What are the top reasons why startups fail?

Originally Answered: What are the top five reasons why startups fail?
While it is counterintuitive, many start-ups fail because they go after too big of a market.

Many start-ups try to be 0.1% of a fifty-billion dollar market rather than 50% of a $100
million dollar market. Of course, both numbers equal $50 million in revenue but the
company that has 50% market share turns out to be much more valuable because it is
much more important to its industry.

Being the winner in a very small market is much more important than being a small
minnow in a giant sea. Being the big fish in a small pond gives you more ability to
innovate and you become really important if a larger player wants to get into that pond.
Also, the value of the #1 company is often many times larger than the number 2.

Peter Thiel (businessman) writes about this phenomena in his book Zero to One (which I
highly recommend).

What screams "I'm educated, but not very bright"?

Once, while working at a local university we were running a woodchipper. One of the
professors walked by and stuck his head into the shute. Immediately we hit the
emergency off switch and pulled him away. He just looked at us confused and said he
wanted to see how it worked. We had to explain that had their been any wood chips
flying out at the time it would've stripped the flesh from his face. We then opened it up
and showed him the working mechanisms. He wandered off quite happy. To this day I
don't think he had any idea how much danger he put himself in.

What was the "I'm done" moment in your last relationship?

We had a fight about her sleeping over at her ex's house. She insisted it wasn't a big
deal. When I asked her how she would feel if I had a sleep over with my ex she said it
was different. I said yeah, we didn't live together and weren't engaged, you were. She
then said if I didn't trust her to have sleep overs with other men then it was my problem
to figure out. I left and told her her stuff at my house would be outside, come get it
before it garbage day or it was going in the can.

What screams "I'm upper class"?

When I did a year at an English university I shared a house with girl who was from what
the Brits call old money.

She dressed fashionably but never wore anything with logos. And she noticed right away
that Im the same and never wear clothing with logos. She was polite to everyone from
the bin man to the university cleaning staff and even if guys tried to talk to us she didn't
let them crash and burn but made it clear she was not interested in a polite way without
soundy bitchy.

She always introduced me right away to her friends before getting into a conversation
with them and when I had friends come over from Norway she always introduced herself
using her full name which always sounded odd to me but I noticed her friends and family
did the same.

She was not a girly girl either. She visited me in Norway and when my grandfather
caught a salmon she grabbed the club and killed it without flinching which is very unlike
99.99 percent of British girls.

She was very observant of everything around her and used disarming charm to get
people to help her with anything she needed. And I noticed it was the same with a lot of
her friends from similar backgrounds.

My dads a Brit and joked to me he could smell her class the first time he visited us, I said
don't be rude and he just pointed at her wax cotton jacket hanging in the hall and said, I
can smell the old money from here.