| To do any serious analysis of entrepreneurship you must include a population in your study that "did everything right" and still failed. Studies of successful entrepreneurs are nothing but confirmation bias in action. Sure you can point to N successful people who did X, Y and Z, and follow that with an unjustified claim that X, Y and Z are the keys to the kingdom, but unless you go out and scour the ground for people who also did X, Y and Z and failed, you've said exactly nothing interesting. In particular, you have not increased the posterior plausibility of the claim "people who do X, Y and Z are more likely to be successful" more than a tiny little increment. I say this as a successful businessperson who has worked for a number of failed startups and knows a fair number of people who came within one business decision of "success" (defined as being a millionaire with less than five years of work). These studies of only successful business-people are completely vacuous. It isn't enough to show that "People who were successful did X, Y and Z." You must also show "People who did X, Y and Z had a better chance of success", which is a completely unrelated question, and whose answer can only be ascertained by investigating a reasonably large sample of people selected on the basis of doing X, Y and Z, not on the basis of being successful. |