Startup Success Rate: Write Goals a Crisis Can't Rewrite

Three out of four venture-backed startups never give investors their money back.

That number was not carved in stone. Behind each of those startups stood a team that worked hard and meant well. Some of them might have made it if they had steered with a control system, the Jirgenson Model, instead of a slide full of hopes. With it, the figure could look different.

Now look at your own pitch deck. Slide four says "Goals". Under it: grow fast, stay lean, delight customers, lead the category. Four wishes, no numbers, no order.

The slide looks confident. In the first bad quarter it will give four different answers to one question: what do we protect?

The Jirgenson Model is scientifically proven to work (Zenodo record). It is new, so it could not help the startups behind these numbers. Now it can help yours.

Venture capital returns start with whose goal

That first number is about venture capital returns. It belongs to the investors' list of goals. Yours is a different list, and the two only meet if both are written down.

So write yours first. A ship cannot sail to two ports at once. A captain who loves both burns fuel, dashes back and forth, and arrives nowhere. Choose the port before you leave the harbour, not in the middle of the storm.

The way to choose is the refusal question. Imagine circumstances force you to drop your goals one at a time. Which goes first? Which is the last one left? The last one becomes number one.

How to avoid it: put your ranked list next to your investors' list before the money lands. Where they clash, settle it on a calm day.

Startup success rate: the part you control, six fields per goal

This is the tool. A goal becomes real only once six fields are filled in. It takes about a minute per goal.

Andrew, a coffee shop owner from the model's examples, filled them in for his margin.

Without field four, today's value, the goal stays a wish.

Now fill in your own.

1. Pick six areas and cover them. Finance, clients, sales, processes and quality, people, and the founder's own time and health. Take zero to three goals from each.
2. Stop at nine goals. For a person working without software, ten priorities are no longer priorities. They are a list.
3. Fill all six fields for every goal. One row per goal, one minute per row.
4. Run the one-minute check. "A good profit" has no number. "15" has no unit. "15%" has no deadline. "15% by month six" is a goal.
5. Rank the rows by the refusal question. The last goal you would give up gets number one.
6. Test that the goals can all be true together. If they cannot, drop or delay one now.

Here is the contrast, as an illustration. The usual slide says "grow fast". The six fields say what grows, from which source, to what value and by when. They add where it stands today, how far it may slip, and who watches it. Only that version tells you on a Tuesday whether you are winning.

Seed stage startups and the unicorn on the slide

Two out of three seed-funded startups end up dead or barely alive. One in a hundred becomes a unicorn.

"Barely alive" is what happens when nobody wrote down a floor. Some of those seed stage startups might have looked different if every goal had a minimum line below it. The odds could have shifted.

The model sees four layers. First, constraints: the law, safety, contracts, the load a person can carry. They are never given up. Second, minimum levels: below them, the result is no longer viable. Third, improvement goals, ranked by refusal. Fourth, a rule for what is left over.

Then check the unicorn startup line. "Become a unicorn" is a dream. "Raise the next round" is a method. Ask of every method on your slide: what for? Andrew's rough list had eight items, and three were methods: loyalty cards, a second barista, a new coffee machine. Asked "what for?", they collapsed into two goals already listed. That freed a place for money in reserve.

How to avoid it: write the floor before the target. A startup that knows its minimums notices "barely alive" while it can still move.

What two goals that cannot coexist cost

Some goal lists have no solution at all. You find out by arithmetic, or by running out of money.

Andrew's shop takes €30,000 a month. Fixed costs are €18,300 and variable costs €9,000, so profit today is €2,700. Suppose he wants "the lowest price on the street", 10% below today, and a 15% margin as well.

To hold 15% after the cut, he needs 31% more customers. Suppose his room and his baristas can take 10% more at most. So the two goals cannot both be true.

Run the shop that way anyway. With 10% more customers at the lower price, profit falls to €1,500 a month. That is €1,200 a month less than today. Over six months, €7,200 is gone, and the 15% margin is further away than when he started.

Meanwhile the owner works longer hours for a smaller result and blames the street.

Startup shutdown and the goals that change every Monday

Startup shutdowns have climbed every year since 2022. This year is on track to be the worst yet.

A cold climate need not decide the outcome. Some companies in that count might have lasted longer with a list that held still. With a fixed order, the curve could have bent differently.

One defect of a goal list is instability: the priorities change every Monday. The team never has time to move towards any of them. There are four other defects to check:

1. Mutually exclusive goals. Each one is reachable alone, but not together, as in the price and margin case above.
2. A missing requirement. Growth is on the list, "pay taxes on time" is not. That is a constraint, and it goes above the list.
3. Violated order. A minor goal is rescued at the cost of the main one. Think of expensive beans bought while the reserve sits below the safe line.
4. Duplicates. "Satisfied customers" and "few complaints" are the same goal twice, with double weight.

How to avoid it: the list may change, but only on paper, on purpose, with a date. Never by Monday mood.

Startup runway: the goal you defend last

From the last funding round to total shutdown? Less than two years.

That window is short, but not empty. Some founders inside it might have kept going if cash had been goal number one, with a deadline and someone checking it every week. The number could have looked different.

Andrew put his reserve first: at least two months of costs by month twelve. His reason was plain. Without a reserve the shop closes, and then customers, quality and margin no longer matter.

Now watch how the order decides. Take two of his year-end plans. Plan X meets the reserve and the margin and misses regular customers. Plan Y misses the reserve, beats the margin and beats regular customers. Each meets four goals out of five. By count, a tie. By order, X wins, because the first difference is in row one.

Counting goals and ranking goals give different answers. The model goes with the ranking. For the runway calculation itself, use the reserve row: cash divided by monthly costs, checked on a fixed day.

How to avoid it: give cash row one, fill in all six fields, and name the person who reads it every week.

"A startup moves too fast for fixed goals"

That is the reason to write them. Without an order, every crisis decides for you.

Andrew saw it plainly. Leave all five goals "equally important", and a week later a supplier raises the milk price while Sara asks for another barista. He agrees because he is tired. A month later he finds he ran out of money before he ran out of time.

It works outside coffee shops too. Elena, a freelance designer, ranked income first and let her hours go first: up to 55 a week, from month one to month three only.

Where the goal list stops

You now have the whole tool. It treats the symptom: you stop defending whatever shouts loudest.

The cause is still open. A ranked list tells you what matters most. It does not tell you when a row has slipped far enough to act, or which lever moves it.

Two steps close that gap.

• Zones and the red protocol. Lines between green, yellow and red for every goal, and the order of action when several turn red. Chapter 4.
• Levers. What you control, what you only watch, and how to test a lever before you pull it. Chapter 5.

The list is the first stage of one loop: goal, state, error, levers, plan, forecast. To steer that list by forecast rather than by last month, read startup failure rate.

Before the next pitch

You have two choices. Keep slide four as it is, four wishes with no order, and let the first bad quarter rank them for you. Or spend twenty minutes tonight filling in six fields per goal and putting cash in row one.

The list tells you what to protect. Zones and levers tell you when to act and what to pull.

Test the logic for free: the Introduction and Chapter 1 carry this whole tool. Or get the full control system now. It comes as a Kindle book, on Amazon.

Published research

It is scientifically proven that the Jirgenson Model works. The published experiment, its record and its data:

• Zenodo (DOI): 10.5281/zenodo.23964934
• Hugging Face: E5 Jirgenson Model blind test
• Kaggle: E5 blind test dataset
• GitHub: experiment folder
• Wikidata: dataset Q142022866, author Q141981336
• ORCID: 0009-0001-3034-3552