How much luck do you think is involved in the success of a startup ?

In my opinion, luck has nothing to do with success of a startup.

What you call good luck is when preparation meets a chance. if you are not prepared and qualified, when that chance comes you won't benefit from it.

What you call bad luck will never cause a startup to fail, it will only delay the time to success. But success will eventually happen.

Just my opinion, there is no answer with proofs for this :)

There are two type of luck in my opinion and i am not sure which one you're referring to:

1. Luck type 1: A simple analogy would be finding $100 note in the street. You actually didn't do any effort to "achieve" this. It's simply the result of randomness or spiritual or unexplained intervention. A startup should not take this type into consideration, simply because it's so improbable and cannot be proved numerically.

2. Luck Type 2: It's the one that mir described above: when preparation meets opportunity. Bell gates himself admitted that he was lucky from the beginning: he prepared, and he had his opportunity. An opportunity can be the absence of competitors when you kicked off your startup for example. And I do believe in this type of luck.

I hope this makes sense :)

Luck is very vague thing. If you play RPG games and there is a luck component they define it as "Luck rules nothing and influence everything".

Personally, I would like to call it "توفيق الله" so if it turned out to be bad I can swallow it with quietly and if it turned out to be good I know exactly whom to thank "Allah".

Finally, I tend not to think about it, and you should not think about it.

هناك حظ. الكثير من الحظ. لكنه حظ بالمعنى الذي تحدث عنه باولو كويليو في روايته الخميائي: لو أردت شيئا بقوة فإن الكون كله سيتضافر لكي يحقق لك رغبتك.