Every year the idea of a startup post mortem site or study comes up and as always goes nowhere because they can't actually draw a causal relationship and tell the story of why the company in question rolled up.
Besides the fact that there is no incentive, in fact there is negative incentive, for key players to contribute to the study of failure, it also requires insane amount of depth in the very specific field which the company was operating in.
It's the same problem as failed replicated studies not getting documented, it's easier and higher incentive to just try again than to study the issue.
Really just needs to be a non profit that would run the studies and maybe turn it into a consultancy or something.
When outages happen, there are companies that do blameless postmortems, and they do get good data.
I think it's a matter of creating the right incentives. Possibly an organization like YC or a VC that's existed for a long time does. Although they tend to regard such knowledge as proprietary, so, no luck for us.
> Really just needs to be a non profit that would run the studies and maybe turn it into a consultancy or something.
Now you're on the right track.
Many non-profits like this already exist: universities, and sometimes, governments. There are lots of papers out there about why businesses fail, and governments are strongly incentivized to fund this kind of research.
I don't know for sure though, but there is probably a paucity of data about why wacky tech startups fail.
- At least until recently, it hasn't mattered very much. Actually, I would argue it still doesn't matter.
- Startups are bespoke and weird by definition, so analysis is hard. But possibly an academic could maybe test theories of exactly how much risk you should take on (I'm thinking of mcfunley's insights on "innovation tokens"; maybe that can be formalized somehow. http://mcfunley.com/choose-boring-technology)
Besides the fact that there is no incentive, in fact there is negative incentive, for key players to contribute to the study of failure, it also requires insane amount of depth in the very specific field which the company was operating in.
It's the same problem as failed replicated studies not getting documented, it's easier and higher incentive to just try again than to study the issue.
Really just needs to be a non profit that would run the studies and maybe turn it into a consultancy or something.