By what definition of "too much"? I see nothing wrong with focusing on studying the best--the ones that made it. Those are the people to emulate. Why spend your limited time studying the ones that failed? Sure, learning from mistakes is great. But I suspect I'm going to weather the storm better if I learn about mistakes from people who made it through to the other side--rather than from people who blew it and ended up bankrupt. I really don't think I'd like to be facing a problem and thinking, "Oh, wait, I read about this...it turned out horribly...we're dead!" Much better to think, "Well, Evan Williams had exactly this problem with Blogger. And look how that turned out! Just gotta keep plugging away."
Just a thought. I don't really think we need a lot of post-mortems while we're in the early stages. Maybe later when we have a huge success on our hands and want to know how to avoid becoming the next SGI (Google uses SGI internally to mean, "company that has huge success and then made huge mistakes", because Google has actually moved into nearly all of the old SGI buildings in Mountain View as SGI has atrophied into a shell of itself--seeing how business and management heavy Google has become in the past year makes me think they didn't think hard enough about SGI...).
After that happened, I spent a couple of months staring at walls, feeling sorry for myself. During that time, I listened to everything at venturevoice.com, read Founders at Work, and kept thinking "man, these success stories are inspiring, but what I need right now are some goddamn failure storiesX." (If you're in the same position, I highly recommend this book: http://tinyurl.com/362eg5 )
Anyways, you're both right. Founders at Rest: Stories of Losers Who Fucked Up and Gave Up would be boring and depressing. But interviews with successful people about their failures -- e.g., Evan Williams' Blogger saga -- would be fascinating and inspiring. The classic story arc doesn't let the hero succeed right off the bat. First he hits a low point, then pulls himself up by his bootstraps.
One of these days I'll write that book. Right now, though, I'm too busy working on my next startup.
Don't forget, Microsoft wasn't Bill Gates' first company.
Reasons #2, 7, 8, 14, 16, and 18. ;-)
What if the failures are doing a lot of the same things? You just can't get a complete picture without examining the failures, too.
It's probably better to be optimistic, because being realistic is likely to simply be depressing, but still, for those curious about the system as a whole, you can't just look at success.
>>I'm sure one of you is already thinking of how to make this a Facebook app, but I think a personal phone call would work best.
Actually, my first thought was meetup group in a certain area.
Or perhaps some kind of demo party. Everyone has to present something for 10 minutes, something they've done or learnt since last week.
Perhaps opencoffee should have a culture of demoing every week. You show up, you get scrutinized, but it's all for the best.
I guess startups are like old soldiers, they just fade away. Anyone want memamp.com? It went to unregistered status a week or two ago.
But this was a good handling of the subject, and good for founders to hear. What I think is great about YC's structure is that it gives startups feedback and deadlines, and I agree that just getting those is enough to keep startups going. Someone should start a startup that just calls people once a week and talks with them about what they got done! It would work even better if the caller was of higher status, but it would work well enough with friends.
But seriously, for startups this would work great. Get together with a group and make a weekly appointment for each person to call another each week and chat about what they're doing, preferably with a little demo. I'm sure one of you is already thinking of how to make this a Facebook app, but I think a personal phone call would work best.
P.S.: "Francisco."