We spend too much time focusing on survivors, when I feel like the best learning comes from looking at failure.
I'd be willing to be there's a lot of failed / failing companies out there doing the exact same thing as the "most effective founders", so what makes them different? I'd be interested to know.
The whole "25 things that successful people do" completely ignores the entire question of whether unsuccessful people also do those things, and therefore whether those things have anything to do with success.
Survivor bias is so prevalent in any thinking about "what makes someone successful?" that yes, it would be much more effective at this point to consider "what makes someone unsuccessful".
I'm willing to bet that the things we consider to be signs of success are actually table-stakes, in that both successful and unsuccessful founders do them, and the thing that actually marks the difference between successful and unsuccessful founders is luck.
Every company is unique and problems are different and in different domains at different external conditions.
Statistics would just be a sample size of 1 and std dev of infinity.
While controlled experiments are the ideal for hypothesis testing, as someone who does stats for a living it's worth point out observational studies do exist.
Entire fields, such as anthropology, depend entirely on observational statistics. The field has also come a tremendously long way in recent years with lots of very useful tools coming out of the Bayesian community (applying proper priors, multi-level modeling, inference on more complex models) and the causal inference community.
McElreath's Statistical Rethinking is a great text that deals mostly with what I would consider the current state of the art in observational techniques. Highly recommended if isn't already on your bookshelf.
There's a pretty established model regarding successful founders who then write books about themselves. The audience seems to be well known and if not presumably a successful founder could self-publish their way to success.
The model for mediocre founders talking about their failures is probably a tough sell to backers as the audience size is unknown and if the founder is unsuccessful they won't be able to self publish.
The best format would probably be a free podcast and where some host would invite other moderately/less than successful founders to talk about their ups and downs. The best bet for the host would be some VC funded moderately successful founder who's startup only 1.5x'd instead of 10x'd snd had to sell the company and now had free time.
- Treat people like volunteers vs treat people like paid employees
- Protect the team from distractions vs distract your team
- Minimize unnecessary micromanagement vs introduce unnecessary micromanagement
- Invite disagreement vs squash all disagreement
- Preserve interpersonal equity vs treat people arbitrarily
- Keep pace with expertise vs ignore whats going on around you
- Overcome discouragement vs succumb to discouragement
The ineffective founds list would probably be something similar, like "be a dick", "ignore your colleagues", "be volatile", etc.
Ie being a dick at right moment may allow you to push through situation that would make weaker / more moral ones fail. And about gazillions of other possible examples that may be counterintuitive.
"We will strive to make people happier and more productive".
Who would say they strive for the opposite?
[1] effective here is subjective and reported. They have a discussion of why they don't use other metrics like company valuations and it boils down to that data is harder to collect I think
Like that anecdote about the studying the WW2 planes that went down vs the ones that made it back to see where to add more armour.
I’d say examining survivors is useful and can provide information, but you need to be careful to correct for survivorship bias. But that’s not to say you cannot gain any information from examining cohorts of survivors.
I think most people probably under-correct for survivorship bias so it’s good general advice to highlight it.
“What is it the successful planes do? Well, they didn’t get shot here (points)”
I’d be very surprised if lots of failing companies are doing the _exact_ same as the most successful ones. Maybe cargo-culting all of the things, or actually doing _most_ of the same things but missing one necessary thing. There is an element of luck to it for sure, but the intangibles like business strategy, product market fit iterative discovery, hiring, managing, developing people, are all quite hard to pin down in pithy summaries. The best startups get these right either by meta-level luck of happening to have the right skill set for the problems they ended up facing (vs. rolling a natural 20 on a skill check with the same stats as other founders) or by actually working harder on acquiring the skills that they most need to develop. But doing these (hard, time-consuming) things well is uncommon.
This may well be true, but the factors for success are hyper-sensitive to the context of the time with a hefty dash of randomness thrown in. By the time we've observed the factors, the circumstances have changed so they're not entirely repeatable. Sticking to the formula may work, or may lead to wildly different results. But altering the formula is just as unpredictable. Context is critical.