Luck and Fortune

Inc.com has an amazing story told by a young entrepreneur, Bo Peabody, who started a business during the dot.com craze, sold it for $58 million in stock to Lycos at a point where he still had generated almost no revenue, saw Lycos stock go up tenfold, and then sold it all before the dot.bomb crash. Smart? Maybe a little. Lucky? You bet! Here are Mr. Peabody’s reflections on his own success.
“Luck is a part of life, and everyone, at one point or another, gets lucky. Luck is also a big part of business life and perhaps the biggest part of entrepreneurial life. At the very least, entrepreneurs must believe in luck. Ideally, they can recognize it when they see it. And over time, the best entrepreneurs can actually learn to create luck.
“Luck in business is different from regular old luck, like when you find $20 on the sidewalk. First of all, being lucky in business has an intoxicating underbelly called believing you’re smart. No one actually believes that he should take credit for finding $20 on the sidewalk. But when people get lucky in business, they are often convinced that it is not luck at all that brought them good fortune. They believe instead that their business venture succeeded thanks to their own blinding brilliance.”
It is good to be smart. It is even better to be lucky. But, it is critical to know the difference. I have seen too many entrepreneurs confuse luck with brilliance only to come crashing down to earth when their luck runs out.
Thanks to Peyman Motlagh, one of my former graduate students, for passing this story along.