Dalton Caldwell: evaluation

Transcript context

…I think you can. So I asked him what is often the most common reason a startup fails? And his answer was they don't talk to customers, they don't find product market fit. They nothing else matters if they can't do that. And so his advice is talk to customers more often. So two questions here. First of all, just is there anything else you would add to why do startups fail? I know we talked about some of these already, but just what comes to mind there? I completely agree with what Gustav said, but to look at this from a different frame, I think is that the founders lose hope. And when you and your heart is like, "Yeah, we're failing." I can see it when I'm meeting with a founder, when they resign themselves that they're failing versus. First is when like, "We got one more move in us. We got one more try." You can see in their eyes when they feel like there's more ideas or there's some last ditch Hail Mary thing. It doesn't always work, but it's almost like you have to not accept that you're going to fail. And as long as you don't accept that that's going to happen, there's usually a lot more moves you can try to save the company. Maybe it's to get profitable, maybe it's to do some other zany thing, maybe it's to launch a new product. And so it's pretty rare, I would argue, that the cause of death is that they had lots of firepower and they were feeling really positive and they just ran out of money. That's actually more rare than founders think. It's much more common that they still have some money left. I'm not saying a lot, but some money and they're just like, "Yeah, I'm done. I'm out of ideas. I don't want to do this anymore." And again, fair enough. But do you get what I'm saying? I think founders are afraid that they're going to run out of money and that's why they're going to shut down. And it's way more common that their idea doesn't work and they have a big fight with their co-founder, and then they can't agree on what to work on, and then they just like, "I don't want to do this anymore. " And they shut down. That is the most common cause of death, is something that sounds like that story. That is so interesting. And again, this comes back to your core advice. Don't die. Just don't die. We talked about this already of just sometimes it's actually okay to die. And I guess just to refresh that lesson is if you're not having fun anymore, maybe it's okay-…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.