On luck

You spent 90 days on the strategy.

It's flawless. All assumptions explained. All investors informed.

Unfortunately, it's completely wrong.

The right markets - and the right strategy for exploiting them - cannot be known in advance.

This matters if you're building a startup.

In business, luck plays a part - a big part

Enter luck.

People naturally assign more weight to their own skills than to luck.

Unfortunately, as people become more specialized, their skills become commodities - luck begins to play an outsize role.

This is true of founders too.

And the best ones understand this.

They focus on making a series of small, compounding decisions that are correct.

They focus on increasing their chances of getting lucky - their Luck Surface Area.

And when plans are correct, they assume it's partially due to luck.

If you're building a business, assume your strategy is wrong, not right.

Build your business in a way that mechanizes learning in real-time.

Build frameworks and culture that helps teams deal with uncertainty.

Develop plans for learning what needs to be known in real time.