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Comment by feedjoelpie | Hacker News Reader

Can we vote on which ones accurately assess their failings and which ones still harbor serious delusions about them?

I am 100% serious, by the way. People have the most ridiculous ideas about why things failed and how it will totally work next time. If they just follow these ego-comforting steps that don't even begin to address the problem.

My top at-a-glance eye-roller says "technical co-founder quit & pulled the code out from under me".

So completely neglectful of basic business structuring that the tech co-founder could just walk away with the code, to which you don't have copyright claim? If a non-technical co-founder can't even bring responsible management to the table, why are they at the table?

Article goes on to suggest that if the non-technical co-founder had learned to code so as to not feel so helpless, things would have gone better. Just wow.

agreed

Heh, yeah I would advise if you're the "find funding" type of serial entrepreneur to think long and hard about what you write there. It may come back to bite you.

At a startup (before traction, employees, etc.), you are pretty much doomed if your technical cofounder quits even if you've structured the company with vesting, ownership of IP, etc. All the domain knowledge, architectural knowledge, etc. goes out the window when the person who wrote all the code leaves. It's very hard to drop someone else into an unfamiliar codebase and have them pick up where the original person left off, and you probably would've made many different decisions (about product, platform, languages, architecture) with a different team.

The real fail there is poor relationship management. Why did the cofounder quit? What was running through their head? Did they not really want to commit to a startup in the first place, in which case the business founder should've vetted them more thoroughly before starting the company? Or did they lose trust in the business founder's leadership, market knowledge, and integrity? Were their incentives never aligned to begin with?

I've been involved in a start-up where the technical co-founder did some pretty bad stuff and ended up leaving the company. They survived, but it wasn't pretty.

Maybe the tech cofounder quit because you're a clueless asshole? Blaming your failure on the guy you drove away, I think that's what he's complaining about as delusional.

> It's very hard to drop someone else into an unfamiliar codebase and have them pick up where the original person left off,

Eh, this is what every new employee at an established company does.

And when a startup has a "technical cofounder", that usually means the "tech" is a CRUD website, as opposed to a novel invention being productized (in which case it would be a technical founder or technical founder pair.

Yeah, but is a vote-system going to be better?

It is also true of those who do have well reasoned arguments as to why they failed. They could be totally wrong, there are just so many internal and external factors that influence a business.

Since the list of self-performed autopsies is short, it might be nice if you could invert the premise — allow a community to choose from preset tags why a startup failed (even if inexact, would make it handy to look for examples of the kind of failure you want to study), and add discussion. That might provide a hook to invite the founders to write their story, then.

If we make such a list, it would help us overcome the Survivorship Bias.

We could make such a list, but I think the list all by itself will cause many people aware of the list and attempting to do a start-up a kind of 'All I have to do is avoid these 300 things and I'll be fine' checklist.

When in fact the real reasons why start-ups fail are often complex interplays between the various factors rather than just one single factor, and only a few of those are under direct control of the founders.

Sure, but it's a seed for discussion. Add a few tags for discoverability and loose correlation, then let the nuance come out in a conversation. We discuss Apple, Google, Microsoft's moves ad nauseum — it'd be great to apply some of that energy to companies operating at a scale closer to ourselves.

This is a great idea. It may also be good to provide others the ability to chime in with reasons not explored in the "full story".

Agreed. This is the start of something brilliant. Voting on utility of story would be great.

I have this intentionally mixed metaphore: hindsight is 50/50.

really like this idea, we'll take a look at implementing this.

Phrased that way, it sounds more like kicking people while they're down than constructive critique. Maybe a more constructive way of putting it might be to discuss the appropriate lessons to learn from each case?

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