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I was going to read your article, but the picture of a blowup doll makes it hard to do so during work.
Yeah - after that picture I am somehow not surprised he has hard time to answer: "Why is it so hard to meet people? Why can’t I just find a girl who loves me?"
I don't understand why people up-voted you while you are not even able to delete an img tag.
80% of businesses fail

Wasn't there an article on HN a couple months back showing this to be a myth?

The stat is meaningless anyway without some sort of timeframe.
I mean, technically it has meaning even without a restricted time frame. Some nonzero percentage of all businesses ever started have never failed.

That being said, it's nothing like 20% so clearly there is an implicit time frame.

No known business has lasted longer than 1,428 years:

http://www.dailynugget.com/2007/04/worlds-oldest-business-cl...

Some nonzero percentage of all businesses ever started have not failed yet.

Although if I guess what the parent comment is thinking of correctly, there was a piece on HN fairly recently about how businesses that were doing well but closed were counted as 'failures'. E.g. the owner retired and closed, the owner got ill and closed, the owner sold up and the business was merged into another before it was running for 5 years, etc.