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.
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.
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.