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Comment by igitur | Hacker News Reader

Epitome of survivor bias. Those who failed by taking on too much risk aren't here to tell their story.

What, they died or something? And now can't tell their story? That isn't survivorship bias at all. You can fail and still tell your story.

Is it possible the terms of a settlement prevent them from posting the story of their failure here?

I've seen a number of people posting comments here that violate settlement confidentiality or non-disparagement agreements using anonymous throwaway accounts.

They may be too ashamed to tell their story.

Or because of the acute pain of losing be more likely to tell their story. I guess whichever side gets this wrong is exhibiting survivorship bias bias.

Great response. And people do tell it, there are a ton of "why my startup failed" articles on HN all the time.

Something like 90% of startups fail. Therefore, if articles were randomly sampled among people who start startups, we should see 90% of articles about failed startups and 10% about successful startups. But if anything it's closer to the reverse. So even though some people do write about their failures, it's definitely not a proportionate sample.

It's just nobody is interested so those stories don't tend to get told that much.

My point about survivorship wasn't about startups succeeding or failing in general and whether they're here to tell their story. It was about taking on excess, uncalculated risk, in this case about not covering your legal arse.

You don't see (many) people here telling how they didn't put proper contacts in place, got sued and failed because of that alone.

And I postulate that it happens a lot more than most of us think.

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