Why So Many Startups Fail Miserably After Raising Money

"Roughly 90% of startups fail. This statistic isn’t surprising, but the way many founders lunge into business, you would think that the failure rate is more like 2%.
Having been following the industry for over a decade, I have noticed some patterns — ideas that sound enticing, plausible, or even brilliant. Ideas shiny enough to attract massive investments before crashing into the ground like they were skydiving without a parachute.
Here are some interesting ways to convince yourself and others that a subpar idea is worth pursuing.
The “X for Y” pitch
Do you want to make your startup idea sound like it will make a trillion dollars? Attach it to a super-successful idea that someone else has already built.
“You know how Uber is really good at getting people from point A to point B? Now imagine Uber but for cats and instead of cars we use zeppelins to hack traffic. Can’t fail.” — some startup founder somewhere
The reason these usually fail is that there are too many assumptions built into the idea. The main assumption is that people use Airbnb to rent apartments means that they will use your “Airbnb for treehouses”.
Not only does this connection to successful startups seduce founders, but it also skews their market research. Many people love Uber or Airbnb, and many are happy to sign onto a new knock-off service, but soon many of them realize that this actually makes no sense at all. So you get 1000 beta users, and 20 of them end up actually using the product..." Lire la suite