This is only tangentially related, but the same pattern applies to government looking at how various policies are implemented in other country. Most often it is used as a shining example of success, but I seriously doubt you can import a policy without understanding first why it works in the first place, which is often much harder to grasp.
this seems to go hand-in-hand with the survivor bias thing. Don't study just the successful startups, because you don't know if what they did contributed to their success without also studying the unsuccessful startups that did the same thing.<p>I call this the "thousand monkeys problem". If a thousand startup monkeys do a thousand random things, then some proportion of them will be successful because statistics. The reasons for their success will be random (i.e. like the article says, some combination of luck, timing, personality, etc). Just studying the successful monkeys will give no insight as to what made them succeed, the entire population needs to be studied.<p>In other words, "25 things that successful startup founders did" is useless without the " and that unsuccessful founders didn't do" bit.