If you're looking at past examples, they'll all be successful because the ones that ran out of money and still failed are on the streets panhandling $10/hour.<p>Maybe people fail at even higher rates when they tunnel onto their currently unsuccessful projects, but the advice appears good because instead of writing a post-mortem that everyone can read the failures are hunting for copper wiring in people's empty vacation houses.<p>Baye's Theorem: P(successful | desperate) * P(desperate) = P(desperate | successful) * P(successful)<p>There's a LOT of desperate people on the streets, and not many rich millionaires. 21% of millionaires inherited their money, upper-bounding P(desperate | successful), so P(successful | desperate) seems like a really low number.<p>Also, this advice would imply you should give away most of your life savings to someone to create a panic'd deadline. Maybe hit up a casino so you have a 50% chance of getting rich gambling, and a 50% chance of losing and getting more motivation for your startup to be successful.