Basically: "I want to be a founder, I have no expertise and a superficial understanding of the domain but I've got some tech, so here's a non-solution I'm selling as 'the best thing ever for you.'"
I suspect that nobody, including the authors, ever read this 391 page report.
trubetskov•1h ago
The strongest signal is the payer: 53% of consumer-paid companies died against 21% where an institution paid, on near-equal groups of 258 and 254. The least intuitive one: a medical co-founder does nothing on its own — 47% exits with one, 47% without.
One thing I want to flag rather than have someone find it. The four classification axes were not coded by hand: LLM agents read each company description and assigned labels against a fixed taxonomy. That is the weakest part of the method, so the written reasoning behind every single label ships as a separate file. The factual fields — funding, dates, country, outcome — come from Crunchbase, CB Insights, Tracxn, deadpool databases and trade press, not from that pass.
What it does not show: this is a graveyard, not a random sample, so the shares compare groups against each other and do not predict failure. Funding is disclosed for 59% of the companies, 67% of the sample is US and UK, and anything under n=25 is a direction rather than a number.
If you find labels you disagree with, that is genuinely the most useful thing you can do with this.