Luck vs. skill: The founders behind major businesses like Bumble, Shopify, and Away explain what their success boils down to - and they all have different takes

Lütke compared the timing of Shopify's launch to "winning the lottery five times in a row" on an August 2019 episode of NPR's "How I Built This with Guy Raz."

"This is not a kind of company that could have been started in two years later," Lütke told NPR. "... Luck is such a major component of the entire journey."

Lütke founded Shopify after realizing that there was no good ecommerce platform for small businesses while trying to open an online snowboard business, according to Forbes. Lütke has a net worth of $2.7 billion.

Read more: Tobias Lutke, the billionaire founder of Shopify, says the key to building a 'fantastic relationship' with investors was being totally upfront about what he did not know

"If people think I was just at the right place at the right time and just snapped my fingers and twirled a couple of times and here's Bumble, I mean, they're really wrong," Wolfe told NPR. "This has been, we're talking, all day, every day, ups, downs, highs, lows, and laser focus."

Wolfe founded the female-centric dating app after a contentious exit from Tinder, which she also cofounded, NPR reported. Bumble was valued at $1.1 billion by Bloomberg Intelligence.

"I've been lucky so many times in my life," Casalena told NPR. "I'd say that there are qualities I probably have that have helped me stay here, you know, perseverance, and pain tolerance, and some level of adaptability, in my best moments some kind of self-awareness."

Casalena designed the website-building tool in his dorm room at the University of Maryland, according to NPR. Squarespace was valued at $1.7 billion in 2017, Business Insider previously reported.

Read more: Squarespace's New York offices are as sweet as the best Silicon Valley tech offices

"I think for me personally, luck and timing had so much to do with everything I've done at every single step, just in terms of the way we timed things or the people we met or even just the fact that it was really lucky that I called [Away cofounder Steph Korey] when I did and we didn't take the jobs we were supposed to." Rubio told NPR. "But I think we worked our tails off especially in that first year just obsessing over everything."

Rubio's three-year-old luggage brand is now valued at $1.4 billion, Business Insider previously reported.

Read more: Cofounders Jen Rubio and Steph Korey built online luggage retailer Away into a $1.4 billion company in just 3 years. Next up, it wants to be a 'travel brand.'

"We did work hard and we're clever and we were able to call in a lot of experience and I think we did a lot of things right, but there is a real increasing returns dynamic," Butterfield told NPR. "Once you start to have some success, the rest of the success becomes easier and easier."

Butterfield founded the workplace messaging app as an internal communication tool for the employees of his now-defunct video game startup, Business Insider previously reported. The company's July 2019 IPO gave Butterfield a net worth of $1.6 billion, Forbes reported.

Butterfield is also a cofounder photo-sharing site Flickr, according to Forbes.