Not fundable

Today, we are in a crisis. Silicon Valley's best — our top operators, exited founders, and most powerful investors — are almost all on  bad quests.  Exiting your first startup only to enter venture capital and fight your peers for allocation in a hot deal is a bad quest. Armchair philosophizing on Twitter is a bad quest. Ya

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The fact that the best ideas seem like bad ideas makes it even harder to recognize the big winners. It means the probability of a startup making it really big is not merely not a constant fraction of the probability that it will succeed, but that the startups with a high probability of the former will seem to have a disproportionately low probabili... See more

Turns out no amount of fundraising, press, buzz, amazing employees, and/or cool tech guarantees you product market fit.

There's no correlation between the percentage of startups that raise money and the metric that does matter financially, whether that batch of startups contains a big winner or not.

In hindsight, my professional and personal experiences have taught me valuable lessons through forced humility, and my advice to all budding entrepreneurs and founders out there is: to always trust your instinct, be fearless when choosing courage over comfort, and remember that failing is A-OK!

The other reason founders ignore this path is that the absolute numbers seem so small at first. This can't be how the big, famous startups got started, they think.

Stephanie Bowker, co-founder of Ourspace and former VP of Marketing at Spendesk:“I honestly don't think it's the right horizon for most companies. For early stage startups it's pointless to pour a bunch of time into mapping out a 12-month plan when you need to learn and pivot on a weekly/monthly basis.”