take the shot, but have a back-up plan, basically.
And, in the unfortunately common case, recognize when you cannot take any bets and instead focus on getting yourself to a place where you can, rather than betting everything and losing everything.
A 15-year-old hearing this talk from Graham as-is might take from it, "wow, if I learn programming, work on things that interest me, do well in school, and go to a good university, I'm guaranteed to build a Google-scale successful startup!"
Telling that kid that there's also a component of luck involved, and that the vast majority of startups fail, would temper that enthusiasm in a much more honest way. If that means fewer kids decide to start companies, that's obviously a negative in Graham's book, but may not be a negative for those kids themselves.
If the kid is motivated from this essay to learn programming, work on things that interest them, do well in school, and go to a good university -- I think they're well setup for success in their life.
- discount the useless advice you get from people who got lucky and are unaware of this fact
- target trying to be in the right place at the right time and have a plan B if you don't get lucky, rather than waking up at 0400 every day to eat raw eggs or whatever
- respect yourself and your employees more
- be more generous with what luck brings you
etc etc etc
a much better question is why do YC and co not talk about luck and connections more? why do they pretend it's all some imaginary meritocracy rather than hugely dependent on going to the right school / being born into the right social class, and then hugely advantaged by having YC's name recognition and tame lendors attached?
I think it’s reasonable to inspire more than hedge. They’ll presumably already hear lots about what the least risky things to do are from many, many sources — that’s the default.
The luck is seen in the short term fluctuations but over the long run when executing your strategy there is no luck.
This requires proper bankroll management among other things.
Also starting a business is easier than poker, poker is zero sum (more often negative sum due to rake).
Business is positive sum. What this means is people will gladly hand you money if your product generates more value for them than holding that money does. In poker, every single hand is like a fist fight because there is always a loser in every hand.
Yes you can win if you are a VC. Less clear what to do if you’re just a card.
The insight here is to only play in games that you have the advantage (or are at least evenly matched) and be very, very careful not to put yourself in a position to go bust on any one hand.
Also, people don’t realize that startups aren’t one single event. There’s a million events and each one has its own luck. For example, you make a piece of content marketing there’s luck in whether it performs well, but that luck can be managed and the risk spread across many events by doing lots of small pieces of content marketing.
I also wrote a blog post about how a popular psychology book oriented towards poker pros (The Mental Game of Poker) can be easily reframed for entrepreneurs:
https://writing.billprin.com/p/the-mental-game-of-entreprene...
With all that said, it’s highly ironic you picked Moneymaker as your example poker pro, since he’s famous in the poker world for being a very bad amateur player who got extremely lucky at the perfect time . It’s a bit like talking about the importance of hard work and deep technology skills for founders, and using Adam Neumann and WeWork as your example of that.
You may be overly generous in your estimation of MY poker skills! However bad Chris is, I am sure I am not anywhere close.