frame candidate goes to: this-edition A all three
We study survivors: a risky practice can look like the cause of success when only winners are counted
Business writing looks at the winners, lists what they did, and says do the same; it almost never counts the people who did exactly the same and failed, or were never funded. Denrell showed in 2003 that risky practices unrelated to performance across everyone can look positively related to it in a sample of survivors. So the question is not what the winners did but why that one was chosen, funded and backed when others who did the same were not. Timing and place matter too: in MusicLab, showing popularity made success more unequal and less predictable, and the ten largest computer-science clusters hold 69% of US inventors in the field.
Decided by. Nobody yet: a candidate for Dinis to read, comment on and decide (keep, rewrite, merge, cut, article first, later, not doing it).
Note. Also the reader's defence against the book's own founder stories. Denrell, Vicarious Learning, Undersampling of Failure, and the Myths of Management, Organization Science, 2003; Salganik, Dodds and Watts, Science, 2006; Moretti, AER, 2021.
Where it comes from
- The controllable founder The survivors we study; Luck, place and timing (newsroom)
What it answers in the 2018 book
- Facts answered outline, Concepts
- Be a founder answered written, Life Patterns
Where it goes
Chapter Fund it, or do not, part Start the company (drafting); topic Facts, evidence and the record.
Other ideas proposed for the same chapter: Fund it, or do not: the worst time to raise is before you are profitable, and the best is when they call you, Investors select for the founder they can steer; control is written into the contract, and founders get replaced, Sell, don't issue: the investor buys the founder's shares, the founder lends the company what it needs, and nobody buys the steering wheel, What breaks: EIS is lost on bought shares, a big early sale reads as doubt, the founder-lender is a creditor, and a broad non-compete closes the fork, Europe's slower, sceptical money suits a founder who can build first.
Node idea:we-study-survivors in graph.json; see it in the graph. Source: admin/content/graph/ideas.json.