[peppery]

The probability that an average entrepreneur succeeds might indeed be assessed fairly by observing that only one entrepreneur in a hundred ever reaches the 1% of wealth or impact.

But this assessment itself seems to suffer from a bias of another sort--the notion that entrepreneurial risk is uniformly distributed over the population of entrepreneurs. Actually, there will be some startups whose risk will be much lower than that of the "average" emerging company (due to the fact that their venture idea satisfies some market need, discovered either by genuine insight/ingenuity or by luck).

It is the belief--however appropriate--that one's own venture falls within this enlightened category of diminished risk that propels founders to pursue their ventures in the face of such an aggregate track record.

[antome]

I recall from some other study, that while "idea" start-ups are basically a lottery, businesses which are working towards a product with apparent benefits, an apparent market, and an apparent R&D road-map actually have an impressively high success rate. Even if a bigger company beats you to the punch, you can ride on their coattails.

[jimhefferon]

> satisfies some market need, discovered either by genuine insight/ingenuity or by luck

.. or by looking at what has succeeded in the past and trying to learn from it, and extrapolate those lessons to the present.