This is the critical information that these articles never mention. It's always "We emailed a few friends and the next morning we had $100 billion in VC funding and a private island!"

I wish more blogs would include the "luck" details in their success posts. It's practically lying to say that all that happened was that you tweeted to ~100 followers. I'm not trying to criticize, it's just an interesting bit that makes the startup sound much more down-to-earth when they're willing to admit where they got their luck from.

Because let's not forget: all success is due to some luck, and that's sometimes the most interesting part of the story.