The Mirage of Survivorship

Originally published on LinkedIn

Survivorship bias is everywhere in startups. We see the winners and assume the system works.

But there’s an important distinction:

• YC and Speedrun are like the farm leagues for elite sports. They’re not perfect, but they offer real mentorship, exposure to winners, and the pattern recognition founders need to calibrate what “good” actually looks like. Even if you don’t break out, you leave sharper, more disciplined, and more connected.
• Local incubators, on the other hand, tend to default to theatre. Formulaic, cookie-cutter programming. Reruns of someone else’s content. Staff chasing local status by hobnobbing with donors and ‘pillars of the community.’ Very little of this helps founders build.

In one case, survivor bias still trains the field. In the other, it just erodes trust.

The Discipline of Building

Paul Graham has a line I keep coming back to:

“All you can know when you start working on a startup is that it seems worth pursuing. You can't know whether it will turn into a company worth billions or one that goes out of business.”

That uncertainty is the reality of the seed stage. You don’t know outcomes. What you do know is whether it’s worth pursuing — and whether you’re building with enough discipline to survive long enough to find out.

PG’s recipe is simple:

• Get good at some kind of technology.
• Have an idea for what you’re going to build.
• Find co-founders to start with.

Everything else is noise.

And here’s where discipline matters:

• Customers are the only real signal. Not judges, not pitch panels.
• Constraints are a superpower. Raising less forces sharper choices.
• Cash is survival. Companies don’t die from competition; they die from running out of money or conviction.
• Projects precede companies. The best startups start as projects you and your friends actually want.

The discipline of building looks less like theatre and more like Olympic training:

• Clear milestones, not vague ambition.
• Honest feedback loops, not applause.
• Daily practice, not grand gestures.
• A focus on peaking when it matters — hitting escape velocity with customers, not at demo day.

The Indie Era

For decades, founders were told venture capital was the only way to scale. But that’s no longer true.

• The cost of building has collapsed — what once took $5M can now be done for <$5k.
• Cloud infrastructure, open source, and distribution channels mean more can be achieved with less.
• Raising too much too early often increases fragility: more burn, more pressure, fewer exit paths.

This is the Indie Era of Startups:

• One-and-done seed rounds.
• Default alive instead of default fundraising.
• Building real businesses that compound customer value without needing perpetual injections of capital.

Escape velocity no longer requires endless venture rounds. It requires discipline, customers, and survival.

The Seed-Stage Critique

The seed stage is broken not because there was too much money, but because institutions never figured out how to help founders make the most of it.

From 2015 to 2020, new abundant capital flowed into the ecosystem. That was a good thing for startups. But many institutional  programs often handled it badly. Instead of building real founder support, they leaned on the appearance of credibility:

• Elevating gatekeepers for panels, mentor lists, and demo day judging slots.
• Staffing programs with people who had never been through the grind of building, but who had learned the vocabulary of startups without the nuance.

It looked like support. In practice, it was theatre.

And here’s the structural truth that kept getting lost:

• Some ideas are inherently capital-intensive.
• Some depend on regulatory shifts or timing.
• Some can be built lean, others can’t.

Not every company is venture-scale. And that’s fine. The danger comes when institutions — whether funds or incubators — treat every startup as if it is. That mismatch pushes founders onto treadmills they don’t belong on.

Spreadsheets can help at this stage — not as market signal, but as founder signal. They show whether a team can break down uncertainty, simulate possible futures, and communicate their vision in the language of business. But the real test isn’t in Excel. It’s in the market. The only durable signal still comes from customers: will they use it, will they pay, will they care if it disappears? (Of course, not all problems fit neatly in this view — deep tech, pharma, biotech, advanced manufacturing — early validation there often comes from scientific progress, regulatory milestones, or technical feasibility rather than immediate customer demand.)

The truth is simpler: raise what you need, if you need it. Build something customers want. Spend less than you bring in. Everything else is optional.

Extraction vs. Alignment

With venture economics, the incentives are at least aligned. Investors, founders, and employees are all tied to the same outcome: if the company breaks out, everyone shares in the upside. If it doesn’t, everyone loses.

Incubators aren’t built that way. Their incentives are different — and so is the value they extract:

• Funding to keep the program alive.
• Prestige from hobnobbing with donors and local “pillars of the community.”
• Status for staff, who get positioned as experts regardless of whether they’ve ever built anything.

The risk is obvious: when an organization’s survival depends on extracting value unrelated to customer progress, can it ever do the right thing for founders?

The result is predictable. The institution always gets paid. The staff always look busy. And the founders — the ones the whole system is supposed to serve — are the ones left holding the bag.

If You Can’t Go to the Valley

A lot of Canadian founders I meet haven’t chosen to go to the Valley. Many can’t. But that doesn’t mean you can’t replicate what makes the Valley powerful.

The advantage of the Valley isn’t the zip code. It’s the density of the right people with the right mindset. Pattern recognition. Ambition calibration. Exposure to winners.

If you can’t move, you need to be intentional about finding or creating that density where you are:

• Find builders, not climbers. Avoid rooms full of “ecosystem players” chasing donor dollars and LinkedIn optics. Spend time with founders who are actually building.
• Join or create small, sharp communities. Builder’s Club, indie hacker groups, or even founder dinners can do more than an incubator ever will.
• Seek exposure to patterns of winners. Benchmark against the best globally — not just local averages.
• Choose mentors with scars, not titles. Operators who’ve built and failed will teach you more than “experts” on payroll.
• Build your own feedback loops. Share numbers, progress, and challenges with a tight peer group. Make it harder to lie to yourself.
• Travel strategically. If you can’t live in the Valley, visit a few times a year. Calibrate ambition, absorb the density, and bring it home.

You don’t need an incubator. You need a community. One built around discipline, scars, and ambition — not theatre.

So the harder question isn’t: How do I get into a program?

It’s: Am I building with enough discipline to create escape velocity?

Because survivor bias will keep rewarding theatre. But discipline — and in many cases, indie discipline — is what builds businesses.

Markets are won the same way they’ve always been: one customer at a time.