Not an MBA or anything, but IMO startups glossing over their early business practices indicates luck rather than hiding good practices. That touches on another big, counterintuitive trap: listening to successful founder’s personal-myth-derived advice on generating success. Important skills attributed to founders— e.g. recognizing opportunity and talent, vision, etc.— are meaningless without simultaneously having the requisite resources and personal/professional circumstances to act. Chance changes our paths in complex, unknowable ways.
It’s probably not psychologically feasible or even useful for them to precisely examine the unearned factors in their or their company’s success, but so many citing ‘hard work’ as the primary factor proves they don’t try. Implying they committed as much, let some hundreds of times more cognitive, emotional, or physical effort, or even as many hours as an NYC line cook aspiring to be a chef, is laughable. Not discounting these folks’ value, but asserting those with less simply have less ambition or work ethic without providing reasonable points of comparison is justification, not reason.
Even the most straightforward occurrences are contingent on many factors. If they wasn’t true, science would br pretty easy. Saying founders heavily discount the importance of luck is different from saying it was entirely random.
What matters is the succession of factors that are in founders or companies control. The objection is that most of Google's success is luck - uncontrollable good fortune. It's precisely the motivation towards gaining fortune that leads to conscientious decision-making in principling the action of one's mind to will the body into organizing itself with others in the future society - positively.
Sure, not just anybody could have founded Google, even if born to mathematics and computer science professors prioritizing their educations and offering enough of a safety net to start a company rather than toil to pay off student loans for their Stanford computer science graduate educations which facilitated a relationship with a professor willing to connect them with Andy Bechtolsheim right at the Internet’s precipice… but it sure did help.
What they did required hard work, intelligence, creativity and discipline to execute... But implying those are the only factors worth considering is garbage. Their circumstances guaranteed they’d be able to reap greater rewards than nearly anybody else for the same output even if google had failed. Just look at the Opportunity Atlas. Do you really think talent is that geographically focused? If you don’t consider their circumstances lucky or don’t think they made much difference, I’m not really sure what else to say.
If Google wasn't a result of massive amount of lucky circumstances, beyond the control of its founders - you'd be able to launch a successful competitor to Google right now and become a billionaire in a few years.
It's actually because Google had predetermined intrinsic value to human beings in filtering through the world wide web which demonstrates one cannot simply launch a competitor without offering substantially significant more value in achieving the same objective.
It’s probably not psychologically feasible or even useful for them to precisely examine the unearned factors in their or their company’s success, but so many citing ‘hard work’ as the primary factor proves they don’t try. Implying they committed as much, let some hundreds of times more cognitive, emotional, or physical effort, or even as many hours as an NYC line cook aspiring to be a chef, is laughable. Not discounting these folks’ value, but asserting those with less simply have less ambition or work ethic without providing reasonable points of comparison is justification, not reason.