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What they should really do is collect book recommendations from ALL founders right when they start up (make it a required field in the incorporation paperwork, lol), then after N years, group them into the recommendations by failed founders and the recommendations by successful founders, and use a Chi-square test or something to select the most significant differences between the two sets of recommendations.

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If only there was an organization with access to a bunch of founders just before they start up with OPM...

Hope you are kidding with this statement :)

It seems like an impractical but useful thought experiment, which I think makes a good point about why these lists should be taken with a grain of salt. To take things further, we could improve the experiment by randomly assigning books to founders when they start! HN folks are quick to point out when many scientific results as “correlation not causation”, and this isn’t any different, in my opinion.

Yes :). I'm just saying that it could theoretically be done properly in a way that addresses GP's criticisms, but it would be impractical.

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