Nice little bit of research by John Valentine:
Of 199 companies funded by TechStars, less than 10% were reported as "failed." Considering over 75% of startups fail, it looks like TechStars has effectively bucked the trend.
Except, of course, that as John's research shows, many of those supposedly active startups are actually pretty much dead:
AccelGolf - The guys who founded the company hustled until July, 2011, when they closed up shop and went off to conquer new horizons like Pistol Lake, TaskRabbot, Centzy, and Raizlabs. Their last Facebook post was in June 2011. Their app is no longer in the app store.
This seems like an ideal bit of journalism for one of the serious tech startup writers to do, though it won't please the incubators in the cross-hairs. How do the "X% of our startups are still alive" claims stack up against reality?
If even a relatively reputable incubator like TechStars happily ignores reality to come up with juicy stats, what do the others do?
