There’s a genre of business content that drives me up the wall. You’ve seen it. “25 Things That Successful Entrepreneurs Do Every Morning.” “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Founders.” “What Elon Musk Eats for Breakfast and Why You Should Too.” These lists are everywhere, and they all share the same fundamental flaw: they only look at the winners. Nobody writes “25 Things That Failed Entrepreneurs Also Did Every Morning”, even though that article would be just as accurate and significantly more useful. The failed entrepreneurs also woke up at 5am. They also journalled. They also had a morning routine and a vision board and a growth mindset. They did all the same things. They just didn’t make it.

This is survivorship bias, and it’s so deeply embedded in how we think about success that most people don’t even notice it. We study the survivors and reverse-engineer their habits into a formula, then sell that formula as though following it guarantees the same outcome. It doesn’t. It can’t. Because the formula deliberately ignores the elephant in the room: luck.

Listen to experienced folks who have seen a lot of startups, and they’ll tell you “I’d rather be lucky than smart, but the harder I work the luckier I get”. I’ve always thought this skirted around the truth, because the truth is much simpler: success is mostly a matter of luck.

The table stakes

Let me be clear about something before I go further. I’m not saying that nothing matters. There are table stakes. You need a working business model. You need enough cash to survive long enough to find out if your idea works. You need to get the right people on board. You need to build the necessary capabilities in the organisation. And so on, there are many more. Without these, you’re dead before you start. But having them doesn’t mean you’ll succeed. These are necessary conditions, not sufficient ones. You will definitely fail if your business model doesn’t actually generate enough revenue to cover your costs. But you won’t automatically succeed if it does. There’s a lot that can go wrong even with a great business model.

This is the big thing: not making a mistake that kills the business. Everyone makes mistakes when they’re doing something new, because the whole point of doing something new is that you don’t know how it works until you try it. You cannot innovate without making mistakes, it’s literally impossible, because innovation means doing things that haven’t been done before, which means you’re navigating without a map. Some of those mistakes are recoverable. Some aren’t. And whether your particular mistake is the recoverable kind or the fatal kind is, to a very large extent, not something you can predict or control. You can be smart, you can be careful, you can be experienced, and you can still make the one mistake that kills the whole thing. That’s not a failure of character. That’s just how uncertainty works.

Profit is a reward for risk

This is basic economics, and yet the implications are somehow controversial. Profit is the reward the market gives you for taking a risk. If there’s no risk, there’s no profit, because everyone would do it and competition would drive the margin to zero. The existence of profit proves the existence of risk. And risk, by definition, is probabilistic. That’s what the word means. There is a chance of failure. You cannot take a risk and simultaneously guarantee success; if you could, it wouldn’t be a risk.

So when someone succeeds in a risky venture, what happened? They took a bet, and the bet paid off. Maybe they were smart about the bet. Maybe they had good information, good instincts, good timing. But they also got lucky, because the alternative outcome, the one where the bet doesn’t pay off, was always a possibility. That’s an obviously true statement; you can’t argue that you took a risk (and therefore deserve a profit) and also argue that you were always destined for success.

The numbers don’t lie

The background rate of failure for startups is roughly 90%. That’s the accepted average. Depending on who’s counting and how they define failure, the figure ranges from about 80% to 95%, but the ballpark is consistent: the vast majority of startups fail. About a fifth don’t survive their first year. About half of the rest are gone within five years. By ten years, roughly two thirds of those have folded. That’s across the entire spectrum of startups.

There’s an entire venture capital industry that exists on the premise that experienced investors can identify which startups will be in the surviving 10%. VCs look for certain founder profiles, certain market characteristics, certain growth metrics. And the data shows that it barely works. VC-funded startups have a 5-year survival rate of about 10-15%. Or, put another way, funded startups fail at about the same rate as all startups. Now, we have to allow for the fact that VCs deliberately push startups to high growth, because that’s the way their business model works. They’d prefer a startup to fail trying to achieve huge scale than only just succeed and give them a 2x return on investment, so we can expect a high failure rate. And then there’s the dilution and preference maths. I’m not going to get into it here, you can search for the stories yourselves. VCs can be brutal about founder equity and exit returns. The point being that if there was any science to startup at all, these people would have found it and exploited it ruthlessly.

Since there isn’t a science, what VCs actually do is pattern-match. They look for startups that resemble previous successes. Right founder profile, right pedigree, right market, right pitch cadence. Paul Graham, founder of Y Combinator, once quipped that he could be tricked by anyone who looks like Mark Zuckerberg. He said it as a joke, but it went viral because it so perfectly captured how the industry actually works. VCs aren’t evaluating business fundamentals; they’re looking for pattern matches to their last big win. Ivy League dropout with a hoodie and a big idea? Funded. Confident guy who talks about disruption and sounds like he’s been rehearsing a TED talk? Funded. As Fortune pointed out, the qualities that make a founder look like a sure bet are exactly the same qualities that make a con artist convincing. Pattern matching doesn’t find winners. It finds people who look like previous winners, which is a very different thing.

What about accelerators? The data there is slightly better; accelerated startups show about a 23% higher survival rate than non-accelerated peers. That’s meaningful but modest. And Y Combinator, the gold standard, the most elite accelerator on the planet with every single factor in its favour; the best mentors, the best network, the best brand, the pick of every new startup on the planet? You’ll sometimes see a figure of around 18% failure rate quoted, which sounds incredible. But that number is misleading; the majority of YC’s investments are recent, and most of those companies simply haven’t had time to fail yet. When you track YC companies long enough for their outcomes to actually resolve, about 55% end up inactive. Only about 9-10% make YC’s own list of most successful companies. Even with literally the best possible support infrastructure in the world, the long-term failure rate is still more than half.

Even the best, most well-resourced, most experienced, most motivated and incentivised people in the business cannot reliably tell you which startups will succeed. Because there’s no science here. It’s unpredictable because it relies on factors that can’t be predicted.

It’s all about timing (and you can’t predict timing)

Bill Gross, founder of Idealab, gave a TED talk where he analysed hundreds of startups to determine what mattered most. He looked at five factors: timing, team and execution, the idea itself, the business model, and funding. Timing came out on top at 42%, beating team and execution at 32%, with the idea itself at 28%, business model at 24%, and funding dead last at 14%.

His examples are telling. Z.com had excellent funding and Hollywood talent but failed because broadband penetration was too low in 1999-2000. YouTube launched at almost exactly the moment that Adobe Flash solved codec issues and broadband passed 50% penetration in the US. Airbnb succeeded partly because it launched during the 2008 recession when people desperately needed supplemental income. Uber emerged when drivers were actively seeking extra earnings.

Jan Koum, co-founder of WhatsApp, told a similar story at YC Startup School. WhatsApp launched in May 2009 as a status-checking app. It flopped. Then, one month later, Apple added push notification capability to the iPhone. That single platform change, completely outside Koum’s control, let him pivot WhatsApp into a real-time messaging app, which is what it became famous for. The App Store itself was only seven months old when Koum bought an iPhone and spotted the opportunity. As he put it: “we were just fortunate in a way that we stumbled into something that people really wanted.” This is a man whose app was eventually acquired for $19 billion, and he’s telling you it was a stumble.

The catch, and this is the important bit, is that the timing has to be right at the moment you launch. You can’t time it retrospectively. You can’t wait until you see the perfect window and then start building, because building takes time, and by the time you’ve built the thing the window will have closed or there will be a thousand other people already doing the same thing. You have to start building before the window opens so that when it opens you’re right there ready with the product that fits it. So the founders who got the timing right largely did so by accident (y’know: luck), they happened to be working on the right problem already when the right time came. And there are plenty of folks out there iterating on an idea whose time has never come. There are lots of folks who failed because they were too early with an idea whose time came later. You can make educated guesses about timing, but you can’t know. Not with certainty. And the data says it’s the single most important factor.

It’s not the idea, and it’s not the team

There’s a widely-repeated piece of startup wisdom: “it’s not the idea, it’s the execution.” The implication being that great teams will succeed regardless of the idea. If that were true, you’d expect the same team to succeed consistently across different ideas. But that’s not what we see.

I met Orion Henry, one of the founders of Heroku, and got to hear his story. There were a gang of them, and they tried a bunch of startup ideas in series. They had some minor wins, but no big successes. Then they built Heroku, a platform for deploying Ruby on Rails apps, got into Y Combinator, and eventually sold to Salesforce for $250 million. Same team. Different ideas. Wildly different outcomes. If it was purely about execution, all their ventures should have succeeded, because these were clearly talented, capable, determined, people. But it took them multiple attempts to find the thing that worked, and when it worked, it worked spectacularly. What changed? Not the team. Not their skills or work ethic. The market was ready. The technology was ready. The timing was right. Ruby on Rails was exploding, developers needed deployment tools, and cloud computing was becoming viable. Heroku landed in exactly the right place at exactly the right moment.

And this works the other direction too. Multiple teams attempting the same idea do not get the same result. Food delivery is a perfect example. Over 3,000 food delivery startups have existed globally, all with roughly the same idea: people want food delivered, let’s build an app for that. The industry has collectively burned through over $30 billion trying to make it work. Thousands of teams, same idea, wildly different outcomes. Grubhub was sold in 2025 at a 90% discount on its 2021 valuation. Postmates got absorbed into Uber Eats. Deliveroo couldn’t survive alone and was acquired by DoorDash. The entire ultra-fast delivery wave of 2022, Fridge No More, Buyk, and others, collapsed within weeks. Today, about five companies dominate the global market, and even some of those are barely profitable. Uber Eats, with all their execution knowledge, their existing set of drivers, and their huge pile of funding, only recently approached profitability, and DoorDash’s “profit” is disputed once you account for $2.6 billion in stock-based compensation. Predicting which of those 3,000 startups would be the survivors? Nobody could do it. Not the founders, not the VCs, not the analysts.

So if it’s not the idea, and it’s not the team, and it’s not the funding, then what is it? Bill Gross says timing. But there’s a hundred other things you can’t control: who you happen to meet, which customer says yes first, whether a competitor launches the week before or after you, whether a global pandemic reshapes your market overnight.

Cargo-culting assholes

There’s a particularly toxic strain of this survivorship bias that manifests as behaviour copying. Steve Jobs was famously difficult to work with. Elon Musk is, by most accounts, a nightmare boss. Both are spectacularly successful. Therefore, some people conclude, being a difficult nightmare boss must be a path to success. This is cargo-culting at its finest: replicating the surface behaviours of successful people without understanding that those behaviours had nothing to do with the success, and might have even happened despite them.

The same logic gives us Jim Rohn’s “you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with”, the idea that success is somehow contagious, that if you just hang around enough successful people it’ll rub off on you. This is magical thinking. It’s the same impulse that makes people build fake runways in the jungle hoping planes will land. We are, let’s be honest, barely-evolved apes, and we still have a deep-seated tendency to confuse correlation with causation and to see patterns that aren’t there. We still think digital watches religion is a pretty neat idea. We are not, as a species, naturally good at probabilistic reasoning.

But you can’t entirely blame them. Because as we saw earlier, VCs are pattern-matching too. If VCs are funding people who look and act like previous winners, then acting like a previous winner is a rational strategy for getting funded. The cargo-culting isn’t just delusional; it’s incentivised. So round and round it goes; VCs fund people who behave like assholes because their last winner behaved like an asshole. Some of them succeed because it’s mostly luck. The successful ones form the basis of the pattern that the VCs match to. New founders learn to behave like assholes so they match the pattern and get funded.

The damage this does is real. There are people out there treating their employees like shit because they think that’s what successful founders do. There are people burning relationships and destroying teams because they saw a documentary about Steve Jobs. And there are entire communities of startup people who are, frankly, assholes, because they’ve absorbed this cargo-cult mythology and turned it into an identity. This is a big part of why regular people don’t like “techbro” startup culture.

Born to it

And then there are the people who inherited the whole thing. We consider them successful. We put them on magazine covers. We ask them for business advice. We treat them as though they have insight into how to build wealth, despite the fact that they did no work at all to achieve their position. They were born to rich parents, inherited a fortune, and showed up.

This is the purest possible example of luck driving success, and yet we collectively pretend it’s something else. We say they’re “good stewards of wealth” or “savvy investors” or “natural leaders”. I’ve met a few of these, and their sheer entitlement and arrogance is breathtaking. I have had a conversation with one, a very rich man who inherited his entire fortune and has lost about 90% of it, and he lectured me on what a business genius he is. There’s an orange twat in the White House with the same attitude. The fact that we treat inherited wealth as “success” rather than “luck” tells you everything you need to know about our relationship with this concept.

The contradiction at the top

Even among the most successful people in the world, there’s no agreement on how success actually works. Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Netscape, co-founder of a16z, one of the most influential figures in tech, talks about founders who create a “reality distortion field.” He describes great entrepreneurs as people who are so compelling, so convinced of their vision, that they bend reality around them. He says “the difference between a vision and a hallucination is that other people can see the vision.” His firm actively invests in founders they describe as “partly delusional”, on the theory that this overconfidence is not a bug but a feature.

And then there’s Irvine Welsh, author of Trainspotting, who puts it rather differently: “Ye always want what ye cannae have, and the things that ye dinnae really gie a toss aboot get handed tae ye oan a plate”. This is not a man who believes in reality distortion fields.

These are both successful, accomplished people who have spent decades observing how the world works, and they’ve arrived at completely opposite conclusions. One says you can will success into existence through sheer force of belief. The other says the universe doesn’t care what you want and gives you things essentially at random. They can’t both be right. Or maybe they can, and the fact that both perspectives are supported by real experience is itself evidence that the mechanism of success is far more random than conventional wisdom suggests.

Why we don’t want to credit our success to luck

Anglosphere culture is steeped in the Protestant Work Ethic. We believe, deeply, that hard work is inherently virtuous and that success is the just reward for hard work. We believe that people who succeed deserve their success, because they earned it. And we believe that acknowledging luck diminishes that achievement. If someone “just got lucky”, then they didn’t really earn it. They don’t really deserve it. And that feels wrong, because we need success to be deserved.

But this belief has consequences that go well beyond hurt feelings. If success is earned, then failure is also earned. If rich people are rich because they worked hard, then poor people are poor because they didn’t work hard enough. If billionaires deserve their billions because they earned them, then there’s no moral obligation to share, because taking earned wealth and giving it to people who didn’t earn it is unjust. Thatcher’s attitude that “the problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money”. The entire philosophical framework that justifies extreme wealth inequality rests on the assumption that success is a function of merit, not luck. If we accepted, truly accepted, that success is mostly luck, then the argument for extreme wealth concentration collapses. If your billions are mostly the result of being in the right place at the right time, with the right parents, the right connections, and the right market conditions, then hoarding all that wealth starts to look less like just rewards for effort and more like just being a selfish asshole.

And then there’s luck as privilege. Having a great start in life is also luck. If I succeed, then as a white man who grew up in a stable home with educated parents and access to good schools and a network of people who could open doors for me, then how much of my success is “me” and how much is the head start I was given? Crediting luck means sitting with that question honestly, and a lot of people really don’t want to. Because if the answer is “quite a lot of it was the head start”, then my success isn’t entirely mine. I didn’t build this from nothing. I built it from a position of enormous advantage that other people didn’t have, and pretending otherwise is dishonest. That’s an uncomfortable thing to admit; it’s much more comfortable to tell myself a story about how I earned every bit of it.

I love the Arnold Schwarzenegger quote around this. In his 2017 University of Houston commencement speech, he said: “Don’t ever, ever call me a self-made man. To accept that credit would discount every single person that has helped me get here today, that gave advice, that made an effort, that lifted me up when I fell.” He then listed them by name: his parents, his teachers, a lifeguard, Joe Weider, the bodybuilders at Gold’s Gym who brought him pillows and dishes when he arrived in America with $20 in his pocket, Dino De Laurentiis, James Cameron, Jay Leno. This is a man who by any reasonable measure has achieved extraordinary success through extraordinary effort and talent, and he’s telling you it wasn’t just him. If Arnold Schwarzenegger can credit his good fortune and others, the rest of us probably can too.

It’s not really about entrepreneurship, or success per se. It’s about not feeling guilty for having so much when others have so little. It’s about how we view this massive wealth inequality. Thatcher said “there’s no such thing as society” and then proceeded to destroy it. Rugged individualism is all very well and good as long as we still look out for each other, too.

The gender angle

On this note, I attended a female-oriented startup event a few years ago that was talking to female founders. The organisers were strong on the message: “it’s not luck.” And I understood why they did. There’s research showing that women are culturally conditioned to attribute their success to external factors, luck, timing, help from others, while men are conditioned to attribute success to internal factors, their skills, their vision, their hard work. Successful women tend to downplay their own contribution in ways that men tend not to, and this affects everything from fundraising to hiring to how seriously they’re taken.

But the solution isn’t to teach women to stop crediting luck, it’s to get men to start crediting it more. Because the women are actually closer to the truth. Success is mostly luck, and acknowledging that isn’t weakness, it’s just facing reality. The problem isn’t that women are too humble. The problem is that men are not humble enough. Instead of pulling women down to the male standard of self-aggrandising attribution, we should be pulling men up to the more honest standard that many women already practice. Credit your luck. Acknowledge the timing, the circumstances, the people who helped. It doesn’t diminish your hard work. It just means you’re being honest about what actually happened.

So what?

None of this means you shouldn’t try. The table stakes still matter. Working hard still matters. Building a good team still matters. You cannot succeed without doing the work. But doing the work doesn’t guarantee success, and we need to stop pretending it does. The people who succeeded did the work and got lucky. The people who failed also did the work. They just didn’t get lucky.

If we could collectively accept this, a few things might change. We might stop worshipping founders as though they have superpowers. We might stop cargo-culting toxic behaviours. We might be more compassionate toward people who tried and failed. And we might, just might, start to question whether the people who just got spectacularly lucky really should be allowed to hoard all of the wealth and deprive others of what they need to live.

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