28 Lessons from Start-ups That Failed

Michael Dariano’s short study of why start-ups die. After researching failed companies, Dariano grouped the wreckage into six big failure modes — not understanding customers, managing money poorly, the wrong strategy, missing key skills, bad luck, and the wrong founding team — and broke those into 28 concrete ways start-ups fail (e.g. overspending on marketing, talking to people who aren’t customers).

Why it’s on the list: Premised on the idea that the most useful lessons come from people who failed — a failure-autopsy counterpart to the usual success literature.

Where I saw it: Recommended by Morgan Housel on Thinking and Walking — Morgan Housel (Patrick O’Shaughnessy’s Invest Like the Best, Ep. 4).

Connections

• Michael Dariano — author
• Morgan Housel — recommended it on the podcast
• Thinking and Walking — Morgan Housel — where the recommendation surfaced