It's ironic that you describe Rich's post as "vapid bullshit" because the problem I see in your comment is that you give such a uselessly facile answer.

Yes, sure, all you have to do to make a successful company is make something people want and charge for it. In the same way that all you have to do to climb Everest is keep walking uphill till you can't anymore.

The real issue here is that doing these things is in practice very hard, at least the way startups have to do them. Doing them at the level of a service business like, say, a sandwich shop, is easy. Doing them at the sort of scale required in a startup is so much harder that in practice few can bear it.

We have a huge amount of data about this after funding over 200 startups. We think constantly about the problem of how to predict which startups will succeed. And nothing is so clear as that toughness is the deciding factor.