[ifuller1]

There are just so many good ideas that are originally decreed as failures that it seems like madness to try and stop somebody from trying. The Xerox R&D team that was told the gui would never really catch on. The investors that told Amazon nobody would purchase books of the internet. Even the Yahoo execs that turned down Google in 1997. Of course some ideas, like the chocolate tea pot, might seemed so doomed to failure that it would be cruel to not call them out. That is until chocolate tea pots become the next big food trend. For more concrete evidence of why this is a bad idea though you should look to the performance of stock market traders over the last 30 years, for the most part their average performance rarely deviates from a 50/50 success rate.

[tanzam75]

Unlike the stock market, the startup world isn't even close to 50/50. If you say that they will fail, you're much more likely to be right than wrong.

Note that Google had no way of making money in 1997. It was actually Overture that pioneered pay-per-click search engines -- and Yahoo bought Overture.