The truth we don't want to admit about what makes a startup successful

It's much less under our control than we care to admit

Let’s say you have a great idea. You go and raise capital. You spend years building a team, finding product/market fit, and launching it. You work long hours. You sink your life savings into it. You read every book on startups and are as close to a perfect CEO with a really fantastic team as possible. You have everything in the world going for you.

The deeply uncomfortable truth that you should come to grips with sooner rather than later is that you can do absolutely everything right and still fail.

Because luck and timing play a much larger role in the success or failure of a business than any other factors.

I cannot tell you how many business I know have succeeded because they had the right idea, met the right investor or customer, or launched just at the right time or had good luck. And how many great companies and ideas have failed due to bad luck and timing.

Even more, do you know how many investors I know who made hundreds of millions or even billions by dumb luck? Bumping into someone that turned into the investment of a lifetime that changed their lives?

We like to credit ourselves with success being attributable to our intelligence or hard work, and investors like to think they are similarly smart, but more often than not success is attributable to luck and timing more than any other factors.

Of course, you can work hard to put yourselves in the situation where you are more likely to make these lucky events happen, but don’t kid yourself. Chance is still chance. Increasing probability is work, but it’s just increasing the chances of a roulette wheel by stacking it in your favor. Not exactly anything to do with intelligence.

And if that doesn’t make you deeply uncomfortable, then you’re probably not human. The fact that as entrepreneurs that we’re not actually in control of our own destiny is unsettling, to put it mildly. But it is the truth, and the sooner you come to accept it, the more you can let go and realize that building a company is more about enjoying the ride than the exit and always will be.

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Sibble & Associates provide technical due diligence services to VC firms as well as angel investors and offers the ability to build prototypes, MVP's, and provide fractional CTO services to startups, all under one roof, ensuring that our clients have the ability to bring their technical concepts to fruition.