I used to think so too. But then look at all the recently successful companies that IPOed and mega billion dollar companies. There is absolutely nothing great about their tech or their business model or their intelligence.

Lyft is just smaller uber clone. Doordash is just another food delivery service. Pinterest is just a spammy link aggregation service. Faster and better home sharing services existed before AirBnb (VRBO is more than 10 years older than airbnb). And the list is endless. They are all successful because they got the right network, got the money, early investors, early users from network.

Business models, tech, intelligence, smartness, timing all means jackshit. The only thing that matters is networking (and persistence)

I would argue that AirBnB is successful because of its "growth hacking" -- I remember they were spamming all of their listings into all of the various Craigslist temporary housing, housing swap, vacation rental, month to month rental categories. Obviously don't remember a specific timeframe but this was well before they were even a well known name in tech.

> Business models, tech, intelligence, smartness, timing all means jackshit. The only thing that matters is networking (and persistence)

I'd say there a self-selection process here. Certain companies possibly wouldn't have succeeded without connections. So one can always find examples where that contribution was most critical. And perhaps that is even the category targeted most by YC, since anyone can do software, to oversimplify somewhat. But many other companies do succeed by timing and performance.