
90% of Tech Startups Fail [Infographic] - amerf1
http://www.wamda.com/2013/02/90-percent-of-tech-startups-fail-infographic
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rheide
This is ridiculous. The infographic shows examples of 'successful' startups
that have only been around for 2 years, then setting them side by side with
'failed' startups that took 5 years or more to fail.

And as someone else mentioned before, Zynga is far from a success story. It's
one of the most memorable failures, if anything.

I'm sure the study provides very sensible results, but this infographic is a
complete misrepresentation of it.

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georgemcbay
I agree with you that this is ridiculous.

However, you really need to define success vs failure before declaring any
company as one or the other.

Taking Zynga as an example, viewed from the position of "making Mark Pincus an
awful lot of money" Zynga was a smashing success, while viewed from the
position of "painting Mark Pincus as a credible person to do business with in
the future" Zynga was a huge failure.

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msprague
Also MySpace was a failure?? It sold for $500 Million. Ask Tom Anderson what
he thinks about it.

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alanctgardner2
I kind of hoped an infographic would be about aggregate stats, not a pretty
picture of six businesses. To get right down to brass tacks:

\- the two really successful ones are both commerce-related. We aren't
comparing Facebook and MySpace, it's not really a compelling comparison. If
they didn't fail because of market fit, show us people with the same idea who
executed better

\- there are few attributes that are compared directly. They cite some good
things one company did, and some unrelated bad things the other one did. Why
can't we see how much funding they took side-by-side, for example?

\- Maybe this is a bit old, but I wouldn't really put Zynga in the 'wins'
column.

Which brings us to the real point; on a long enough timeline, everyone's
chances of survival go to 0. The common metric for success seems to be an
acquisition, or going public. We don't get a good idea of who's exited, or
even on what timescale we're comparing these companies.

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jacques_chester
I'm working up some articles about estimation. One is going to be about
estimation by analogy; or what Kahneman called "Reference Class Forecasting".

The basic insight is to check the base rates for your given venture or
project. Humans are notoriously optimistic when making forecasts or estimates.

And now I am experiencing a strange thing. My current startup venture is based
on the fact that people ignore the base rates; that humans have optimism bias.

And what am I doing?

... I'm ignoring the base rates and being optimistic ...

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speeder
That is the whole point of having a startup in first place.

Why startups famously have many young single people? Because young single
people can go gung ho at risks and do what must be done, even if the chance to
work is very small...

If the world need "X", and if you try it there are only 1% of chance of
succeeding, what better way to make it happen than to 100 companies try it?
Yes, 99 will die, but one will work!

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TomGullen
90% of startups/small businesses failing is a figure often thrown around but
when I researched it I found no rock solid evidence of this number, also found
wildly varying definitions of what a startup is, and what counts as failure.
The link in the OP article links to another article which links to another
article.

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bradshaw1965
A vast percentage of _all_ companies fail. Take a look at stock market
listings from 20,50, 100 years ago. The question is what kind of value was
produced from the organization.

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scottmagdalein
This isn't an infographic. This is text with colorful backgrounds and icons.

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camz
The first thing I noticed was that Allmand Law who commissioned the
infographic is a firm that specializes in bankruptcy and collections... LOL

It's an interesting/hilarious (yet ironically fitting) marketing strategy.
Failed startups make great clients for bankruptcy law firms. Most end up
swimming in debt.

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digitalWestie
I think you have to define scope though. MySpace isn't the definition of
success but I don't know if it's the definition of failure either...

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jdavis703
Didn't MySpace fail once it was an apparatus of News Corp? I think it would be
very difficult to count News Corp as a startup.

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clebio
The social buttons that follow scrolling with a lag are maddening. Very
distracting.

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lttlrck
An infograpnic that concisely illustrates the title of the post? Out of luck.

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mbesto
Define failure first.

