There's a huge amount of luck and serendipity involved in all things, including of course the outsized returns and hypergrowth that SV worships and today's generation of young social climbers pines over.
However I would caution anyone to be careful with the type of optimal strategy you outline. Diversifying within reason is good, but you have to deliver real value somewhere along the line. The luck involved in building a successful business does not occur in a vacuum, if you are not focused and prepared, the rocketship won't leave the ground (or worse explode mid-flight).
Those who are more obsessed with the financial or social outcome than the actual job of building a business are the ones you find all glad-handing each other at networking events while the most successful always seem to have (or have had) something more important to do.
It’s not just luck. It’s also the unacknowledged support of your peers. I’ve had two bosses that were process nerds to the point of wanting to write a book, and neither of them, once they tried to condense their findings down, wanted to credit the teamwork aspects and other human factors (I’m big on human factors).
When you like people, or just your team, you plaster over their mistakes. If you try to reduce the whole thing to something cynical, people just want to watch you crash and burn. Which is I think where you see the problem with reproducing results. You get a certain number of people who just want to turn the screws another two clicks instead of creating a better work environment where more gets done.
However I would caution anyone to be careful with the type of optimal strategy you outline. Diversifying within reason is good, but you have to deliver real value somewhere along the line. The luck involved in building a successful business does not occur in a vacuum, if you are not focused and prepared, the rocketship won't leave the ground (or worse explode mid-flight).
Those who are more obsessed with the financial or social outcome than the actual job of building a business are the ones you find all glad-handing each other at networking events while the most successful always seem to have (or have had) something more important to do.