It takes luck to be in the right place at the right time, but it takes something else to recognize the fact and exploit it. A lot of other people with a similar

It takes luck to be in the right place at the right time, but it takes something else to recognize the fact and exploit it. A lot of other people with a similar level of education were in the same right place / right time situation as Gates and Jobs were back in the day, but many of them (particularly in large corporations) failed to recognize the opportunity even when it was poking them in the eye. And on that note, unless one is superstitious, "luck" is just another way of saying "random or unpredictable variables favorably aligning with your goals". If it's coin-flip-like random, then there's nothing you can do to foresee it or influence it. But in technology and business, many things are not like that. The fact that you cannot predict something usually means you have insufficient information (even for a coin flip, if you knew the exact force vector your thumb imparted on the coin, you can in fact predict the outcome). Or, more likely in the case of startups, the information is already available, but you fail to recognize its significance because it's buried in an avalanche of information.