What Really Kills Most Startups

Recognizing the human reasons your business failed is the only way to prevent it from happening again

Photo by Matt Botsford on Unsplash

I’ve noticed that Silicon Valley founders, when talking shop, love to dig into the reasons startups die:

• “Shyp wasted too much time building something people didn’t want”
• “Formspring lost touch with the product vision”
• “KiOR made poor hiring decisions as it staffed up”

True facts, all of them! But the technical cause of death is usually a veneer. Behavioral, cultural, and interpersonal issues are among the biggest killers of startups, but they are seldom discussed in public. These issues are very personal. They are sometimes scary for founders to confront within themselves, and even scarier to confess to the world. Yet they are the true gems we can take away from most failed startups.

The other day I started digging through startup post mortems, and I came across a few founders courageous enough to feel their own bruises:

• “Nathan and I had major communication problems … we weren’t intrinsically motivated by news and journalism” —Paul Biggar, NewsTilt
• “I started to feel burned out. I was Blurtt’s fearless leader, but the problem with burnout is…