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Comment by Alex3917 | Hacker News Reader

> And luck too can be bought. With enough capital you can afford to play the game again and again.

If luck regresses to the mean both within and between startups, then it stands to reason that the value of more iterations is limited. I think it's probably more valuable just to be able to recognize which direction you're likely to regress toward.

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Not really, because the returns and losses are asymmetric. If you lose, you lose maybe a million bucks of your own money, probably less. But if you win, you could be a billionaire.

This means that people with rich families and rich connections can afford to play the game as much as they have a taste for.

Sure, but it seems to me that most can afford roughly one iteration at most. I would argue that being able to roll fair dice multiple times is still better than having weighted dice that you only get to roll once.

I'm not sure what you mean?

If winning means getting 3 heads in a row by flipping 3 coins, and you have 3 coins to flip and someone else has 1,000 coins to flip, the second person is much more likely to win.

Tell that to firms like Softbank. They have enough money to play the game as long as they want. Even massive loses don't make them blink until WeWork happened.

That's largely irrelevant. The question is what is the optimal strategy for each player given the assets that they have. No one would deny that some people are starting off with vastly more assets than others.

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