I’ve been building a database of successful companies (starterstory.com)

> Don't just record successful companies. You can't figure out what actually matters if you don't compare to failed companies

Quite. Trying to reverse-engineer start-up success this way has more than a whiff of cargo cult about it.

I have come across this website that interviews failed founders. Looks like nthey pivoted to now doing both failed and successful but they def. started focussing on failed founders:

https://www.failory.com/

https://www.failory.com/graveyard

Good call, I could add this as a tag / make it filterable as some of the companies we've done case studies on have since failed, pivoted, or been acquired. Adding this to the backlog.

somebody can probably find the real story better than I can. Back in World War 2, the B29 Bomber would go out on long flights but not all of them returned. Of the ones that returned, they saw the hauls were full of bullet holes, so they kept adding armor to the haul and kept losing planes. By focusing on the planes that were not coming back, it turned out the problem was holes in wings - planes were surviving the holes in hauls.

This is one of the primary points of the book "The Halo Effect."

This is why I suggested I think on this forum for Jessica Livingston to make a follow-up to Founders at Work called Fuckups at Fail. Well not that because you can't stock it. But basically. A catalog of failures. Give me an intimate idea of what success is like, yes by all means, but also what failure is like. And the volume. In detail, so like tell me the blow-by-blow tragedy, like when the founder shits his pants in a meeting with VC's, at that point I'm fine with an abridged version. Nobody talks about that, tell me.

Like also all this self-faith is generally misplaced. They always tell you to believe in yourself, come on. Before I embarked on the algorithms and AI research in 2009 as the only hope for my future, put all my eggs in that basket out of desperation, I analyzed NBA player salaries, heights, and income in-depth. So my hypothesis is only people who can get into the NBA should go all-out training for basketball. Everybody else should treat it as a pass-time, and not dream about it, like set their alarm for when they're dreaming about it, anything. Muggsy Bogues can't get a rebound unconditionally. I played against an superior basketball, better ball-handling better shooting better everything "just better" as my brother described the people who made the basketball team in Berkeley High. Just better. Didn't matter a fuck, I was 6'2", which in practice in Chile means gigantic, blocked his shots got every rebound, won 10-0. Infinite mulligans. Height. Basically comes down to how tall you are.

So the NBA, which is tied to the sports industry, is essentially a tournament where everybody buys in, and the winner gets all the buy in. So the shitty thing is telling you you can make it, for example by putting Muggsy Bogues up as an example of a great player, always bragging the short players, cut the shit. It's all a ruse to get suckers, meaning short players who think they can win, to buy in to a tournament. Stealing basically. Dude Muggsy Bogues I think can't dunk. 5'5"? I couldn't even dunk at 6'2" and I was the tallest player on the best basketball team. I could reach the rim and then a tiny bit. Muggsy Bogues had to clear 9 more inches of vertical to reach the rim, not even dunk. I could squat like 300 pounds, and I also had the same height jump for both legs, because I did track and competed nationally. Man, get real. Fucking trampoline. They had special effects in the 1920's, you think they can't bullshit in the 1980's? Like falsify that shit? Who would accuse you? Only Daniel Cussen, in 2022.

People put dogshit on the news 60 minutes per hour, it doesn't stop. Counterfactual shit nonstop. Like the best is to read headlines and nothing else. Thomas Jefferson said that, the American Federal Government has that available publicly, if you read through the millions of pages of crap before it. Peer through the window at the newspapers in the newspaper dispenser, never buy in. Window-shopping and that's it. Like the kid saying "Extra! Extra! Napoleon invading Spain!" That's the news. Town crier. That's it. Layman doesn't know shit, no access, why would he ever get an inside scoop on anything? He wouldn't! Nobody would tell him!

Like I by this point stopped reading the articles on this forum, like I just can't, it's just rape, everrybody wants me to share a needle with them I just can't, I know I'll get asked for cookie "consent" (which means incoming rape), sorry I just can't. I just base my posts on reactions to the articles, and divine what I can, and if I fuck up die tragically without complaint. There's traps, like startups (not YC) getting the article points (people milk points, it's a points system points systems either get promoted into being hacked, or demoted into not being worthwhile to track, very hard to stay in between). So like articles on this site...

This!

Stories of successful companies are of very limited use. Stories of how companies failed is of tremendous value.

"Make your own mistakes, not somebody else's."

Ah yes, been meaning to fix that. Was planning on cleaning it up and also adding a typeahead / search function. Thanks for the feedback.

Yes but we don't solely cover VC funded startups with success rates of <5%.

We cover a lot of small & bootstrapped businesses, e-comm, agencies, side hustles, etc that IMO believe anyone can start. This isn't the stereotypical list of successful companies ala Airbnb, Uber, Dropbox.

It probably has a nice React front end and Stripe for payment processing, so that would put it in the startup bucket :)

Always was.

Also Failory, the same business as OP but with the opposite angle: https://www.failory.com/graveyard

I think both are important, but I appreciate the feedback.

I know there are a 'zeitgeist' of typical SV successful companies (Uber, Dropbox, etc) but we actually cover a ton of companies you've probably never heard of. We cover a lot of side hustles, side projects, agencies, e-commerce, and more too.

And there are very profitable companies with failed founders (diluted, expelled, leverage failures, dot dot dot). And failed companies with successful founders (cashed out at IPO, WeWork’s Adam Neumann is a billionaire, dot dot dot)

gross margin is included in the reports

Failure stories suffer from an infinite amount of things that can go wrong. I never found "stories of failure" compelling, because in many cases I'm on a different path and wouldn't have done the same mistakes anyways.