the antithesis of luck).
Yes, you have to hustle. Yes, you have to build something people want. Yes, you should have an awesome team. When you combine all those things and still fail, most people will blame something besides just luck. ("I couldn't get funding", "Google changed their algorithm", "I couldn't hire the right person for X")
Of course, when a 9-figure exit happens to someone who can't code as good as you and didn't go to as good a school as you–then it was most definitely luck.