I question the stats that says 1% success rate for startups. I will need to see the reference, but one I had access to basically said "1% matches or exceeds projections shown to investors" or some such. Funnily enough, by that metric Facebook is a failure (they missed the goal they set in the convertible note signed with Peter Thiel). If run decently, I would expect double digit success rates, for a more reasonable measure of success. If a driven, creative rationalist is running a company, I would expect a very high degree of success.
Another thing much more common in rationalists than the common population is the ability to actively solicit feedback, reflect and self-modify. This is surprisingly rare. And incredibly vital in a startup.
Success at startups is not about not doing stupid things. I've made many MANY mistakes. It's about not doing things stupid enough to kill your company. Surprisingly, the business world has a lot of tolerance for error, as long as you avoid the truly bad ones.
It is hard to survey startups. What is usually done is to measure success rates of companies that raised a Series A round of funding. Many companies fail before achieving that, though they necessarily fail faster, producing less opportunity cost.
Here is a chart of returns to a VC, taken from this paper by a different author. 60% of dollars invested are in companies that lost the VCs money (lost them 85%). This is a top VC that managed to triple its money, so this is an overestimate of success of a regular VC-backed company. This is a common bias in these s...
If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.