Jerry Neumann's "We Have Learned Nothing" argues that 25 years of startup methodology haven't moved the needle on startup survival rates. Sorry dude, you're wrong :)
In 1995, the word "startup" wasn't even known outside a few cities.
By 2010, starting a company was the new American Dream for every ambitious 22-year-old with a laptop. The denominator didn't just grow, it exploded by an order of magnitude with increasingly inexperienced founders.
If startup methodology wasn't working, you'd expect far more failures (as a percentage) as the founder pool massively diluted. That's not what the BLS data shows. Flat survival rates against a radically expanded and less experienced population isn't evidence of failure. It's evidence of success.
Neumann also misses who these frameworks actually serve. The Startup Genome project's research in the early 2010s found you can't pick winners, but you can pick likely losers — they're the ones spending scarce resources as if they've figured something out.
Books like Four Steps to the Epiphany, Lean Startup and Lean Customer Discovery won't make you successful, but they will keep you from killing your company before you figure out a real business model.
"Don't do dumb shit" is table stakes. It works. It keeps working when everyone adopts it. The positive advice — follow this process to win — is where the cargo cult lives.
Lastly... always scrutinize startup advice from a VC. Investors take a portfolio approach across dozens, sometimes hundreds of bets. Founders get maybe six in a lifetime. VCs are maximizing for a very boolean outcome: huge, fast wins (100X returns!) and fast zeros (still a win because no more board meetings!).
What they refuse to say is that luck is the hidden driver in almost all their successes. And staying alive is the best way to get lucky.
Read the books. Learn from the greats. It's actually helping.
https://colossus.com/article/we-have-learned-nothing-startup-pundits/