I know it's not the point of the article, specifically, but it's very difficult to draw any startup conclusions based on a game company. Games are notoriously difficult to make into successful products, even more-so than your average startup.

That said, I do think the author has a lot of good points. Surely there is a portion of "randomness"/luck, but there's also a healthy dose of focus & determination that make things work.

To play a bit of devil's advocate, I do feel that in the last few years the idea of "success" has somewhat diverged from what it used to mean. Is Twitter successful? To their founders & early investors, certainly they are. In 5 years, will Twitter still be relevant & a worthwhile investment to their millions of new stockholders?

Was Zynga "successful"? Again: to early investors, they were wildly successful. They were able to dump their shares onto a greater fool.

To me, those are two examples of "lucky" startups. A startup like Salesforce is less "lucky" and more a well-executed product. It's not as sexy as a Facebook/Twitter/Zynga, but it's a solid business addressing a specific need. It isn't reliant on "scale massively and figure out a sustainable business model later", which to me is what the aforementioned companies are.

To paint a picture, some startups have fisherman tactics: throw as wide of a net as possible, catch as many things as possible and some small portion will be valuable. These would be startups to whom luck would seem to play a larger role (in my opinion).

Others are more focused: identify a specific set of targets to go after, and hunt them down. This would be more like Salesforce. To me, these are the startups that don't rely as much on luck.