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Comment by kylec | Hacker News Reader

I remember Paul Graham once saying that 9 out of 10 startups fail, but it seems that nowadays outright failure is less and less common. Sure, only a fraction of startups get really big, but it seems like acquihires are becoming the default failure mode. With the upside of striking it rich and the downside of employment at another company with a generous signing bonus, it's no wonder lots of people want to hop on board the gravy train.

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I think this graph should spell it out for you. Keep in mind, it's just displaying the Series A crunch.

http://image.slidesharecdn.com/02paulmartinobullpen-final-14...

That's all a quick google image search could find: I've seen the 2014 data, it's more of the same - the deals remains flatlined while the number of ventures starts to go parabolic.

I highly doubt that most ventures that can't make Series A are going have that many opportunities for acquihire.

Do you really think that acquihires are becoming the default failure mode? What about all of the startups that fail silently? I'm seeing some selection bias here.

I don't know, but what actually happens is immaterial. All that matters is perception, and my perception (selection bias and all) is that starting or being involved in a startup seems much less risky than it did 5 or 10 years ago. I'm sure that there are lots of people at Harvard, Wharton, and Columbia that share this perception, leading to an increase in demand for programs about startups.

We should aim to keep the mass media out of our perception, because all it cares about is generating clicks :)

They don't care about plain simple failures, but they are large part of startup life.

One day they will move on from startups to some other hot thing, just like they did with Bitcoin, Ebola, etc.

Don't believe the hype!

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