The document outlines the top 20 reasons why startups fail, highlighting that failure often stems from common patterns identified in post-mortem analyses of 101 startups. Key factors include lack of market need, financial mismanagement, and failure to pivot or respond to feedback. The author emphasizes a positive relationship with failure as a learning and growth opportunity for entrepreneurs.

1. Top 20 Reasons Why Startups Fail

2. Our Relationship to Failure
• As entrepreneurs, our relationship to failure is
redefined
• Any new enterprise is a groping forward from one
failure to the next
• Failure is another word for learning what doesn’t work
• Split testing
• Pivot
• Iterate
• Course correct
• Feedback

3. If at first you don’t succeed

4. “I have not failed. I've just found 10,000
ways that won't work.” Thomas Edison

5. Fail Forward

6. iterarate

7. Course Correct

8. Fail fast and cheap
manage risk and limit downside

9. A Day in the Life

10. The Dip

11. Own Your Failures
• Take responsibility
• No blaming others
• Recognize quickly when something isn’t working
• Professionalism: emotionally detach from your
ideas
• Listen and embrace feedback and criticism
• Don’t defend as the default reactionary response
• Learn, course correct, pivot, rinse and repeat

15. On the other hand…
Never underestimate the power of getting it
right the first time.

16. Top 20 Reasons Why Startups Fail

17. After Action Reports
Post Mortem

18. Top 20 reasons for startup failure
• This list was compiled by CB Insights by
analyzing 101 startup failure post-mortems.
• They analyzed these to figure out the main
reasons startups fail.
• Startups, corporations, investors, economic
development folks, academics, and journalists
all want some insight into the question:
• “What are the reasons startups fail?”

19. Startup post-mortems
After reading through the
101 postmortems, they
learned there is rarely
one reason for a single
startup’s failure. However,
they began to see a
pattern to these stories.

20. Anna Karenina Principle
"Happy families are all alike; every
unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
• Leo Tolstoy
• It’s the first sentence in the classic 800+ page
novel
The Anna Karenina principle states that a deficiency
in any one of a number of factors dooms an
endeavor to failure. Consequently, a successful
endeavor (subject to this principle) is one where
every possible deficiency has been avoided.

21. • Each failure overcome is
exorcising a deficiency
and bringing us closer
to our goal
• Pain is weakness leaving
the body
• The obstacle is the way

23. The Obstacle is the Way

24. #20 Failure to Pivot
Not pivoting away or quickly enough from a bad
product, a bad hire, or a bad decision was cited
as a reason for failure in 7% of the post
mortems. Dwelling or being married to a bad
idea can sap resources and money as well as
leave employees frustrated by a lack of progress.

25. #19 Burnout
Work-life balance is not something that startup
founders often get and so the risk of burning out
is high. Burn out was given as a reason for
failure 8% of the time The ability to cut your
losses where necessary and re-direct your
efforts when you see a dead end was deemed
important to succeeding and avoiding burnout,
as was having a solid, diverse, and driven team
so that responsibilities can be shared.

26. #18 Didn’t Use Network
Get your investors involved. Your investors are
there to help you. Get them involved from the
start, and don’t be afraid to ask for help. I think
we made the mistake early on of trying to do
(and know) everything ourselves, perhaps out of
insecurity over being so new to the business
world. This is a mistake.

27. # 17 Legal Challenges
Sometimes a startup can
evolve from a simple idea
to a world of legal
complexities that can
prove to be a core cause
of shutting down.

28. #16 No Financing/Investor Interest
Tying to the more
common reason of
running out of cash, a
number of startup
founders explicitly cited a
lack of investor interest
either at the seed follow-
on stage (the Series A
Crunch) or at all.
Runway

29. #15 Failed Geographical Expansion
• Location was an issue in a couple of different
ways. The first was that there has to be
congruence between your startup’s concept and
location.
• Location also played a role in failure for remote
teams. The key being that if your team is working
remotely, make sure you find effective
communication methods, otherwise lack of
teamwork and planning could lead to failure.

30. #14 Lack of Passion
• There are many good ideas out there in the
world, but 9% of startup post-mortem founders
found that a lack of passion for a domain and a
lack of knowledge of a domain were key reasons
for failure no matter how good an idea is.
• The work you do while you procrastinate is
probably the work you should be doing for the
rest of your life.
– Jessica Hische

31. #13 Pivot Gone Bad
Pivots like Burbn to Instagram or ThePoint to
Groupon can go extraordinarily well. Or they can
start you down the wrong road.
As Flowtab’s post-mortem explains,
• “Pivoting for pivoting’s sake is worthless. It
should be a calculated affair, where changes to
the business model are made, hypotheses are
tested, and results are measured. Otherwise,
you can’t learn anything.”

32. #12 Disharmony among
team/investors
• Discord with a
cofounder is a fatal
issue for startup post-
mortem companies.
• Acrimony isn’t limited
to the founding team,
and when things go bad
with an investor, it can
get ugly pretty quickly.

33. #11 Lose Focus
Getting sidetracked by
distracting projects,
personal issues, and/or
general loss of focus was
mentioned in 13% of
stories as a contributor to
failure.

34. #10 Product Mistimed
• If you release your product too early, users
may write it off as not good enough and
getting them back may be difficult if their first
impression of you is negative. And if you
release your product too late, you may have
missed your window of opportunity in the
market.
• Being right too soon

35. Timing is Everything

36. On the other hand…
If you are not embarrassed by the first version of
your product, you've launched too late.
– Reid Hoffman
– PayPal, LinkedIn, Masters of Scale podcast
– Book: The Startup of You

37. #9 Ignore Customers
• Ignoring users is a tried and true way to
fail. Tunnel vision and not gathering user
feedback are fatal flaws for most startups.

38. On the other hand…
“If I had asked people what they wanted, they
would have said faster horses.”
– Henry Ford
An innovator should have understanding of one’s
customers and their problems via empirical,
observational, anecdotal methods or even intuition.
They should also feel free to ignore customers’
inputs. Ford’s adherence to his vision of the mass-
market car and how to materialize that vision was
instrumental in his early success.

39. #8 Poor Marketing
• Knowing your target audience and knowing
how to get their attention and convert them
to leads and ultimately customers is one of
the most important skills of a successful
business. But an inability to market was a
common failure especially among founders
who liked to code or build product but who
didn’t relish the idea of promoting the
product.

40. #7 Product without a Business Model
• Failed founders seem to agree that a business
model is important – staying wedded to a
single channel or failing to find ways to make
money at scale left investors hesitant and
founders unable to capitalize on any traction
gained.

41. #6 User un-friendly product
• Bad things happen when you ignore what
users want and need, whether consciously or
accidentally.

42. #5 Pricing/Cost Issues
• Pricing is a dark art when it comes to startup
success, and startup post-mortems highlight
the difficulty in pricing a product high enough
to eventually cover costs but low enough to
bring in customers.
• A16z podcast on pricing
• https://a16z.com/2016/08/13/pricing/

43. #4 Get Outcompeted
• Despite the platitudes that startups shouldn’t
pay attention to the competition, the reality is
that once an idea gets hot or gets market
validation, there may be many entrants in a
space. And while obsessing over the
competition is not healthy, ignoring them was
also a recipe for failure in 19% of the startup
failures.

44. #3 Not the Right Team
A diverse team with different skill sets was often
cited as being critical to the success of a
company. Failure post-mortems often lamented
that “I wish we had a CTO from the start,” or
wished that the startup had “a founder that
loved the business aspect of things.”

45. #2 Ran Out of Cash
Money and time are finite and need to be
allocated judiciously. The question of how
should you spend your money was a frequent
conundrum and reason for failure cited by
startups (29%).
• Budgets
• Discipline

46. #1 No Market Need
• Tackling problems that are interesting to solve rather
than those that serve a market need was cited as the
No. 1 reason for failure, noted in 42% of cases.
• “Startups fail when they are not solving a market
problem. We were not solving a large enough problem
that we could universally serve with a scalable solution.
We had great technology, great data on shopping
behavior, great reputation as a thought leader, great
expertise, great advisors, etc, but what we didn’t have
was technology or business model that solved a pain
point in a scalable way.”

47. On the other hand….
In his book Zero To One, PayPal and Palantir entrepreneur
and venture capitalist (first outside investor in
Facebook) Peter Thiel claims that in business the opposite
of the Anna Karenina principle applies:
• Tolstoy opens Anna Karenina by observing: “All happy
families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its
own way.” Business is the opposite. All happy
companies are different: each one earns a monopoly
by solving a unique problem. All failed companies are
the same: they failed to escape competition.

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