Startups often fail from implosion due to drama like founder splits. The strongest teams have great trust and unity (e.g. come from the same school cohort). It’s plausible EA culture provides an alternate source of unity
For what it’s worth, I think this appears empirically false in terms of pretty much every EA for-profit startup of a fairly large size (say >10 employees) that I’m aware of, including the successful(!) ones.
Founder or near-founder level drama that has ex ante very negative consequences (“red flags” is maybe my current preferred term) appears to be the norm rather than the exception. (Incidentally this was also true during my own brief stint as an intern in an mission-oriented non-EA startup, which is now valued at 10 or 11 figures)
Different people can learn different things from these anecdata, but hypotheses I’ve generated include:
1. Base rates of founder conflict (to a pretty extreme level, like >50% of management quitting) is just really high, and my naive impressions/prior that founder conflict should only be pretty common in failed startups is wrong.
2. Wittgenstein’s ruler: I shouldn’t trust my own instincts of what are red flags for startup success (like founder conflict) in the face of pretty strong empirical data. Maybe I’m quite bad at causal assignment here.
3. The world is just crazy/easy. There’s so much money laying on the table that you can screw up in many important ways and still come out ahead as long as you do a few other (more?) important things right.
4. There’s just too much randomness/heterogeneity in the world to say much of anything when it comes to startup success.
I’ve gone up on my belief in 1. personally updated somewhat downwards on 4, and up on both 2 and 3.
For what it’s worth, I think this appears empirically false in terms of pretty much every EA for-profit startup of a fairly large size (say >10 employees) that I’m aware of, including the successful(!) ones.
Founder or near-founder level drama that has ex ante very negative consequences (“red flags” is maybe my current preferred term) appears to be the norm rather than the exception. (Incidentally this was also true during my own brief stint as an intern in an mission-oriented non-EA startup, which is now valued at 10 or 11 figures)
Different people can learn different things from these anecdata, but hypotheses I’ve generated include:
1. Base rates of founder conflict (to a pretty extreme level, like >50% of management quitting) is just really high, and my naive impressions/prior that founder conflict should only be pretty common in failed startups is wrong.
2. Wittgenstein’s ruler: I shouldn’t trust my own instincts of what are red flags for startup success (like founder conflict) in the face of pretty strong empirical data. Maybe I’m quite bad at causal assignment here.
3. The world is just crazy/easy. There’s so much money laying on the table that you can screw up in many important ways and still come out ahead as long as you do a few other (more?) important things right.
4. There’s just too much randomness/heterogeneity in the world to say much of anything when it comes to startup success.
I’ve gone up on my belief in 1. personally updated somewhat downwards on 4, and up on both 2 and 3.