"Most startups fail." It's a line you hear in nearly every entrepreneurship talk.
But the message behind that slogan isn't one to scare founders. It's to set up something more useful:
understanding why startups fail, so that those exact issues can be avoided. That's the thinking behind our recent Startup Barometer, which looked at data from 1,839 startups coached since 2014. The headline numbers: 67% are still active today, and startups past the five-year mark survive at a rate of 73%, well above the international benchmark of 51% for venture-backed startups globally. We spoke with Donát Pájer, business coach at Start it @KBC, to dig into what's behind that number, and how the accelerator comes into play in keeping that number high.
Why startups actually fail
Donát’s take: running out of money is frequently the reason founders give for a startup's failure, but it's rarely the full story. "It's more of a cause than a reason," he says. Behind most financial problems is something deeper: co-founders who can no longer work together, or, most commonly, a lack of product-market fit. Startups chase new opportunities by definition, and new markets are hard to read. Founders often mistake their own personal experience for proof the broader market wants the same thing; and that's where a lot of startups quietly go wrong. Startup Genome research, the most widely cited global study on the topic, backs this up. It puts the overall startup failure rate at around 90%, broken down as follows:
- 34% — no product-market fit ("nobody wants the product")
- 22% — ran out of cash
- 18% — team problems
- 16% — no business model fit (customers won't pay enough)
- 6% — technical problems
- 2% — operational problems
- 2% — legal problems
"Ran out of cash", the reason founders usually name first, sits well behind product-market fit, and roughly level with team issues. The money runs out because something upstream already went wrong.
Timing matters too. Of that 90%, about 10% never reach their first birthday, while a much larger 70% fail somewhere between year two and year five. Early failures tend to come down to fundamentals: the wrong team, no real market demand, a product tweaked into confusion, or pricing that doesn't work. Later failures look different: growing too fast or too slow, the wrong people in senior roles, founders who stop listening to customers, or decisions made under
stress instead of strategy. Survival isn't one hurdle. It's a series of them, and the risks shift as a startup matures.
Our own business coaches see these patterns play out directly. Inge Wouters points to founders who build in isolation instead of talking to customers, or who only want to hear positive feedback. Christophe Cieters notes that even a technically strong product built without early customer conversations is unlikely to succeed: sales conversations need to start before the product is finished.
Redefining "survival" and understanding the data
However, to understand how an accelerator helps founders navigate these failure points, every founder in the program works with a business coach. Whether that guidance meaningfully improves survival odds is hard to isolate, Donát admits, but he offers a useful reframe: “The best outcome isn't always survival at all costs. Sometimes it's helping a founder fail faster, so less time, money, and energy gets wasted chasing the wrong idea. A fast, well-guided failure can be just as valuable as a five-year survival.”
At the same time, a crucial part in all this is recognizing the limits of survival statistics. A few things are worth knowing before taking the 73% at face value:
- "Survival" isn't defined the same way everywhere. The 90% failure figure above comes
from Startup Genome, but the definition of failure and the time window used (one year,
five, ten) changes the result significantly.
- Survival rates vary by industry and by era. A few years ago, a large share of startups in
the program were blockchain and crypto companies; today, there are almost none.
Newer, hyped categories tend to carry more risk and lower survival, simply because
there's more experimentation happening.
- Our own number has a methodological quirk. Only startups that are formally
incorporated, can be tracked. Founders who join without ever incorporating, and who
quietly stop, don't show up in the statistics at all. That likely nudges the survival rate
upward.
- "Survived" doesn't mean "became a unicorn." Some startups evolve into smaller consultancy or advisory businesses rather than scaling into a major success story. That's
not the story usually told in a pitch deck, but it's still a founder who became self-sufficient.
Does a corporate background help?
Beyond coaching and definitions, individual founder demographics also play a role in survival. For instance, 70% of Start it @KBC founders come from a corporate background. Whether that translates into better survival odds is hard to say with certainty, according to Donát: it probably helps, since those founders bring more tangible market experience, but it's one factor among many, not a guarantee. Similarly, despite a clear global funding gap between male and female founders, internal data shows survival rates between both groups remain roughly equal. Donát suggests a potential reason: “Since fewer women start companies in the first place, those who do may already be more selective and committed, making a direct baseline comparison difficult.
The AI factor
External market shifts are changing the equation even further. Most published startup research is a year or two out of date by the time it's released, and AI is changing the landscape faster than that. Donát’s seen two-person teams in the program now delivering what used to take a team of six to eight. Software is easier than ever to build, which is reshaping what actually gives a startup an edge. A strong technical team used to be a real advantage; increasingly, it isn't one on its own. What matters more, in his view, is knowing exactly what to build and for whom, because speed without market validation is "a speed trap." Donát: “It's possible to move fast and still end up in entirely the wrong direction. That’s where we jump in as business coaches: to help founders find the right path for their business.”
Start it @KBC and survival security
Ultimately, “It's genuinely hard to isolate how much of the 73% five-year survival rate comes from selection, how much from coaching, and how much simply reflects who applies to a program like this in the first place. Producing two unicorns (Aikido and Keyrock) out of more than 2,000 coached startups demonstrates a strong success rate that goes far beyond simple survival,” says Donát. What can be said with confidence: we don't pretend startups can't fail. We try to explain, honestly, why startups usually do fail, and build a program, a community, and a coaching structure designed to help founders spot those failure points before they become fatal.
Sometimes that means five more years in business. Sometimes it means a faster, smarter pivot. Either way, it's a founder still standing, still learning, and still building.
Curious about the full numbers behind our Startup Barometer?