I think what a lot of us in the "luck" camp are trying to convey is: There are a lot of "pretty darn smart" people in tech. A LOT. Hundreds of thousands, who could be the next great startup CEO, could be a VP of engineering at BigTech, could lead the next technology team that disrupts $1T industries. They aren't because there are very few of these roles in the world, and only a few of the many "pretty darn smart" people can slot into them. How these roles get distributed among the many talented, brilliant people can only be described as random. For every brilliant, hard working, startup CEO you can point to, I can probably point to 1000 people who are equally brilliant and hard working, but simply didn't roll the dice a thousand times in the exact way the "successful startup CEO" did. The rest of these brilliant minds are often plugging away in obscurity as run-of-the-mill senior software engineers, purely based on the random walk their lives happened to take.