For those who have been through both the college and startup journey, could you share if you see any parallels between the two experiences. Does luck play an equally large factor?
If your goal is to do the first, then luck will play a large role. That's why VCs have portfolios of companies. It's nearly impossible to make predictions about which startups succeed, but if one of their companies does, they win (note that they don't care if it's your company or not). As a result, VCs push their companies and founders towards making risky bets. Those bets involve a large amount of uncertainty and randomness. You either win big, or you lose.
If your goal is to build a profitable business not focused on exponential growth or VC-sized returns, then luck plays a smaller role. That's because you are not forced to make those large risky bets. You can take more calculated risks with slower growth while focusing on profitability. If you win, you are not going to win as big as in the first case, but your chance of winning in some way is higher. Of course, there is always uncertainty in life.
Note that I've focused on financial returns, which may not be what you (should) care about. For example, your chance to fail is high in the first case, but you since you are involved with more "successful" people you will likely learn and build a network along the way that can set up you for future success. You are more likely to "succeed" in the second case, but you may not build much of a network or stretch yourself. Similar arguments in the other direction can be made for mental health or stress levels.
I recommend reading "Fooled By Randomess" [1] on the topic of chance
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Fooled-Randomness-Hidden-Chance-Marke...
If you are some super precocious young scientist who had already developed a novel drug, Stanford would be calling you.
If you show investors a killer product and early traction, it doesn’t really matter who you are, they will be knocking on your door.
Now obviously its not easy to do either one of those things. And most of us are somewhere underneath those very high bars, so luck does matter. Getting into a good undergrad, getting into YC. I won’t lie. In my experience, these things have helped me immensely. But optimizing for them is like studying for the test, not for actual learning.
If you want to be an entrepreneur, worrying about luck, Stanford, YC is all misguided effort. Start a business, succeed, fail, learn, start again. This is what will actually get you closer to your goal. This is what will get you good enough so that the whims of luck won’t make or break you.
Stanford is small, arbitrary luck in a single play game, where failure usually is not something you can learn from, because you will never apply to Stanford again.
One's startup journey is best thought of as an iterated game, where luck mostly around timing, and you can learn from failure and practice your timing.
In targeting an elite college you are in a lottery with 100s of others for each seat. Of those hundreds a few might actually not be "qualified" but generally there is nothing substantial to distinguish 99% of those who don't get in.
Being chosen or not is a particular kind of small luck- the sort of arbitrary circumstantial occurrance that is not under your control and is not something you can learn from. Not "getting in" is not failure, unless you think not meeting the demands of your ego is failure (it isn't).
In starting a business, the range of moves and outcomes, the game board, is SO MUCH LARGER and SO MUCH MORE REAL than anything involved in getting into even an elite college. Here you have other people's money and their livelihoods at stake, not just your own ego. Here success and failure are much more tangible and much more distinguishes between them. Execution is much, much more complicated.
Even among startups who execute well, most still fail because of timing. The ones that succeed also do so largely because of timing. This "luck" around timing is something you can learn.
Said another way- my daughters are used to scoring high 90%s in their academics. Every day I tell them the real world is where the people doing the best are scoring around 5-10%, and of those who do it best the ones who succeed get their 1 right out of 10/20 at just the right time.
Next, I wouldn't really draw comparisons between success and failure in starts ups and academic institutions, as success in getting into a school is really arbitrary, where the start up success is not some limited resource decided by a panel of admissions officers. In my experience, as an employee of multiple start up projects and companies, start ups are as much of a lottery game, and I've seen unfair and unjust things happen to other people, and experience them myself.
On a personal note, you will deal with failure, and bad things will happen to you that make you feel bad. This is life. You can give up, or decide to keep pushing forward closer to your goals with minimal delay and resentment. There are a couple of useful philosophies for dealing with this, and I've found Stoicism very helpful for managing these situations. (See Marcus Aurelius's Mediations for a good intro [2]).
[1] https://studentsforfairadmissions.org/sffa-files-motion-for-... [2] http://seinfeld.co/library/meditations.pdf
The ultimate thing to optimize for is to build something people want.
The college you go to is just one factor feeding into that.
Don't let a poor outcome in one factor cause you to lose focus on the ultimate goal.
And here's a tip: go to another school in the Bay Area, find the hottest startup, and offer value to them until they let you intern there. 4 years of that (or even at a few startups) is worth more than anything you would have gotten from any school. And don't forget to read all the startup books.
Edit: I realized I didn't really answer your question so here goes: yes luck plays a huge factor, especially as you move from predicatable businesses such as commerical real estate to hypergrowth moonshots like Google and Facebook. But all startup founders face setbacks, and you've just witenssed your first highly visible setback. Don't let it rock your ship; instead use it to fuel your fire.
Pretty much everything you do should be just to put yourself in a position to be lucky. It's sort of like sports - there's no one guaranteed strategy to score goals, but you have to put yourself in a good position to be lucky.
A degree doesn't guarantee you a better career. It just puts you in a good position to be lucky - if an opportunity lands, it's likely going to the one with more education.
You be nice to people because it helps you get lucky. You be proactive because it helps you get lucky. You work really hard because the world respects hard workers, which helps you to get lucky.
Presence helps you get lucky. i.e. not being in the future or the past, or in some virtual world. Just being present, observing the world as it is, finding the irregularities that everyone is too busy to see.
Or heck, just smiling a lot, being optimistic, cheerful, energetic, fun to be around.
Basically there's a lot of these little things that help a lot in getting lucky. But this doesn't apply so much to college applications besides interviews.
And work to get to a level of accomplishment where you don't need to worry about getting accepted / funded.
Successful graduate of an "elite" university. With a wife from a state school who kicked his ass financially before we got hitched... (just saying)
As someone who has exited multiple startups let me tell you first hand that startups are what you make them out to be. The success of a startup however, while there are some large factors that are outside of your control, is mostly a function of how hard working and smart you are. You need to make the right decisions and work hard for a long time toward a vision that you believe in. Meanwhile being a student requires you to be somewhat good at bullshitting and maintaining a body temperature somewhere in the 30s (and for the students out there, dont get butt-hurt by this comment, it´s literally true).
That said, you have to understand that startups are not for everyone. The best advice I can give you is to go out and work for a startup for a year or two and gain some experience. Additionally get close to the CEO and have him mentor you until you understand what it takes to run a company of that size. You might find that running the show isn't really for you, and there is no shame in that. Meanwhile, save all the cash you can because you will need every dollar once you eventually start your own thing if you decide to do so. It may take months or years until the money makes it in so you want to save up as much as possible and use those savings when the time is right.
There are some startups that only succeed due to luck, and some startups that only fail due to luck, but most startups aren't in either category.
For the most part if your startup idea requires something like Oprah endorsing it in order for you to succeed, then it's by definition a bad idea.