Startups

July 2025

• Jul 14, 2025ExplainersStartup Failures Explained Step by StepFailures follow traceable sequences. Quibi raised $1.75 billion on founder reputation, bought celebrity content before testing demand, shipped without sharing or screenshots, and closed six months after launch. Juicero spent $120 million engineering a press before journalists showed the packs squeezed fine by hand. CB Insights read 111 founder post-mortems and found no market need cited in 42 percent of them, ahead of running out of cash.24 MIN43.9k

April 2025

• Apr 23, 2025CultureStartup Culture ExplainedZuckerberg hung "Move fast and break things" in 2004 and replaced it in 2014 with "Move fast with stable infrastructure." That shift is the whole tension. Bernstein and Waber measured actual interaction with wearable sensors across two Fortune 500 renovations and found open offices reduced face-to-face contact by roughly 70% while digital messaging rose. Also: why flatness fails past about 30 people, and which values must evolve as headcount grows.23 MIN7.8k

June 2024

• Jun 3, 2024CultureSuccess Factors for Entrepreneurs: Research InsightsAzoulay and colleagues analyzed IRS and Census records for US startups from 2007 to 2014 and found the mean founder age of the fastest-growing companies was 45, with the top performers older still. Covers survivorship bias, Sarasvathy's effectuation and affordable loss, why serial founders who failed before do no worse than first-timers, and the venture base rate of roughly 75 percent not returning capital.16 MIN3.7k

September 2023

• Sep 23, 2023Work SkillsStartup vs Big Company Career: How to Choose at Every StageWork one example through. You hold 0.2 percent of a company, fully vested, with a $10M liquidation preference stack above you, and it exits at $80M: investors take their $10M first, your share of the remaining $70M is $140,000. Against a $30,000 annual salary discount over four years, the net gain is $20,000. This covers compensation ranges by stage, the breadth-versus-depth learning trade, the different failure modes, and what to ask for before signing.14 MIN1.9k

August 2023

• Aug 20, 2023ExplainersStartup Failure Statistics: Unveiling the Real RatesThe harsher figures come from a different population, venture-backed companies judged against investor returns, and only about 0.5 percent of new US businesses raise venture capital in a given year. Industry matters more than the slogan, with construction near 42 percent five-year survival against roughly 61 percent in healthcare. The restaurant version of the myth was disowned by the researcher it is traced to.17 MIN3.6k

January 2023

• Jan 21, 2023CultureVenture Capital: How It Works in StartupsReturns follow a power law, so a company reliably returning 3x is worth less to the portfolio than one with a 10 percent shot at 100x. That is why VCs screen for enormous markets rather than sound small businesses. The page works dilution through honestly too: two founders at 50 percent each hold about 29 percent after a seed round, a Series A and an option pool, and that is the rational trade when the capital buys real growth.14 MIN2.7k
• Jan 20, 2023CultureUnderstanding Entrepreneurship and Its RealitiesWhat entrepreneurship actually involves and what the failure data shows. Bureau of Labor Statistics Business Employment Dynamics figures put roughly 20 percent of new employer businesses closing within the first year and about 45 percent by the end of year five, which makes the popular nine-out-of-ten claim more mythology than measurement. Closure is also not always failure, since BLS data cannot separate retirements and sales from bankruptcies.16 MIN11.4k

July 2022

• Jul 29, 2022CultureMinimum Lovable Product: More Than MVPWhat an MLP is and why the term exists. Laurence McCahill of The Happy Startup School coined minimum lovable product around 2013, observing that teams used the MVP label to avoid the harder work of crafting experiences people actually wanted. An MVP tests whether a product can function; an MLP tests whether it can inspire loyalty, making it the smallest thing you could ship that someone would recommend to a friend without reservation.18 MIN4.6k