Survivorship bias: because for every Steve Jobs and Bill Gates there are millions of folks, whose business ended without any success (something like 80% of businesses close during the first year).
You're saying that skill and knowledge play no part in success. A mentally handicapped person would have as good a chance at success as Steve Jobs by your logic, because it's all luck.
High. The first success is luck and the rest are a consequence of this initial lucky break (namely via generous access to capital).
Increases total number of opportunity chances.
I don't like the lottery metaphor, because the math doesn't work out (you can't buy out the total # of lottery numbers to guarantee a win and still profit), but basically, the more money you got, the more tickets you can buy, the higher your chance of winning.
Mark Cuban said something along the lines of "You only have to be right once." Get your first couple million, and from there on it's just intelligent investing, which you can literally pay an intelligent investor to do for you.
There are literally thousands of talented people executing like there is no tomorrow and failing.
Access to capital, access to distribution, luck, timing. Thats what you primarily have the other factors are less relevant because most people playing the entrepreneur game have those.
That said, of the 2 companies he explicitly founded and ran, only Apple was successful. NeXT was a spectacular failure.
Hardly a failure, let alone a spectacular one.
Pixar was a tiny struggling business spun out of Lucasfilm and sold to Jobs any employees.
Pixar was a software company when he purchased control. What turned them around was their switch to making feature films. I'm pretty sure that they would have gotten distribution from anyone once Toy Story was far enough along, the question is whether they could have financed the effort. Having Steve Jobs helped a lot because he believed in them and people would return his calls.
Let me put it another way. There is a whole army of successful technology CEOs who could have run NeXt or Pixar into the ground. The fact that both became huge successes wasn't just luck, Steve Jobs played a huge role in both.
Apple was going to switch to Windows NT or buy BeOS before Jobs convinced them that NextStep was the better option. He connived Disney to partner with Pixar. Could Steve Ballmer have done that?
And no Next wouldn't have made it by any stretch it was only because Jobs forced them into Apple that they survived. The world belonged to windows at that point and Next had no chance to actually do anything with that.
Can I ask what metrics you're judging by?
There are many extremely talented people doing exactly the same not succeeding. You have the same in everything from music to movies and art.
The primary defining factor are things which has nothing to do with the talent but with timing and luck. So the primary insight is to play the game to have a chance to win.
There are hundreds of thousands of people who have gotten the same training on valuing companies as Warren Buffett has. But no one comes close to his long term results because the talent of doing an accurate valuation is not as important as the psychological abilities needed to make smart investment decisions, as well as the ability to determine enduring competitive advantages. So few of these talented people actually have remotely the talents of Warren Buffett.
For entrepreneurs just a few of those key talents include recognizing opportunities, the balls to actually quit a job to pursue opportunities, and an innate ability to understand how to find or build significant competitive advantages.
People with those skills won't succeed 100% of the time, but they succeed far more than people who only have one or two of them.
You can read as many books and follow his strategies as much as you want you will never be him and it's not because you can't be as talented as him and that was the point my comment. You can't read your way to success.
Buffett would have beat any market, any where any time. That's what you don't understand. He didn't succeed because he invested in the US, he did better because he invested in the US. He averaged 40% returns his first 12 years as a professional investor, quadrupling market returns. He's only had a couple down years in over 50 years of investing. How is that luck? His diverse set of skills is the reason.
Again his set of skills is similar to a successful entrepreneurs skills. The average entrepreneur may only succeed 20% of the time, but a skilled entrepreneur clearly succeeds at a far higher rate.
Do you really think that someone ignorant of competitive advantages, budgeting, market research, leadership skills, etc, etc, has the same chances of succeeding as an entrepreneur as someone who is very skilled at all of them?
Many people were predicting they would be rich were wrong. Again survivor bias.
And no he wouldn't have beat it in any market which is also why he didn't really invest in other markets and mostly advice people to do it.
But it doesn't really matter because Buffet is not useful for anything in this discussion which was about whether luck and timing played a crucial and defining role in companies success. Pointing to Buffet or Gates makes absolutely no sense what so ever anyone who invested in the US market the last 50 years would have gotten out on the good side. Just because they didn't made as much as Buffet doesn't change that fact.
You are missing the point entirely because you think that I am saying that luck and timing are the ONLY things that matter.
What I actually said was that out of the talented people there are, luck and timing become the defining factor not superhuman abilities to predict the market. The same reason the VC community in general is doing really bad and even companies like YC are mostly wrong.
There are no secrets to success. They are mostly unique stories not formulas which means they are mostly about luck and timing NOT about talent as there are plenty of talent out there.