Knowing what not to do is obviously a lot easier than knowing what to do. Because many mistakes are universal and can occur in any situation, whereas recipes f

Knowing what not to do is obviously a lot easier than knowing what to do. Because many mistakes are universal and can occur in any situation, whereas recipes for success probably need to be tailored much more for individual opportunities (eg. the reasons why gmail became successful in the 21st century would be different from the reasons why hotmail became successful in the 20th century). Therefore, I'd warrant that even if individuals are able to correctly determine what made them successful (eg. for hotmail, was it really that VC's advice to put at the bottom of each email "sent from my free Hotmail" or whatever? For Facebook, was it really that they restricted members to be originally Ivy League college students that had to use .edu email addresses to register, giving the unintended consequence that everyone's identity would have to be real? There are so many things that went into each success story's success that you can't pin it down to any few things, though they all had in common a special opportunity at a special window of time with a lot of hard work, luck, and matching skillsets or philosophies that were coincidentally and fortunately for the founders just what the doctor ordered. Steve Blank once said on cracking the code of entrepreneurship: "We now know how to make companies — startups — fail less. I can’t tell you we know how to make them succeed more. But I can tell you we can probably crank down the infant mortality across a portfolio of not only technology startups but probably restaurant startups or dry cleaner startups or whatever else we wanted to do in the United States by just teaching people to ask a simple set of questions." Also, sounds like you'd be interested in reading this: http://steveblank.com/2011/05/29/tune-in-turn-on-drop-out-the-startup-genome-project/ http://steveblank.com/2011/05/29/tune-in-turn-on-drop-out-th...