Any chance they break out of the survivorship bias bubble in their discussions? I largely stopped listening to Acquired because of that. I want more stories about startups that failed while doing seemingly the right thing, and fewer about startups that probably got lucky.
Ironically, this perspective itself is a result of survivorship bias.
There are seemingly so few podcasts and publications about failure stories that it must be a rare and unique idea to start one, right? But the reality is that it's a very common idea. I feature success stories on my podcast (Indie Hackers), and I've been getting requests for "more failure stories" since day #1. I've tried them, and I've also seen a lot of competing websites and podcasts try them. And guess what?
They aren't popular.
It turns out, there's a lot of failure-based content out there. It just never survives or thrives enough to get popular. Hence the survivorship bias illusion that nobody is making failure content.
My theory as to why is simple to understand if you understand basic story structure: Every success story is actually made up of a bunch of small failure stories followed by a small success story: fail-fail-fail-win. People greatly prefer to hear the failure stories of those who eventually succeeded, than to hear the failure stories of those who never did. Not only does it make for a better overall story, but it's more effective to learn from. So I think people are right to prefer this.
Yea, that's an interesting perspective. I do wondering if we can learn from a related, but successful form of failure content, which is the disaster/accident investigation videos. I watch a wide range from the classic TV airliner crashes [1], to highly detailed air crash disaster investigation reports / training [2], to industrial / other accidents [3], to gov't industrial accidents reports / simulations [4].
I wonder if there's anything to be gained from way that content succeeds while business failures don't? Is it just that startup failures aren't as dramatic? It's not a clear-cut kind of narrative that's satisfying? No idea...
Great point. My guess is that it depends on the context.
Humans are natural storytellers. We're wired to encode our experiences as stories, share stories, and recall the stories we've been told. But most importantly, we're wired to learn from stories. We aren't born with a lot of useful instinct like many animals are, so crucially we use stories to pass on knowledge. Knowledge is useful if it helps us pass on our genes. And to pass on our genes we must both survive (i.e. not die) and thrive (i.e. find and reproduce with mates).
I'd guess the darker stories like the ones you're sharing are about survival. They pass on useful knowledge about what not to do if you want to live. We're instinctively attracted to these kinds of stories. For example, when someone dies, we all want to know the story behind how. Ancient humans who possessed a similar morbid curiosity probably out-survived their brethren. And we're their descendants.
On the flip side, success stories are about thriving. They're about accruing resources, status, respect, social capital. Sometimes they're about surviving too, e.g. climbing a tree to escape a lion, or finding the right kinds of food to forage for in a particular neck of the woods. The useful knowledge in these stories usually exists in the form of some special insight, or a set of behaviors or instructions. These are stories about things you should remember to do, rather than things you should avoid.
So it would make sense for aspiring entrepreneurs, public speakers, etc. to want to study success stories; and for pilots, race car drivers, etc. to want to study failure stories. I'd also wager that people who are aspiring to achieve something care more about success stories.
I think it might be more instructive to have a side by side comparison: why did startup A in fail and startup B succeed, assuming they are in the same space?
For example, why did Facebook take over the world and not MySpace? Why did DOS beat CP/M?
Or a non-tech example: why did Amundsen beat Scott to the South Pole? Was it down to technique (e.g. using dogs instead of motored vehicles) or mindset?
I agree that failures are interesting, but the bias problem doesn't go away. Reasons people give for why they failed are no more reliable than reasons they give for why they succeeded (or anything else, for that matter). We're good story-tellers and bad reason-knowers.
I often have this feeling when reading "why my startup failed" blog posts (how do they know?!). Which doesn't mean they aren't worth reading!
> Reasons people give for why they failed are no more reliable than reasons they give for why they succeeded
100% true.
That's why when you learn about other ventures, successful or not, what the founders say are the important features aren't really the part that you should pay the most attention to.
A founder's analysis of the events is not without value, and shouldn't be ignored, but it's not the most important part. Any founder's analysis will be heavily subjective, after all.
Founder awareness of what even happened in my experience is highly biased. Likely even worse than reliability of eyewitness testimony, since they were actively participating in the situation.
Agree, if there was a proven and repeatable method of doing (or not doing) anything that produced significant value, it would rapidly be adopted (or blocked) — and as result, offer diminishing (if not negative) returns.
Nobody does the right thing. You will not find any startup, future success or failure, that is doing everything the right way. Many times the difference between success and failure is who got lucky and never had to pay for the stuff they skipped over, and who got the predictable consequences.
I think you missed my intended point. Of course there are no perfect startups. However, at any given time there are multiple startups doing largely the same thing, but most of them will fail. I want stories about why Startup A succeeded, and why Startup B doing the same thing in the same space at the same time failed. We typically only get the former stories, which aren't very helpful in a vacuum. It's far more educational to look at both sides and draw conclusions.
Failures are always interesting, but it is incredibly hard to pinpoint why it failed. Lots of things can go wrong, and it is usually a combination of factor that kills a company.
I was once told only to take advice from people who succeeded repeatedly at a task. Building a company and succeeding is impressive, but there may be a lot more factors in play than just the actions of the founders. Building several successful companies makes the difference.
I started following a lot of indie games on Reddit, and it was a huge bummer to watch great-looking, fun, polished games crash and burn time after time
It definitely scared me away from investing in my own game ideas.. not sure if that was a good thing or not
