A Short-Story on the Factors of Why Start-Ups Fail

People who succeed to an incredible high degree by standards of our society, whether as a highly regarded scientist, a superstar in sports, a comedian, an actor or a person of exceptional public interest, they share at least one thing in common and that is failure. In basketball, one such individual is Michael Jordan and a quote of his goes like this:

I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. Twenty six times I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed. — Michael Jordan

Lessons are learned from failure, which prepares you to do better in the future by actively trying to avoid failure and actively trying to not make the same mistakes twice. This notion of failure is what motivated me to make this post and my curiosity drove me to ask the question: What makes a company successful? A rather passive and simple answer is: The lack of collateral mistakes. Mistakes carry different weights. Some mistakes are almost harmless, easily compensated, don’t have immediate consequences and, very importantly, they are reversible. Some other mistakes, come with collateral damage and cannot be unmade. It is the latter ones that need to be avoided at any cost, if possible. Thus, in the spirit of failure, I decided to dive into the factors that make a startup and their founders fail on a grand scheme, and as it turns out there are quite a few lessons to be learned.