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@noelle this only works if you already decided that it's a game of chance. analogies are good for illumination, not argumentation.
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@Moon @noelle Here's the argumentation:
Professional angel investors, presumably good at determining all the knowable factors that would cause a startup to fail, still only see 10% of their investments succeed. They have access to people with experience in business development and execution that can help their investments prosper.
The difference between those 10% and the other 90% would be things nobody could foresee, not things like talent, connections, market knowledge, grit etc. It would be unforeseeable factors like being in the right place at the right time. Luck.
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@Moon It is! But it's not entirely understood why. Because if they knew why they'd stop failing. So what you do is you try and try again ... which brings us back to the HN post. =)
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@clacke @noelle good explanation, thank you. That makes perfect sense. although I think it's generally understood by people (at least business people) that most businesses fail.
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@Moon @noelle 90% of the time, you miss 100% of the shots you didn't take
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@Moon What I'm saying is that Jane Joe Random doesn't have excellent executives, investor networks, the experience and skills to evaluate their own talent, grit and business idea, etc, so they're even less than 10% likely to succeed.
If they did have 10% chance to succeed they'd need to be able to try about 7 times to have a 50% chance to succeed.
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@clacke what I mean is, there's kind of a difference between angel investors and entrepreneurs. angel investors have a ton of money and they spread it all around because risk is just part of the game. the angel investor almost can't lose. but any individual business, the person starting it is taking huge risk. even then yeah the successful people are serial entrepreneurs that eventually hit it so the analogy does match that very well, you can be a serial entrepreneur if you have a lot of money. regular people opening a restaurant or whatever, 80+% are just going to fail and they go back to their regular wage job.
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@clacke the reason I don't care for the analogy is not the analogy itself i'm thinking, it's that it's often used to hand-wave away the requisite hard work. I understand perfectly that hard work doesn't equal success but it's a prerequisite to it 99+% of the time.
in my own life it was an observation that some people just seemed to be lucky but i looked closer and the people that got lucky were people that 1. showed up and 2. kept trying consistently. also maybe 3. didn't fuck it up and were able to keep the ball rolling.
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@Moon That's also true.
I'm reading the post as coming from the direction that you need hard work and determination to even get into the carnival. That's a given. The success is not.
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@clacke oh i also agree that "meritocracy" is a terrible model for explaining success.
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