It's an interesting study, no doubt. However I keep wondering if you can really judge a start-up's chance to succeed without taking the actual business idea/concept as well as the entrepreneur's personality into account. Since it's very hard to operationalize those, I do understand that you refrained from including it. I've just got the feeling that the quality of the business idea and the entrepreneur's traits might be a pretty powerful confounding variable for what you examine. Therefore it seems necessary to me that these variables are being controlled somehow.
I'd like to illustrate that issue. You name premature scaling as the most important factor for start-ups to fail. While this conclusion might not be wrong on the one hand, it may be an illusion that the premature scaling is the actual reason for failure. As an example, premature scaling should be very likely to happen to a "megalomaniac" entrepreneur who just overestimates his business idea's chance to succeed or its growth rate by far. If megalomania is in place at that stage, one have to assume that it also was when the entrepreneur founded his business - by highly overestimating a crap idea who wouldn't have deserved to be turned into a business. In this case, the business' failure wouldn't have been caused by the premature scaling (although it seems to be since that's what you were looking at) but by the entrepreneur's tendency to overestimate the quality of his idea. That said the premature scaling is just another outcome of the true, underlying reason for failure - but not a reason itself.
It's just an example, but it might show that it's risky to name your variables as crucial factors for failure as long as you don't control what the business is based on in the first instance: the business idea and the entrepreneur's personality.
What are your thoughts on that?
The initial idea isn't that important. Entrepreneurs change their idea all the time. In the report we show that consistent companies or ones that scale properly, are more focused on discovering whether their idea makes sense where as companies that scale prematurely are more focused on validating that they are right. And as far as personality, while it's an interesting variable to look at in the future, in the end of the day we just look at whether the company produces results regardless of their predisposition. It's also common wisdom that there are many different kinds of entrepreneurs that have been successful.
I see your point - however I still think that the company's predisposition is too important to be left out. In this spirit I suspect premature scaling to be a dependent variable (instead of being a first-level factor).
