Well, it really depends on what you think I meant. You're interpreting me as talking about startups (which I explicitly wasn't, since I was talking about freelance work).
Even assuming we're talking about startups, the article is looking at venture-backed startups, and defining failure as returning less than 1x. This gets two things "wrong":
1. If talking about startups, most people (founders, investors) will consider a return of 2x to be a failure as well.
2. You're already limiting the discussion to startups that have been venture backed.
IIRC in venture-land, the number of startups that are considered to be returning a meaningful return is around %10-%20 for the best funds.
No, I think that's a great assumption. Well, startups vs. general businesses - I think specific things like restaurants might fail at a pretty high rate too.
I think the rest of my comment stands though. And especially, if you're singling out specifically VC-backed startups, I'm guessing their 1-year failure rate is practically zero, since they usually raise enough money to survive at least 18 months. That's why the details of what exactly we're talking about matter a lot here.
I think, for all VC-backed startups, there are statistics that show a more-or-less 90% rate of startups "failing" in the sense that VC's care about. But it's really more-or-less- I'm assuming it's a made up statistic that is in the area of the truth.
