Start-up Failure Quotes

Start-ups make so many mistakes that the challenge to identify the root cause of a failure is tough. But believing in your own plan is probably the worst.

The natural state of a start-up is to die; most start-ups require multiple miracles in their early days to escape this fate.

I think many start-ups make mistakes because they are focusing on things that are farther ahead, and they haven't done the work that has built the foundation to support it.

Start-ups often die in the first 18 to 24 months because of formative mistakes, like choosing a bad co-founder or the wrong corporate entity or an inappropriate platform. Ninety percent of the companies the Founder Institute has created are alive because we've helped them avoid those mistakes.

Back in 2001, my first start-up was mentioned in the 'New York Times' and 'USA Today.' I figured that would drive thousands of visitors to the site and tons of new business. Instead, only a handful of people visited our site, and not much business came of it at all.

Most start-up companies fail and it is smart public policy to help entrepreneurs increase their odds of succeeding. But, the biggest loss to our economy is not all the start-ups that didn't make it: It's the ones that might have been created but weren't.

Start-ups should be based on radical ideas. There should be a high failure rate for start-ups, because if there isn't their ideas aren't bold enough.

Since 1978 the record pretty well shows that no start-up airline . . . has really been successful, so the odds of JetBlue having long-term success are remote. I'm not going to say it can't happen because stranger things have happened, but I personally believe P.T. Barnum was, in that respect, correct.

The grim reality is that most start-ups fail. Most new products are not successful. Yet the story of perseverance, creative genius, and hard work persists.

The only thing that we know about financial predictions of start-ups is that 100 percent of them are wrong

Founders have continually struggled with and adapted the 'big business' tools, rules, and processes taught in business schools when startups failed to execute 'the plan,' never admitting to the entrepreneurs that no startup executes to its business plan.