90% of Tech Startups Fail [Infographic]

This is ridiculous. The infographic shows examples of 'successful' startups that have only been around for 2 years, then setting them side by side with 'failed' startups that took 5 years or more to fail.

And as someone else mentioned before, Zynga is far from a success story. It's one of the most memorable failures, if anything.

I'm sure the study provides very sensible results, but this infographic is a complete misrepresentation of it.

I kind of hoped an infographic would be about aggregate stats, not a pretty picture of six businesses. To get right down to brass tacks:

- the two really successful ones are both commerce-related. We aren't comparing Facebook and MySpace, it's not really a compelling comparison. If they didn't fail because of market fit, show us people with the same idea who executed better

- there are few attributes that are compared directly. They cite some good things one company did, and some unrelated bad things the other one did. Why can't we see how much funding they took side-by-side, for example?

- Maybe this is a bit old, but I wouldn't really put Zynga in the 'wins' column.

Which brings us to the real point; on a long enough timeline, everyone's chances of survival go to 0. The common metric for success seems to be an acquisition, or going public. We don't get a good idea of who's exited, or even on what timescale we're comparing these companies.

I'm working up some articles about estimation. One is going to be about estimation by analogy; or what Kahneman called "Reference Class Forecasting".

The basic insight is to check the base rates for your given venture or project. Humans are notoriously optimistic when making forecasts or estimates.

And now I am experiencing a strange thing. My current startup venture is based on the fact that people ignore the base rates; that humans have optimism bias.

And what am I doing?

... I'm ignoring the base rates and being optimistic ...

90% of startups/small businesses failing is a figure often thrown around but when I researched it I found no rock solid evidence of this number, also found wildly varying definitions of what a startup is, and what counts as failure. The link in the OP article links to another article which links to another article.

A vast percentage of all companies fail. Take a look at stock market listings from 20,50, 100 years ago. The question is what kind of value was produced from the organization.

This isn't an infographic. This is text with colorful backgrounds and icons.

The first thing I noticed was that Allmand Law who commissioned the infographic is a firm that specializes in bankruptcy and collections... LOL

It's an interesting/hilarious (yet ironically fitting) marketing strategy. Failed startups make great clients for bankruptcy law firms. Most end up swimming in debt.

I think you have to define scope though. MySpace isn't the definition of success but I don't know if it's the definition of failure either...

The social buttons that follow scrolling with a lag are maddening. Very distracting.

An infograpnic that concisely illustrates the title of the post? Out of luck.

Define failure first.