The massive amount of failed startups is caused by people who think this is a fun popular way to make money out of thin air.<p>If you're level-headed and sensible, you can do your analysis, make a business plan and figure out if your idea is marketable or not. Then, there's the business-doing portion, which is extremely complex, different from your technical work, and will make or break your company. But that only works if you have a financially viable, novel idea.
Unless you intend to scam bad investors, you can't have a startup without real innovation, period.<p>The startups were meant to be a way for experts in some field to materialize an (actually) innovative idea with economic potential, and generally an idea that doesn't require absurd amounts of capital.
This could be done in a typical corporate environment, but when the innovation originates from a single individual, the startup model allows him/her to better protect his interests and grow his business faster.<p>When running a startup became a trend (in many areas of Europe it did, I don't know about the Americas) there was a huge influx of people with no technical expertise, all of whom simple wanted to be a startup owner for the sake of it, with no plans or targets, just to be managers. These people fail over and over, sucking up EU and local government resources with them, and dragging the name of real startups in mud. Many of them are just the kids of wealthy individuals with connections. They leverage these connections to get investments and loans and waste 100s of thousands to millions on repeated failed attempts to materialize some retarded idea, like solar freaking highways or the 10,000th taxi hailing application on the market.<p>Survivorship bias is bad, but this situation would persist even without it.