Is it luck or persistence? ..

.. that makes people successful

Are successful people successful because of luck or persistence (and pure power of will)? There are many opinions on this topic backed by anecdotical evidence for either side. Jeff Bezos explained on several occasions that they got very lucky with Amazon multiple times through the company’s journey. But also, few people will probably deny, that there are many smart, hard working people behind the company’s success. And there are countless other anecdotes in interviews, biographies and New York best sellers to form your opinion on the issue.

I this short post I would like to offer you another one yet, that was especially appealing and insightful to me. It’s kind of “pure wisdom in a nutshell”. Have a look at the picture below ..

.. and let me give you a bit of context on this: The picture you see above is from a slide deck of Sha [1] which he used to talk about his fundraising journey with his own startup. This represents a graphical summary of it: Many investors said no until the first said yes. If you think about each investor conversation as flipping an “unfair coin” (e.g. which is not 50 % / 50 % for head and tail but 5 % head and 95 % tail), to get to yes from an investor you need to “get lucky” indeed as the chances are clearly against you for each conversation. But to “get lucky” you also need to flip a lot of coins as for each single flip chances are against you, which means you need to be persistent.

Recently, I came across a different representation of the same idea in a talk held by Daniel Dippolt from EWOR [2] that I liked a lot wherefore I want to highlight it here:

It shifts the question from “company success” success to “founder success”: If you start a company and you fail, and you repeat it, after the 20th try you are almost certain to succeed. Nevertheless, it’s still about chances: For each individual company the odds are against you and you have to “get lucky” but if you persist then the cumulated probability plays in your favor.

So coming back to the initial question: Is it luck or persistence? It is both and it helps great time to be persistent to get lucky eventually.

[1] Shaded Khallaghi: “We Raised!” during REAKTOR.Berlin Demo Day Batch 6 (03/2024)

[2] Daniel Dippold: “The Mathematics Of Building a Tech Venture, Clueless No More” (07/2024)