The Shortlist Newsletter
Latest · Issue 07 · 2026-07-23
Every deck has a why-now slide, and most just say the market is growing. In our set, 6 of 8 failures gave a reason that could describe fifty other companies. The winners named the exact thing that had just changed.
Read the issue →Issue 06 · 2026-07-09
The best co-founders were usually former coworkers, not friends. 28 of 35 winners had a relationship that predated the company.
Issue 05 · 2026-07-02
A demo that outruns the product is the strongest fraud signal in the record. Theranos and Magic Leap both ended in collapse.
Issue 04 · 2026-06-18
The four largest raises in our data all failed, roughly $18B combined. The burn multiple catches it while a company is still private.
Issue 03 · 2026-05-19
Every public SaaS winner disclosed a retention metric in their S-1. The failures that filed publicly chose not to.
Issue 02 · 2026-05-14
73% of failures bet on marketing. 18% of winners did. The single biggest gap in the dataset.
Issue 01 · 2026-05-05
Every failure claimed one moat. Every winner claimed two or more. The data is binary.
The Newsletter
Each Thursday, one non-obvious pattern, tested against a growing set of outcome-labeled companies and the named failures other newsletters won't touch.