When outages happen, there are companies that do blameless postmortems, and they do get good data. I think it's a matter of creating the right incentives. Poss

When outages happen, there are companies that do blameless postmortems, and they do get good data. I think it's a matter of creating the right incentives. Possibly an organization like YC or a VC that's existed for a long time does. Although they tend to regard such knowledge as proprietary, so, no luck for us. > Really just needs to be a non profit that would run the studies and maybe turn it into a consultancy or something. Now you're on the right track. Many non-profits like this already exist: universities, and sometimes, governments. There are lots of papers out there about why businesses fail, and governments are strongly incentivized to fund this kind of research. I don't know for sure though, but there is probably a paucity of data about why wacky tech startups fail. - At least until recently, it hasn't mattered very much. Actually, I would argue it still doesn't matter. - Startups are bespoke and weird by definition, so analysis is hard. But possibly an academic could maybe test theories of exactly how much risk you should take on (I'm thinking of mcfunley's insights on "innovation tokens"; maybe that can be formalized somehow. http://mcfunley.com/choose-boring-technology http://mcfunley.com/choose-boring-technology)