Start-up failures. The question isn’t why they fail so often, more by what miracle any survive!

I have been investing in new start-ups since 1998 and, as a result, seem constantly to be addressing problems and/or one crisis after another. Perhaps even worse, I seem to be continuously engaged in conversations with people inside and outside the sector on how and why new start-ups fail. But I actually think it should be more along the lines of how come any survive at all!

On the face of it, the near one in a 100 long-term success/survival rate seems catastrophic – and people look on and discuss it in near disbelief. Well, I just had another conversation that motivated me to blog my thoughts here!

For me the big surprise is that any new ventures make it because the potential points and mechanisms for failure are so very numerous – and almost always human related. So, being an engineer, I look for tools and techniques to minimise and limit failure. And this starts with an initial set of guidelines as follows:

By Peter Cochrane

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