Bias

Why don’t you ever meet anyone who spent all their life savings outsourcing their tech startup and ended up with nothing in return.

Survivorship bias is easily one of my favourite logical fallacies, and the fact that you never hear from founders who have this sort of critical complete failure early doors is fully down to survivorship bias.

We have a habit of fetishising failure in entrepreneurialism but failure stories actually go, “I failed and it was awful BUT THEN I MADE IT”, because if they hadn’t had done the “BUT THEN I MADE IT” part… they wouldn’t have created an audience, and you would not be IN that audience.

For a non-technology person who’s lived through this the lifecycle is, work in industry, have an idea, find some money, get burnt by the software agency, end up with nothing, still need money in order live, go back into industry, never to be heard of again. That’s why you don’t hear from them – they go back to their jobs.

It’s much more likely you’ll lose all your money as a non-technology founder than end up with a business, and it’s not cute. It ruins people’s lives.

15/Sep/2023