The report made by CB INSIGHTS
Startups, corporations, investors, economic development folks, academics, and journalists all wanted some insight into the question:
Why do startups fail?
So we gave those post-mortems the CB Insights data treatment to see if we could answer this question.
After reading through 111 post-mortems since 2018, we’ve learned there is rarely one reason for a single startup’s failure. However, we did begin to see a pattern to these stories.
And so after sifting through the post-mortems, we identified the top 12 reasons startups fail.
Since many startups offered multiple reasons for their failure, you’ll see that the chart highlighting the top reasons doesn’t add up to 100% (it far exceeds it).
There is certainly no survivorship bias here. But many very relevant lessons for anyone in the entrepreneurial ecosystem.
It’s worth noting that this type of data-driven analysis would not be possible without a number of founders being courageous enough to share stories of their startup’s demise with the world. So a big thank you to them.
