Hard work, skill, and luck.

I think about startup success as requiring three things: hard work, skill, and luck. You need some combination of all three. But I’ve come to believe that most of us have the order wrong.

We put hard work first because it’s the thing we control. Skill second because it feels earned. And luck last because admitting it played a major role feels like it cheapens the achievement. But when I look at the research and my own experience, I think timing and luck deserve a lot more credit than they usually get.

Hard work is table stakes.

I’m a big believer that by showing up and working hard consistently, you create the conditions for luck to happen. There’s a saying that’s been attributed to everyone from Seneca to Thomas Jefferson: “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.” I think that’s exactly right. A lot of the research points to how much timing matters, but every one of those founders had to show up, put in the work, and be ready for the moment when it arrived. Hard work doesn’t guarantee luck, but it’s the only way to be in position when luck shows up.

That said, I think the phrase “hard work” tricks people into thinking it means long hours. It doesn’t. I’ve worked 40 to 50 hour weeks for most of my career, and rarely need to go much beyond that. The research backs this up too: there are diminishing returns on hours worked past a certain point. Your output at hour 70 is not the same quality as your output at hour 30.

What I think hard work actually means is intensity and discipline during the hours you’re in it. It means doing the things you don’t want to do, having the hard conversations, pushing through the uncomfortable work first instead of hiding in the easy stuff. It means staying focused when you’re at your desk, not bouncing between social media and Slack and pretending that’s productive. Focus might actually be more important than “hard work” in the traditional sense.

Sometimes you do need to put in long hours. There are sprints where something critical needs to get pushed through, and you just have to grind for a few weeks. That’s part of it. But treating that as the default is a recipe for burnout, and if timing and luck are as influential as the data suggests, burning yourself out doesn’t meaningfully improve your odds. It just means you’re exhausted when the opportunity finally shows up.

And that connects to grit. Angela Duckworth’s research shows that perseverance in the face of setbacks is one of the strongest predictors of long-term success. If you’re always running on empty, it’s a lot harder to persevere when things go sideways. And things will go sideways. Protecting your energy isn’t laziness. It’s what lets you keep showing up with the resilience you need when it matters most. Hard work is table stakes because it’s what keeps you in the game long enough for timing and skill to do their part.

Skill compounds over time.

If hard work keeps you in the game, skill determines how effectively you play it. The more reps you get, the better your pattern recognition. You make fewer mistakes. You move faster. You avoid pitfalls that would have cost you months earlier in your career. You rely less on outside help because you can do more yourself. All of that compounds.

Skill also makes your hard work land in the right places. Early on, you might work hard on the wrong things because you don’t know any better. As your skill develops, you start to see where the leverage actually is. You spend less time on things that don’t matter and more time on the things that move the needle. That focus, applied consistently over time, compounds into something that starts to look a lot like luck from the outside.

And when real luck does show up, skill is what lets you capitalize on it. You can be in the right place at the right time, but if you can’t recognize the opportunity and execute on it, it passes you by. I’ve been part of a startup that grew from zero to 400,000 members and over a billion in assets under management. I’ve taken a company that had nothing but a broken app and turned it back into a real product with a funnel that converts and meaningful traction. Those outcomes required skill. But they also required being in the right situation at the right time.

Timing and luck are bigger than anyone wants to admit.

This is the part that makes people uncomfortable.

Bill Gross, founder of Idealab, gave one of the most-watched TED talks on startups. He analyzed 200 companies across five factors: timing, team and execution, idea, business model, and funding. The number one factor? Timing. It accounted for 42% of the difference between success and failure. Team and execution came second. The idea itself came third.

Think about that. The idea, the thing most founders obsess over, was the third most important factor. Timing was almost twice as important.

His examples are compelling. Airbnb launched during the 2008 recession, when people desperately needed extra income. That economic pressure helped customers get over their natural resistance to letting strangers sleep in their house. Uber launched when drivers were actively looking for additional income. The ideas were good, but the timing is what made them explode.

Then there’s the academic research. A team of Italian physicists led by Alessandro Pluchino built a simulation of 1,000 careers over 40 years. They found that the most successful individual in the simulation had only slightly above-average talent, while the most talented person had far lower success. Talent follows a bell curve. Wealth follows a power law. The gap between those two distributions is explained almost entirely by randomness.

They published their findings in a paper called “Talent vs. Luck” and explicitly warned against what they called “naive meritocracy,” where we assume the most successful people are the most talented. The data says that’s not true.

And then there are the startup stories that prove the pattern:

Facebook vs. SixDegrees. SixDegrees tried to build a social network in 1997 and failed. Facebook did nearly the same thing in 2004 and changed the world. Same concept, different timing.

Groupon vs. Letsbuyit.com. Group buying as a business model failed in 1999. Groupon launched the same model in 2008 and it worked.

YouTube. Online video was attempted many times before YouTube. It launched right when broadband adoption hit a tipping point. The technology and the audience were finally ready at the same moment.

Marc Andreessen, who built Netscape and co-founded a16z, put it simply: “Almost all tech startup ideas that fail are actually good ideas with bad timing.”

So what do you actually optimize for?

If timing and luck are the biggest factors, and you can’t control or predict them, what should you actually do?

Stay in the game. The longer you’re building, the more surface area you create for luck to find you. Every project, every company, every role is another chance for timing to line up. The skills you build at one company are part of what makes you effective at the next one.

Build skill deliberately. Skill is what lets you recognize a lucky break and act on it. If you don’t have the skills to execute, the best timing in the world won’t save you. Invest in getting genuinely good at something.

Don’t burn yourself out waiting for luck to arrive. If the outcome is heavily influenced by factors outside your control, grinding yourself into the ground doesn’t meaningfully improve your odds. Work hard, stay focused, but protect your energy and your health. You need to still be standing when the opportunity shows up.

Enjoy the work. If so much of the outcome is out of your hands, the journey has to be worth it on its own. Find work that genuinely excites you, and get good enough at it that the process itself is rewarding. If you’re only in it for the exit or the outcome, you’re making a bet with long odds and sacrificing your quality of life in the process.

Can you predict timing?

Bill Gross’s advice is to look at whether consumers are truly ready for what you’re offering. That’s sensible, but it’s a lot easier to say in retrospect than in the moment. Airbnb’s timing looks obvious now. It wasn’t obvious in 2008.

I think the honest answer is no. You can study markets, talk to customers, and look for signals. But you can’t see the future. Which reinforces the whole point: focus on what you can control. Show up. Build real skill. Stay focused. Protect your energy. And keep building long enough for luck to find you.