Luck

“I think in the VC, probably the influence of luck on ultimate outcome is probably as high as in any other, as any other industry that I know, probably the highest.”

“There's another aspect too is there is luck, but there's some ability that the great founders master that luck. Like they figure out How to, like, just keep getting, you know, lucky again and again. And so, like, what do you call that? I don't know what you ca…”

“What I realized was, luck is actually poison, because it strips people of agency. So if you constantly rely on luck, if you constantly fall back on good luck, bad luck, what you're saying is that you have no agency.”

“Well, anyone who says that you don't need luck to be successful in business is full of shit or doesn't understand. You definitely need some luck to go with it. You need luck and timing are a very important ingredient.”

“If you can do something that changes your odds of an outcome, it's not luck by definition. Luck to me, the biggest are where and when you were born. You can't control it. Bill Gates couldn't control it. Elon Musk couldn't control it, but it has a massive incom…”

“And then I think, to a large extent, more luck than skill to get to a hundred million, but it requires a ton of patience, and a ton of persistence”

“I do think, and this sounds a little fatalistic, but I think 90% of virality, whether it's in content Or maybe even companies too, maybe a little less for companies, but a significant part of virality is luck. It's something that you really can't put your fing…”

“I actually think that risk and luck are virtually the same things, just in opposite directions. Risk and luck, the definition that I would give to both of them are, there are things that can happen outside of your control that have a bigger influence on outcom…”

“You don't have to be lucky to get rich. You don't have to be lucky to build an audience. You don't have to be lucky to build a SaaS company to 10 K a month that can change your life. You don't have to be lucky to build an incredible network. You don't have to …”

“Trying to be a bootstrapper and rely on luck is super dangerous, and we see some people doing it. We see in our space some founders who kind of get lucky, and then when they go to do it a second or third time, they can't, right?”

“I'm going to say luck has three conditions. It happens to an individual organization, so to you or your company or your favorite sports team. Second is it can be good or bad. Don't mean to suggest that it's symmetrical, but there's a positive sign potentially …”

“I think that you need some amount of luck to kind of be in the game. Whatever it is, like, You need some like minimum bar of luck. And then above that, it's probably skill.”

“That's right, David. Previously, that was held by a, when I wrote, I think it was in January of 14 or 15, called Luck, in which I talked about how lucky I've been and that I'm a big believer in luck and it's great to be on the right side of it. And I listed ab…”

“So to me, success is very, success has, success itself The yes or no has very little to do with luck. The magnitude of success has a lot to do with luck”

“Luck is asymmetric as a cause. We cannot make the case of luck as the cause of a great company in any of our research. It's more of the flywheel effect over time, and return on luck, capitalizing on things, and cumulative, right? So good luck cannot cause a gr…”

“Luck in some ways is, is really anathema to sports, right? We work hard and we game plan and we strategize and we compete and we sweat. We don't want to think that this is just in the hands of fate or coin flip. I mean, in some ways, luck is very much at odds …”

“Now, what you've done there is you've socialized the result to the world. You've offloaded responsibility for this bad outcome to the world. Now, in the short run, that feels good. Because you don't need to do any kind of, like, identity update. You don't need…”

“It drives me crazy that I would say a vast majority of money managers I've met over the years, and it's a big number, simply will not accept that luck is part of the equation.”

“And the paradox of skills when both luck and skill are contributing to outcomes, which is most things, right? There are some things that are mostly skill like running races, but most things in life have at least a dollop of luck. It can be the case that a skil…”