Successful founders certainly have an incentive to make it seem like founding their startup was extremely hard so it seems like their success was more due to sk

Successful founders certainly have an incentive to make it seem like founding their startup was extremely hard so it seems like their success was more due to skill and less due to luck. This isn't to say the ratio of skill/luck is any specific number, just that a founder always has an incentive to tell the history in a way that tilts it more to the "skill" side. Though I think the whole ecosystem (VCs, founders, the press) feed this notion because attributing success to luck isn't really interesting to people. You don't see a lot of books by lottery winners about how to succeed in life. Again, this isn't to say these stories aren't true; founding a startup is extremely difficult. But then again, so are a lot of things. If I just selectively picked and exaggerated stories of "normal" programmers, I could make them seem like really special people. So basically, my advice is to trust a story of a successful startup's founding history with the same grain of salt you would a fisherperson's story of how large of a fish they caught on their last vacation. Some truth, some exaggeration, and without any evidence you have no way to know.