This is an essentially perfect list. I take "have a great team" as implicit as you won't be able to do all those things without one. Luck is a huge factor in s

This is an essentially perfect list. I take "have a great team" as implicit as you won't be able to do all those things without one. Luck is a huge factor in success, and it plays into all those things in very direct ways. I've been involved in three failed startups (and one successful consultancy) and seen all those factors play out. Timing and making a product enough people want (and are willing to pay for) are the two areas where luck plays the biggest role. Market validation is a huge issue for new technology, and it's surprisingly easy--with the best market intelligence you've got--to build something that not enough people want (yet) to make money. And not all markets allow fast pivots or particularly small MVPs. Sometimes you don't know it isn't going to get picked up until it's too late to change course. In other cases there is simply no way to know if you should take a fairly good offer today and cash out, or not. It's easy to point to cases where founders turned down good offers and went on to make large multiples of them, and cases where founders turned down good offers and went broke. It would be a very valuable exercise to gather up cases like that and present them in a business school context. My bet is that no one would be able to consistently make the right decision based on the information available at the time, which would make the role of luck unequivocal.