Former employees are often biased by their job function. At the first startup I worked at, I had a role that straddled Eng & QA, and the lesson I took away from it was "engineering quality is critically important; we failed because there were too many bugs." In hindsight - having now seen v1 of many other startups - we failed because a lack of nerve, because many other startups charge thousands of dollars a month for product quality significantly worse than what we had. We should've shipped it, had money coming in, used that to negotiate another funding round, and then used the funding to fix the bugs. But without visibility into common sales & fundraising practices of startups, there was no way that 19-year-old-programmer-me could've known that.

Maybe, maybe not.

If you have an all new product you need to get into the market fast. Once you have the basic features working you need to see if customers really exist. Even if it means your customers have to try everything twice because you crash the first time, if they buy your product you fix the bugs they see so that it mostly works and move on.

However if you don't have a new product you cannot do that. If you want to release something where the market already exists you can just do one part better you need to be as good in everything else. Tesla didn't release their original roadster without a heater, in the 1950s heaters were optional.

You need to figure out which market you are in and release accordingly. Getting this wrong means the death of your company. If you are in the first investors are taking a risk that people will want your product - it would be stupid to invest in perfection when customers might decide your product doesn't fill a need, better to abandon your interesting but useless product early. However when you are in the second you need to meet your user's expectations - thus I don't need to check the feature list to tell you Tesla comes with a working heater standard. Expectations is also why the early reviews of Tesla showed a tow pulling it away with a dead battery - the equivalent stupidity in a gas car would be the tow truck charging $10/gallon for gas and you are on your way in a few minutes. (Tesla has been mostly successful in managing expectations in the years since - now everyone knows it isn't the best car for cross country trips but you can do it once in a while with a little planning - there is a lesson in this too when you are a little different in an existing market make sure the downsides of your different are understood)

"Former employees are often biased by their job function."

Aggregating their reviews would cancel this effect out though.

If you can. I thought the context of this thread was free-form postmortems, where people give a narrative explanation of why the startup failed. It's hard to aggregate that.

Also, there's the risk of aggregate counts simply reflecting the population of each job function, unless you weight them. Then it'll just say that every engineering-focused startup failed for engineering reasons and every sales-focused startup failed for sales reasons, which may be true but isn't terribly helpful for a founder trying to figure out what to do.

It's an interesting thought, almost like a "glassdoor.com" on startup failures. I'd be curious if Glassdoor actually implements some sort of a weighting scheme to counter the bias that unhappy people are more likely to post reviews, so a poorly run group would have an outsize impact.

It's because of that case I think free-form postmortems might be more insightful, despite their own obvious faults. Perhaps NLP and sentiment analysis could shed some light.

I agree--although they might not have the "full information" as jstandard points out, the employees are in the trenches all day and have to deal with the trouble spots directly. For probably all places I've worked that failed, the employees simultaneously knew the problems (and would gripe about them) but were not empowered to actually fix them. Anyone who's been in this kind of death march situation knows that feeling of helplessness--that the track up ahead is bent and if only we could just run up ahead of the train and fix it...

>If the founder knew exactly what is/was "wrong" they probably had been able to turn it around

Not always. Changing a single person's bad habits or tendencies is hard enough. 10 people? 100? Culture carries momentum even if the prime mover is found.

Sometimes you learn a really good lesson when you have like 30 days runway left. Maybe too late to pivot but still a good lesson.

I agree in part. The real trick of it here is that those former employees will also be wearing their own lenses of bias. There's a good chance they don't have full information on the company.

Then the challenge becomes a game of synthesizing contradicting perspectives. That's what makes this exercise of distilling causes into "bitesized pieces" so difficult.

There is a lot that goes into running companies that ordinary employees take for granted. I don't think there's any reason the perspective of the average employee will be more accurate than the perspective of the average founder. Both will have strong biases coloring the perception of events in their own favor, and in some cases, problem employees and problem founders may blame each other instead of admitting their own faults.

In most cases, there is, of course, no simple way to pinpoint a particular place where everything ran amok. That's to be expected. The analyst needs to listen to everyone with credible knowledge of the company and use their own judgment to come to an opinion on the biggest issue. This is a subjective analysis, and not something that can be authoritatively established.

This is absolutely true, and I'll take it even a step further: great people can still form dysfunctional teams even if they all do good individual work.

Often times in an early stage startup the problem is the team doesn't gel enough to adequately explore the problem space. In those cases, the founder might conclude that the opportunity wasn't there, but maybe it's because people weren't aligned enough to push far enough in the right direction. It's impossible to know whether there was really a viable business there, or whether it was a failure of the team. But subjectively after going through several startups and other early stage projects, I know the feeling of a team that is gelling, and it can make an unquantifiably huge difference to early results.

> "Both will have strong biases coloring the perception of events in their own favor, and in some cases, problem employees and problem founders may blame each other instead of admitting their own faults."

This really resonated with me. It's truly a skill to build the self-awareness to realize when you're the problem. It's much easier to externalize or abstract the problems away, particularly in stressful times where everyone feels overworked. I've caught myself doing this.

I have to set aside part of every week to step back, breathe in, and candidly examine how I might be contributing to problems that are happening. Otherwise it's too easy to get wrapped up in the hunt for demons outside the burning house.

That's true, but ordinary employees will have a perspective that founders usually just can't see, usually due to their biases. As such, it'd be better to take in the perspectives of both, to paint a more complete picture.