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This was a surprisingly good read and data-driven. I found it surprising that the top reason for failure was product-market fit followed by team. I would have

This was a surprisingly good read and data-driven. I found it surprising that the top reason for failure was product-market fit followed by team. I would have thought finance (#3) and tech (#4) would rank higher.

awillen 6y ago
I think finance and product-market fit go hand in hand, and it's a question of the founder's perception of which is more important. If you don't have a good product, you won't make any money, so for those startups it really depends whether the founder saw running out of money as the final blow or the fact that the product didn't find its market to be the overarching cause of things.
MattGaiser 6y ago
Customers really don’t seem to be all that picky about tech quality in many cases. I know a guy who got government SaaS and IoT contracts with little more than the knowledge of PHP for Dummies and Arduino. “It runs” is more than enough in most cases. You can get by with “it runs 90% of the time” too.
toast0 6y ago
Tech barely matters. If nobody wants your product, the right tech is a mock-up. If people want your product, but you can't deliver because of tech, that might be promising enough to get funding for a better team. The dependency on a 3rd party product that's pulled seems real and dangerous though; you can't have security if you're built on something you don't control and can't replace under pressure.
vishnugupta 6y ago
Amazon is littered with awesome tech that took 2-3 years to build and launch but failed because there was no market for it. I worked on one such product, a micro payments web service. It took me a while to realize that that’s just how Amazon operates. Carry out experiments all the time, most fail, but the ones who click take off spectacularly. As Bezos says, don’t take Hail Mary bet. Take smaller bets all the time.
- hef19898 6y ago
  The thing that just continues to strike me since I left Amazon is how many start-up ideas are buried within that company. Coming from logistics, there is basically no internal tool or process that couldn't be turned into a start-up. Quite funny actually.
- cutemonster 6y ago
  What made the micro payments web service fail? If I may ask
icedchai 6y ago
More often the tech works, you just find out that after 3 years in that you've probably built the wrong thing.
biztos 6y ago
I also enjoyed it but I'm not sure I'd call it "data-driven" when the author puts "data" in scare-quotes: > Disclaimer: the interviews are qualitative, even though the founders were asked similar questions, they weren’t asked to fill out a survey, so to gather the “data” I had to interpret their words and put them into boxes. Points for being up-front about that, though.
m12k 6y ago
Do you know of any examples of companies that failed due to tech issues? I tried coming up with one, but I actually couldn't think of any

awillen 6y ago

I think finance and product-market fit go hand in hand, and it's a question of the founder's perception of which is more important. If you don't have a good product, you won't make any money, so for those startups it really depends whether the founder saw running out of money as the final blow or the fact that the product didn't find its market to be the overarching cause of things.

MattGaiser 6y ago

Customers really don’t seem to be all that picky about tech quality in many cases. I know a guy who got government SaaS and IoT contracts with little more than the knowledge of PHP for Dummies and Arduino. “It runs” is more than enough in most cases. You can get by with “it runs 90% of the time” too.

toast0 6y ago

Tech barely matters. If nobody wants your product, the right tech is a mock-up. If people want your product, but you can't deliver because of tech, that might be promising enough to get funding for a better team. The dependency on a 3rd party product that's pulled seems real and dangerous though; you can't have security if you're built on something you don't control and can't replace under pressure.

vishnugupta 6y ago

Amazon is littered with awesome tech that took 2-3 years to build and launch but failed because there was no market for it. I worked on one such product, a micro payments web service. It took me a while to realize that that’s just how Amazon operates. Carry out experiments all the time, most fail, but the ones who click take off spectacularly. As Bezos says, don’t take Hail Mary bet. Take smaller bets all the time.

hef19898 6y ago
The thing that just continues to strike me since I left Amazon is how many start-up ideas are buried within that company. Coming from logistics, there is basically no internal tool or process that couldn't be turned into a start-up. Quite funny actually.
cutemonster 6y ago
What made the micro payments web service fail? If I may ask

icedchai 6y ago

More often the tech works, you just find out that after 3 years in that you've probably built the wrong thing.

biztos 6y ago

I also enjoyed it but I'm not sure I'd call it "data-driven" when the author puts "data" in scare-quotes: > Disclaimer: the interviews are qualitative, even though the founders were asked similar questions, they weren’t asked to fill out a survey, so to gather the “data” I had to interpret their words and put them into boxes. Points for being up-front about that, though.

m12k 6y ago

Do you know of any examples of companies that failed due to tech issues? I tried coming up with one, but I actually couldn't think of any