Paraphrasing "If you get good at seeing red flags it doesn't make you good at seeing green ones. When you optimize against failure you don't optimize for success. So on and so forth."
A failed founder can tell you what broke but won't know what else could've gone wrong or rather what else they needed to go right.
I like this idea a lot, if it can be done well.
Is there already trove of failed tech startup stories that are genuine, and maybe analyzed like business case studies? Is it publicly-accessible, or could it be?
I think the biggest challenge is getting truthful and complete information. (People will have made embarrassing mistakes, no matter how much brilliant heroism the team also pulled off. There will be things the failed founders don't want past customers/partners/investors to know. There will be things investors don't want known about their own behavior. For growth startups, there may be investment fraud at some level, for example. Or backstabbing. There will be differences of perspective on what really happened. There may be personality disorders. Etc.)
A lot of people will tolerate a disposable "incredible journey" post to put a less-negative spin on failure, but AFAICT usually no one involved really wants all the truth to get out.
Also, if you do it, ideally it would be for all startups. If you only do it for some, without all being humbled simultaneously, then current convention is to look down upon those with the transparency, while pretending the non-transparent ones are better. It's a pretty dim-witted and petty culture, and we have to structure with that in mind.
"Failed Startups- +70 articles listing +400 failed startups, filtered by country, industry, customer, and cause of failure" - https://www.failory.com/failures
I wonder whether anyone at any investment firm bothers to understand why a startup actually failed, or that's irrelevant to their operating model.
False choices: Presents manual work vs. scalable strategy as either/or when most successful companies do both simultaneously.
Has a One size fits all: Claims all startups must recruit manually, ignoring that enterprise products need fundamentally different approaches.
Instead, do the following...
- Interview failed founders, not successful ones: They will tell you why things actually break (co-founder fights, cash flow, timing) instead of survivorship bias fairy tales.
- Optimize for "no," not "yes": Ruthlessly eliminate wrong customers instead of trying to delight everyone. False positives kill more startups than missed opportunities.
- Plan your failure modes first: Map exactly how you could die (regulation, key person risk, moats) and build defenses. Most founders only plan for unicorn outcomes.
- Copy boring businesses, because that is the secret of sucess. Dont copy sexy startups: Uber is just taxis with an app, Airbnb is hotels with no real estate, Netflix is just video rental with better logistics. The biggest "innovative" companies are doing boring businesses better, not inventing new categories.