Give successful entrepreneurs less credit. They’re the lucky ones.

Founder myths are comforting. It’s nice to believe someone, somewhere, had a clear view of the future, executed on it and was rewarded for it.

Alas, just like a company’s founding date, tales of entrepreneur foresight are almost always bullshit. 

Outcomes matter, but if we anchor on a business’s end state alone, we over-credit winners and over-blame strugglers — then build policies and programs on those distortions.

In reality, like just about any creative endeavor, entrepreneurial outcomes are the result of three key factors: smarts, industriousness and pure, random chance – of macroeconomic trends, industry changes and other coincidences that can make an idea look prescient or foolish. Ignore the luck factor, and worthy founders don’t give it another try — and over-celebrated entrepreneurs overestimate the breadth of their wisdom.

A 2014 Stanford analysis showed that entrepreneurs developed longer-lasting and financially stronger businesses after repeat attempts. 

The right lesson from any breakout company isn’t that its leaders are suddenly experts on everything; it’s that they are a mix of smart, hardworking and lucky as hell. The flip side is just as important: A founder’s miss isn’t proof of incompetence. Markets shift. Timing slips. A procurement office changes hands. 

That’s why wide, repeatable bets beat one-off hero worship. Professional investors quietly admit this with portfolio math and local ecosystems should behave similarly. 

Many picks will be average, a few will be duds and a small number will drive returns. Don’t pin the region’s narrative on a single unicorn or ribbon-cutting. Build pipelines that create lots of shots on goal — mentorship, procurement on-ramps, inclusive capital and talent bridges — then keep the cycle moving.

This was one topic I got to talk about with Kevin Renton, a principal with the creative agency Electric Kite. They hosted me for a regular interview series they host, and asked about what gets overlooked in building companies and identities. My answer? Storytelling, including journalism, has a role, not as cheerleading but as infrastructure for shared reality.

Journalism as civic infrastructure

Good reporting widens the aperture of who gets seen, what gets measured and which ideas get a fair hearing. 

The Technical.ly newsroom gets this training: Smart, informed decisions can lead to bad outcomes. Sloppy strategy can sometimes strike gold. Management guru Peter Drucker famously quipped that “Culture eats strategy for breakfast,” meaning a healthier team environment is more important than the sharpest view of the world. In a sense, this is an acceptance that the world can change without your permission. 

Successful entrepreneurs need skill and discipline, which includes assembling a good team with the help of an inspiring story. Entrepreneurs with closed businesses could have underperformed, or elements shifted out of their control. 

Who tells the story of a given company matters, then. Many often say that social media and web publishing have removed the gatekeepers. But that’s not quite true. We’ve traded traditional gatekeepers (official sources and, say, newspaper reporters) for new ones – the algorithms that reward attention-seeking behavior.  

Whether that leads to more truth is up for question.