RESEARCHERS

The Science of Founder Status Shame: Why Benchmarking Against Visible Winners Is Statistically Broken

2 the researchers behind it — The startup world runs on visible success stories — IPOs, TechCrunch headlines, billion-dollar valuations. What it buries is the base rate: roughly 75

Harvard Business School

Shikhar Ghosh

Known for:Empirical research on venture-backed startup failure rates, finding approximately 75% fail to return investors' capital — a figure that directly challenges survivorship-biased startup culture narratives

Key findings

2012
Research across a large sample of venture-backed companies found that approximately 75% fail to return their investors' capital. Of these, 30–40% liquidate all assets, meaning investors lose their entire investment. The data was compiled from companies that received VC backing, not just those that achieved any press visibility — giving an unusually complete picture of the distribution. ↗

Statistical Research Group, Columbia University (wartime)

Abraham Wald

Known for:Mathematical formalization of survivorship bias through his WWII bomber analysis — demonstrating that studying only surviving units produces systematically inverted conclusions about where vulnerability actually lies

Key findings

1943
Wald's analysis for the Allied Statistical Research Group showed that the damage patterns visible on returning bombers were the wrong data to reinforce: those planes had survived despite the hits. The planes that didn't return were the ones that revealed where a hit was fatal — an insight that became the canonical illustration of survivorship bias and has since been applied across medicine, finance, entrepreneurship, and social science. ↗

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