Examining The Social Roots Of Startup Failures

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If you're a startup founder, it's likely you've seen the numbers: Only 1% of startups become "unicorns" like Uber, Airbnb, Slack, and Docker, and only 18% of first-time founders make it through their first year of operations, according to CB Insights.

So why do so many fail? It has to do with how many people you have in your social circles, writes Adam Clark Estes at Gizmodo.

"Our brains are evolution, and our ancestors lived in small groups," he writes.

"So they didn't need to communicate with hundreds of people and didn't get this skill."

In other words, you may have thousands of "friends" on Facebook, but how many of them do you really know? "But running a business implies communication with many more people," Estes writes.

If a company loses the competition, its rivals understand their clients better.

"We don't have a lot of 'brain slots' for business partners, customers, subordinates, and investors," Estes writes.

"And this biases our worldview to an extent.

Who needs your product, and why? Six years ago, I, like many other founders, focused on my product from the opposite perspective from which my customers were...

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