Member-only story
Is Your Startup Philosophy Failing You?
Science is eating startups. We need a philosophy that’s built for the challenge. Precisely. One. Philosophy.
The Hall-of-Famer Ted Williams said, “Baseball is the only field of endeavor where a man can succeed three times out of ten and be considered a good performer.” I guess he wasn’t well acquainted with entrepreneurship. In this game, if you succeed one time out of ten, you’re far outperforming the field.
Why do startups fail at such an alarming rate? Most explanations are anecdotal from founder stories. We pool together the biggest successes and the biggest flops, and distill patterns for best practices. A small industry of blogs and podcasts transforms these experiences into a mountain of knowledge. But if this knowledge truly lights the path to success, it’s only by the slightest flicker.
Those that have succeeded in the past perform only marginally better than those that haven’t. We long thought that the collective experience of teams outperforms the performance of the lone founder, but that notion doesn’t survive scrutiny either. Despite a mounting effort to teach…
