Do people learn as much from analyzing business successes as from analyzing failures?

Harry Stebbings · Apr 26, 2021

As much is learned from success as from failure; people simply don't invest the analytical time in success that they do in failure

People under-analyze their successes, so they wrongly conclude there is less to learn from them

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Bill Gurley · Dec 6, 2021 · hedged

Humans over-analyze failure relative to success, and investors would learn more by studying the winners they missed than the losses in their portfolio

We rewrite our history each night casting ourselves as the hero, a Darwinistic anxiety-reducing tool, so winners get chalked up to being right and are never studied; at Benchmark the most-studied cases are the great breakouts they failed to chase

Scope: says he isn't sure it's the right thing to do

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Max Levchin · Feb 5, 2025 · hedged

You learn just as much from successes as from failures; we simply don't analyze successes because they succeeded

Analyzing success is boring and the texture of individual decisions is much harder to detect when every funnel step converted at roughly the same high rate; any useful question you ask about a success ends up being framed as 'why wasn't it better'

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Harry Stebbings · Feb 5, 2025 · hedged

You actually learn the same amount from successes as from failures — we just don't analyze successes because success invites moving on

Analyzing why you succeeded would reveal the thoughtful decisions, e.g. around CAC over time, that produced it

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Martín Escobari · Nov 11, 2022

You cannot derive a true insight about a business from success stories alone; paired company analysis against the counterfactual is required to tell luck from causation

Like twin studies in genetics, you need the alternative reality to know whether the outcome was luck or something the company did

38:59 Paired counterfactual analysis not success stories alone separates luck from causation

Parker Conrad · Apr 26, 2021

The Silicon Valley platitude that you learn a lot from failure is wrong; the only real lesson from failure is how much it sucks and that you don't want it to recur

His own experience of big ups and downs left him with that lesson rather than substantive learnings

3:52 Failure teaches only that it sucks not substantive lessons