Why most startups fail
I read Paul Graham’s essay titled The 18 Mistakes That Kill Startups. It’s a good read and it’s hard not to agree with the majority of what he says. In a nutshell: success is the opposite of failure. If you avoid doing absolutely everything that would cause you to fail, you succeed. Here is a partial list of things to avoid. Among them, he has somewhat uninformative points like “don’t raise too little money” and “don’t raise too much money” which is like telling someone to not undercook or overcook a steak. No recipe here, the proof is on the plate.
In a way, it reminds me of someone one I knew who was reading “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” in the hope of becoming a more effective person. After browsing the book for a while, I thought that she might as well be reading “The 12 Habits of Famous Race Horses”. This article is in a gray area between descriptive and prescriptive. Even though it’s nice to read, I don’t know if it’s actually very helpful. The people who have what it takes to create a successful startup (a tiny minority) will do it anyway. Those who don’t can have this article read to them every morning by their personal trainer as they work off the undercooked steak from the night before and it will do them no good.
At this point, I feel like inserting a link to something more Carl-Saganesque like the Drake Equation. The point is that a number of factors are completely outside of anyone’s control.