I tracked 300 founders from my old sales calls. A quarter are already gone.

Here's MY data from the past week.

I started going through my old Calendly meetings from the last 3 years. Mostly startup founders, CEOs and VP Sales - about 300 of them. One by one I started Googling the companies and checking their LinkedIns.

So far around 25% are completely gone (and I covered 200+). Another 10% replaced leadership, replaced the VP Sales or completely changed direction.

And honestly after reading all the shutdown posts (or articles in the news) and we ran out of runway? explanations, the same patterns keep showing up again and again.

Most of them did NOT fail because the technology (or the product in general) was bad.

Most of them failed because they spent years building product, hiring developers, opening offices, raising money, adding features and talking about vision... while sales and go-to-market were treated like something they wouldfigure out later? - or it would happen by itself at some point. Somehow.

Later came.

And the market didn't care.

The brutal part is that many of those products were actually good. Some were VERY good.

But good products without strong commercial execution (with some heavy planning in advance) die every single day.

Especially now when everybody has AI, everybody has automation, everybody has dashboards and everybody claims they are revolutionary.

I've been seeing this for 20 years across different industries and companies. Founders constantly underestimate how hard it is to actually make people buy.

Not to click. Not to like. Notshow interest.

BUY.

And by the time many companies finally realize they have a sales, positioning or go-to-market problem, they already burned most of the money.