Startups Archives - Startup Economist

The Better Startup Pitch Test: Why Most Decks Fail Before Investors Ever Say No

Monday, 09 February 2026 by Paul O'Brien

Most pitch decks don’t fail because the startup is doomed (though I’ve explained how we know that’s the case just from how you pitch, here). They fail because the founder is thinking in PowerPoint instead of economics, incentives, and narrative logic. Every founder asks for the template to follow, as though there is some magic

Published in Raising Capital, Startups

6 Comments

Why We Teach Startups to Pitch to Investors Even If They Don’t Want Venture Capital

Friday, 06 February 2026 by Paul O'Brien

I realized this week, that this is a discussion point I have with almost every founder, and yet I’ve never bothered to write it up. Every founder. Particularly in our work in Founder Institute, when teaching or mentoring dozens of founders in the same room, the question is always posed, “why are we working on

funding fundraising pitch decks pitching venture capital

Published in Startups

14 Comments

American Pie and the Moment Every Founder Loses the Music

Tuesday, 03 February 2026 by Paul O'Brien

Don McLean’s American Pie is usually shared as an elegy for rock ’n’ roll and American innocence. It’s a song with tremendous meaning to me, sung as a group while my high school class graduated, I went to study the lyrics and history in college, teaching myself how to build and website (then with notepad,

american pie don mclean entrepreneurship failure founders music startups

Published in Fun, Startups

9 Comments

The Startup Pitch Mistakes That Tell Us You’ll Fail Before You Start

Thursday, 22 January 2026 by Paul O'Brien

A startup pitch is not a sales pitch; no one in the room is buying, we are not your customer and we’re not even deciding whether your idea “will work.” What we’re doing is much simpler and harsher: we’re deciding whether what you’re doing creates enough perceived value to justify our time, reputation, and risk

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Published in Startups

22 Comments

6 Habits of Highly Successful Entrepreneurs

Thursday, 15 January 2026 by Paul O'Brien

The research isn’t vague anymore. Decades of behavioral economics, psychology, and entrepreneurship studies have piled up enough evidence to stop pretending success is random. Whether someone builds alone or inside a founding team, outcomes track to a small set of repeatable human behaviors. Put the right skills and habits inside a young organization and it

entrepreneurs entrepreneurship habits personalities personality traits

Published in Startups

11 Comments

Michael Jackson and the Startup Delusion: Why Tech Isn’t What Creates Value

Monday, 12 January 2026 by Paul O'Brien

“Can a model perform well technically but fail to create business value, and why?” What a wonderful question; I was asked recently that perspective on tech in a way that made me see a primary challenge in startups, in a different light. Read the question again and appreciate that even the asking of it reveals

creativity creators michael jackson music

Published in Startups

10 Comments

5 Predictors of Startup Failure; One of Which Proves Conventional Wisdom Wrong

Wednesday, 31 December 2025 by Paul O'Brien

Okay, up front? Most startup advice is recycled nonsense, passed around by people who’ve never actually watched hundreds of companies quietly die. Startup failure isn’t mysterious, it’s patterned. Predictable. Boring, even. The frustration is that founders keep making the same mistakes while congratulating themselves for “learning fast.” If you’ve been around accelerators, demo days, angel

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Published in Startups

44 Comments