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Startup Cargo Cults: What They Are and How to Avoid Them

Cargo Cult Causes

Everyone in the startup ecosystem, from investors to founders to employees, is prone to Cargo Cult thinking. People try to extract lessons from the successes of others, but fall prey to numerous biases and fallacies:

• Survival bias — attributing causality to common attributes of successes without determining if those attributes were different among failures. Example: “The most successful CEOs are incredibly hardworking.” (It turns out that many unsuccessful CEOs are incredibly hardworking, too, so working 100-hour weeks may not be a good predictor of success.)