Ninety to ninety-five percent of startups fail within the first five years. A large majority fail within the first 12 to 18 months. The failure of a startup shouldn’t be a big deal. In fact, finding the hard edges is what startups are all about.

Ideas should be pressure tested to find the ones that don’t survive, the ones that do, and most importantly the ones that could scale.

The problems begin when we conflate startup failure with “this is really bad”.

It’s only bad if the founder and team are over-extended, underwater, out of runway, or whatever analogous phrasing you choose. When all of the resources are marshaled in the wrong direction. When nobody stopped to do the critical work over the urgent. When the founders believed the same s...