Persistence Is a Numbers Game: 150 Startups, One Collapse, and the One That Worked

In The Founder, Ray Kroc is a fifty-something milkshake-machine salesman who can’t stop chasing the next idea. The film gives him one line to live by.

Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent.

— Unsigned, The Spatula, 1914. Usually credited to Calvin Coolidge.

Coolidge never wrote it. It first ran unsigned in a 1914 trade journal for pharmacists, and got pinned on him in 1929 (Quote Investigator). A line about persistence that persisted its way into a president’s mouth. Fitting.

I have believed that line for most of my career. I have also tested it more than most people get to.

150 Startups

I co-founded a startup studio and ran it as CTO. It built startups for a living: more than 150 of them.

• It was big. Several cities, several countries, a well-known name in the industry.
• Some of its startups did well. Some were modestly successful. A few listed on stock exchanges. Some are still around, and that still makes me happy.
• The vast majority failed. That is how startups work, at any scale.

The studio was a startup too. It had a meteoric rise, and it was successful for a time. Then it collapsed under its own weight.

The maths was simple. 50 staff is a lot to carry on a model where partners have to fund every accelerator round. When the partners slow down, the payroll does not.

I founded a lot of companies there. My own stake died with the studio.

The One That Worked

FameCake is the opposite. It runs on a skeleton crew and punches well above its weight. Things are looking up.

It is not the only thing I have started in the last year. It is the one that is working. And it is still hard graft. Every week.

What the Research Says

The research is not kind to the line in the film.

• Grit barely predicts performance. A meta-analysis of 88 samples and about 66,800 people found a modest link (r ≈ .18). It overlaps heavily with plain conscientiousness (Credé et al. 2017).
• Failing before barely helps. Among venture-backed founders, a past winner succeeds about 30% of the time. A first-timer succeeds about 21% of the time. A founder whose last company failed: about 22% (Gompers et al. 2010).

So trying again does not make the next attempt much more likely to work. That matches my experience. My 100th startup was not a sure thing because I had done 99.

Why Persistence Still Wins

Persistence does not improve each attempt. It buys more attempts.

• Odds per attempt stay flat. Call it one in five. Stop after one try, and you probably fail. Keep going, and the odds that something works climb with every try.
• Attempts just got cheap. A prototype used to take a team and a quarter. Now it takes me and a system I spent a year building. More shots, for less.
• Each attempt has to teach you something. The studio taught me what overhead does to a startup. FameCake is built on that lesson.

The Lessons

• Persistence is the multiplier, not the skill. It does not make you better. It gives you more draws.
• Make the draws cheap. Small crew, low overhead, fast prototypes. The cheaper each attempt, the more of them you can afford.
• Learn from every one. Otherwise the next attempt is the same bet at the same odds.
• The win is still work. Starting got cheap. Keeping one alive did not.

Kroc was right about the line, for the wrong reason. Persistence is not omnipotent. It is just how you stay at the table long enough to win a hand.