And, also, survivor bias. Lots of companies hustled and hustled and died.
Elon Musk is a really good example. At one point he couldn't meet cashflow--and then the government contract for SpaceX finally came in.
3 months of delay on that contract and Musk is a goat instead of a hero.
It's like when old successful people give "life-affirming" advice like "quit your job, follow your dreams, take risks, LIVE!" Which is great advice if you're already financially secure and you know that doing so didn't result (in your case) in you ending up as some peon working in a fast food joint. Never mind the other 99% of people who did the exact same thing and it didn't work out, because who listens to a failure?
In short, it's not that luck isn't super important, but if you are thinking about luck then you probably won't be ready to capitalize on it.
[0]: http://www.codusoperandi.com/posts/increasing-your-luck-surf...
This blog post is a common line of messaging in the "how to succeed in startups" - "see what (hugely successful company X) did? That's what you should do, that's how you succeed!"
Truth is that success comes from a somewhat magical mixture of timing, luck, spotting of opportunity, knowing how to build it, having the resources to build it, meeting just the right people at the right time who will play a role in that success, somehow making the product "slightly more right" instead of "slightly more wrong" and sometimes seeing some incredible new way of viewing the world that others don't. Like a magic spell it's a bit of all these ingredients put together in a recipe that, well, works.
Then the bloggers and venture capitalists come along, timeline what you did and say "ha! there is the recipe for success!".
However I think that's actually a point in favor of starting small: If you're going to fail? At least fail fast. While you have time to "pivot", or wind down, or whatever makes sense to try instead.
If you're onto something, you can usually tell at a small scale. Sure, sometimes there are network effects and exponential growth. But not hockey sticks. (Source: My own opinion and anecdata.)
Odd that the first example appears to be from a basketball write-up, which is exactly where I very frequently hear the term goat/GOAT used in the sense I described.
The acronym dates back to maybe 1992 or thereabouts: http://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2016/07/goat.html
GOAT, the positive acronym, isn't even used in today's sportswriting about basketball (at least without an unpacking explanation). It's more of a slang / online forum term.