> - Interview failed founders, not successful ones: They'll tell you why things actually break (co-founder fights, cash flow, timing) instead of survivorship bias fairy tales.
I like this idea a lot, if it can be done well.
Is there already trove of failed tech startup stories that are genuine, and maybe analyzed like business case studies? Is it publicly-accessible, or could it be?
I think the biggest challenge is getting truthful and complete information. (People will have made embarrassing mistakes, no matter how much brilliant heroism the team also pulled off. There will be things the failed founders don't want past customers/partners/investors to know. There will be things investors don't want known about their own behavior. For growth startups, there may be investment fraud at some level, for example. Or backstabbing. There will be differences of perspective on what really happened. There may be personality disorders. Etc.)
A lot of people will tolerate a disposable "incredible journey" post to put a less-negative spin on failure, but AFAICT usually no one involved really wants all the truth to get out.
Also, if you do it, ideally it would be for all startups. If you only do it for some, without all being humbled simultaneously, then current convention is to look down upon those with the transparency, while pretending the non-transparent ones are better. It's a pretty dim-witted and petty culture, and we have to structure with that in mind.
"Failed Startups- +70 articles listing +400 failed startups, filtered by country, industry, customer, and cause of failure" - https://www.failory.com/failures
Thanks. That site is advertising-heavy, but does have some info. One thing that could be done better is that the interviews I skimmed are softball to one person. So this is more the "incredible journey" answer for why it failed, but the actual dozen unflattering reasons.
The exceedingly tidy high-level explanations might be OK for some purposes, but not so for actually avoiding the contributing factors happening again to countless startups in the future.
I wonder whether anyone at any investment firm bothers to understand why a startup actually failed, or that's irrelevant to their operating model.
I like this idea a lot, if it can be done well.
Is there already trove of failed tech startup stories that are genuine, and maybe analyzed like business case studies? Is it publicly-accessible, or could it be?
I think the biggest challenge is getting truthful and complete information. (People will have made embarrassing mistakes, no matter how much brilliant heroism the team also pulled off. There will be things the failed founders don't want past customers/partners/investors to know. There will be things investors don't want known about their own behavior. For growth startups, there may be investment fraud at some level, for example. Or backstabbing. There will be differences of perspective on what really happened. There may be personality disorders. Etc.)
A lot of people will tolerate a disposable "incredible journey" post to put a less-negative spin on failure, but AFAICT usually no one involved really wants all the truth to get out.
Also, if you do it, ideally it would be for all startups. If you only do it for some, without all being humbled simultaneously, then current convention is to look down upon those with the transparency, while pretending the non-transparent ones are better. It's a pretty dim-witted and petty culture, and we have to structure with that in mind.