Every Fortune Has a Mechanism
Why opportunity is rarely accidental — and readiness matters as much as luck.
By Esra Talu, Founder & CEO of GoGlobal
People often call something “luck” when they only see the final frame.
A founder meets the right investor at exactly the right moment.
A company lands its first major international customer through an unexpected introduction.
A conversation at a conference turns into a partnership.
Someone enters a market just before demand accelerates.
From the outside, these moments can look almost accidental.
Sometimes they are.
But I have come to believe that behind most meaningful strokes of fortune, there is also a mechanism.
Not a formula. Not a guarantee. And certainly not an algorithm that produces success on command.
A mechanism.
A set of conditions that makes a fortunate outcome more likely — and, just as importantly, makes someone capable of recognizing and acting on it when it appears.
Luck Is Real
I don’t subscribe to the idea that luck does not exist.
It clearly does.
Timing matters.
Geography matters.
Who happens to be in a room matters.
Economic cycles matter.
Being introduced to one person rather than another can change the direction of a company.
There are variables we simply cannot control.
But founders sometimes make the opposite mistake: they treat everything they cannot predict as something they cannot influence.
Those are not the same thing.
You cannot control when opportunity appears.
You can influence how often you encounter it.
And you can certainly influence whether you are ready when it does.
My Own Mechanism Was Built Long Before I Recognized It
In my digital book, Breaking Boundaries: How I Built a Startup and Paved the Way for Others, I wrote about something that has shaped almost every chapter of my professional life: from a very young age, I had an instinct to look beyond borders.
Some of that journey began with opportunities my family gave me. Attending a French high school was their decision. But what followed was increasingly mine.
I wanted to take every opportunity I was given a little further.
I studied International Relations in Switzerland. At a time when technology was still far from mainstream in Türkiye, I became fascinated by what was coming and completed a program in Office Automation and computer technologies. In my twenties, I worked on the U.S. partnerships of our family business. Later, we began moving parts of our own businesses into the digital world long before digital transformation became part of everyday business language.
None of these experiences looked particularly connected at the time.
But they were.
When Türkiye began entering the internet era, I was ready for what came next.
That preparation eventually led me to build one of the country’s earliest e-commerce businesses and spend 15 years helping introduce consumers to an entirely new way of shopping. We were not simply selling online. We were helping create trust in a new medium, educating a new consumer group and navigating a market for which there was no established roadmap.
The years that followed kept building on one another.
Working inside technology and startup ecosystems, first as an entrepreneur and later also as an investor and advisor, gave me another layer of experience. So did teaching, mentoring, meeting founders across different markets, and spending decades operating between Türkiye and the United States.
Looking back, I can see something much more clearly than I could while living through it:
Very little of what we do with genuine curiosity and commitment is wasted.
One experience prepares us for another — sometimes years before we understand why it mattered.
I used to tell my graduate students this through my own story. Work done with real interest, courage, and enthusiasm is rarely a detour. It becomes part of the preparation for the next journey.
Years later, when I founded GoGlobal, that principle came full circle.
My biggest motivation was to take nearly three decades of experience — the mistakes, relationships, market knowledge, failures, successes, and lessons accumulated along the way — and make them useful to the founders coming after me.
From the outside, that may look like another chapter.
To me, it feels more like the continuation of a mechanism that had been forming for decades.
The Invisible Architecture Behind “Lucky” Moments
When we look closely at successful founders, companies, or careers, the visible breakthrough is often the smallest part of the story.
Behind one important introduction may be ten years of relationships.
Behind an investor saying yes may be dozens of earlier conversations that helped a founder understand how to position the company.
Behind an international expansion opportunity may be years spent building credibility outside the home market.
Behind a major customer contract may be a founder who stayed in touch long after the first meeting produced nothing.
We tend to remember the event.
We rarely see the architecture underneath it.
That architecture can include reputation, relationships, knowledge, visibility, persistence, credibility, and timing.
None of those guarantees fortune.
Together, however, they increase what I think of as a founder’s surface area for opportunity.
The larger that surface area becomes, the more places opportunity has to land.
Serendipity May Be Accidental. Readiness Rarely Is.
Throughout my entrepreneurial journey, there have been moments that could easily be described as luck.
The right person appeared.
An introduction happened.
A conversation led somewhere unexpected.
But when I look backward, very few of those moments truly began on the day they happened.
Usually there was a much longer chain behind them.
A relationship built years earlier.
A decision to enter a room without knowing exactly what would come from it.
A reputation developed over time.
An earlier failure that changed the way I approached the next opportunity.
Or simply remaining engaged long enough for timing to eventually work in my favor.
This is something founders often underestimate.
We spend enormous energy trying to predict where opportunity will come from.
In reality, some of the most valuable opportunities are impossible to predict.
The better strategy is to build the conditions that allow unexpected opportunities to find you.
Networks Are Not About How Many People You Know
This is particularly relevant when people talk about networks.
Founders are constantly told to “build their network.”
But a network is not a contact list.
And access is not the same as relationships.
The real value of a network comes from trust, relevance, and continuity.
Do people understand what you are building?
Do they know what kind of opportunities are useful to you?
Do they trust you enough to introduce you to someone important?
Have you contributed value before asking for something?
And when someone opens a door, are you prepared enough to walk through it?
This is where financial, human, and social capital intersect.
Capital rarely moves in isolation.
Investment often comes through trust.
Customers often come through relationships.
Talent follows credibility and vision.
Partnerships develop through repeated interaction.
The opportunity may appear suddenly.
The conditions that make it possible usually develop much more slowly.
Founders Can Design for Fortune
You cannot schedule a lucky break.
But you can design your company and your behavior in ways that make useful collisions more frequent.
That means being visible in the right ecosystems rather than everywhere.
It means building relationships before you need something from them.
It means understanding where your industry, customers, and capital are moving.
It means following up.
It means staying curious about people and markets outside your immediate geography.
It means giving people a clear reason to remember you.
And it means being prepared to move quickly when something unexpected happens.
There is also another part that founders occasionally overlook:
Fortune has a short half-life.
An introduction is only valuable if you follow up.
Investor interest disappears if the company is not ready.
Market timing is wasted if execution is too slow.
A potential customer will move on if the founder cannot communicate the value clearly.
Opportunity itself is not an outcome.
It is only an opening.
The Algorithm Is Not the Same for Everyone
This is also why I hesitate to call this an algorithm.
Algorithms suggest repeatability.
Entrepreneurship rarely works that neatly.
The mechanism behind one founder’s success may be completely wrong for another.
Some founders benefit enormously from entering large ecosystems and meeting hundreds of people.
Others build their most important relationships deeply and quietly.
Some businesses depend heavily on venture capital.
Others grow through customers, strategic partners or distribution.
Some companies expand globally very early.
Others should dominate one market first.
There is no universal recipe.
But there are recurring principles.
Build credibility.
Stay close to markets.
Invest in relationships.
Increase your exposure to relevant opportunities.
Learn continuously.
Follow up.
And perhaps most importantly, remain ready to act when reality presents something you did not plan for.
The Takeaway
We will probably continue calling certain moments “luck.”
And that is perfectly fine.
There will always be randomness in entrepreneurship — perhaps more than founders like to admit.
But randomness does not mean passivity.
The goal is not to eliminate uncertainty.
It is to build the mechanism around it.
Because while you cannot manufacture fortune, you can create more opportunities for it to find you.
And sometimes, what looks like a lucky break is simply the moment when years of preparation finally meet the right opportunity.
Serendipity may be accidental. Readiness rarely is.
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