Keynote Resources
The Five Gates
Every dead startup already knew.
The information was always in the room. Here is the diagnostic so you never have to learn it the hard way.
The Five Gates
Score each gate 0–10 for your current project. Your lowest number is not your weakness — it is your next conversation. Book it this week.
Gate 1: Timing __/10
Is the world ready for this — or am I just ready to build it?
Bill Gross analysed 200+ companies: timing correlated with success at 42%; the idea ranked third. Honest caveat — an informal analysis, hand-scored by his own staff, never peer-reviewed: a practitioner's pattern, not a law of physics. The market has to be ready for you, not just you for the market.
Gate 2: Building __/10
Am I building — or am I planning to build?
An observed pattern across 50+ coached startups — not a controlled study: the teams that shipped something in the first two weeks were the ones that survived. Paul Graham gave the test four words: do things that don't scale.
Gate 3: People __/10
Have I had the conversation I am avoiding?
Gorman & Sahlman asked 49 venture capitalists about their troubled portfolio companies: roughly two-thirds of the trouble traced to people problems. Wasserman's founder research adds the uncomfortable part — the closer the founders' personal relationship before founding, the less stable the founding team.
Gate 4: Scaling __/10
Am I growing because I am ready — or because it feels good?
The Startup Genome report named premature scaling the number one cause of startup death — self-reported data, debated methodology, but the direction is confirmed everywhere Felix has ever looked. Hiring feels like growth. Renting an office feels like legitimacy. LinkedIn congratulations feel like validation. And you are dying.
Gate 5: Pivoting __/10
Am I in love with the problem — or with my solution?
Samsung started with dried fish. Nintendo started with playing cards. BYD started with phone batteries. Plan B was bigger than Plan A. The pivot is not the backup plan. The pivot is the plan. Self-test: write your problem statement without naming your product. If you can't, you found your answer.
The Failure Filter
Three questions. Run them on any decision, any risk, any bet — before you make it.
1. Am I in new territory?
If you have done this before and it failed the same way, this is not intelligent failure. It is repetition.
2. Is this the smallest version of this bet I can make?
Can you test with ten customers before building for ten thousand? Can you drive deliveries in your car before building the app?
3. What will my fix break next?
Every solution creates a new problem. The product fix broke the team. The team fix broke the founder. You cannot prevent the chain. But you can anticipate the next link.
Why it works: reframed failure arrives as data, not as a verdict — and data gets through. (See Eskreis-Winkler & Fishbach 2019 and the Keith et al. 2022 replication in the sources below: the tune-out effect dissolves under reframing. The Filter is the reframe.)
The Premortem Script
Before your next big bet, ask the team: “It's 12 months from now. It failed. Write down why.”
Everyone writes alone, then reads aloud. Prospective hindsight generates roughly 30% more reasons for an outcome (Mitchell, Russo & Pennington 1989; Klein 2007). More reasons generated — the studies never measured decision quality, so no bigger claim is made here.
The People-Leader Ritual
Monthly. Fifteen minutes. Calendar-owned by the manager. Three questions, mapped to the WHO's three burnout dimensions (energy depletion, mental distance, reduced efficacy). Invitation, never pressure.
- 1. “Where is your energy, compared with three months ago?” (energy)
- 2. “Is there a part of the work you notice yourself avoiding?” (distance)
- 3. “Where did you feel effective this month — and where not?” (efficacy)
The 30-Day Survey
Thirty days after each event, attendees receive a five-question survey measuring gate recall, Failure Filter adoption, and one behavioural change. Results go to the organiser. If the room can't remember the framework in 30 days, Felix wants to know. Attended a talk and didn't get yours? Email felix@vulpine-industries.com.
Sources
Check the sources — Felix did. Every claim in the talk, with its citation and the caveat that travels with it. Where a finding is contested, the hedge is printed here, not hidden.
Eskreis-Winkler, L., & Fishbach, A. (2019). “Not Learning From Failure — the Greatest Failure of All.” Psychological Science, 30(12), 1733–1744. sagepub.com
Five studies, 1,674 participants; telemarketers given failure feedback retained less (48% vs 62%). Caveat: the effect is conditional — Keith, Horvath, Klamar & Frese (2022, J. Exp. Psychol.: General, preregistered, N=520) found it disappears with loss-framing or corrective feedback. That conditionality is the talk's payoff: reframing dissolves the effect; the Failure Filter is the reframe.
Gompers, P., Kovner, A., Lerner, J., & Scharfstein, D. (2010). “Performance persistence in entrepreneurship.” Journal of Financial Economics, 96(1), 18–32. sciencedirect.com
Previously successful founders: 30%. First-timers: 21%. Previously failed: 22%. Failing once buys you one percentage point. Caveat: success metric is IPO-based; VC-backed sample, 1986–2000.
Camerer, C., & Lovallo, D. (1999). “Overconfidence and Excess Entry: An Experimental Approach.” American Economic Review, 89(1), 306–318. aeaweb.org
Reference group neglect: with skill-dependent payoffs and self-selection, 85% of entrants entered markets where the average entrant lost money. The famous line from the paper's discussion: “I expect the average entrant to lose money, but not me!”
Cooper, A. C., Woo, C. Y., & Dunkelberg, W. C. (1988). “Entrepreneurs' perceived chances for success.” Journal of Business Venturing, 3(2), 97–108. sciencedirect.com
N=2,994. 81% rated their own odds at 7/10 or better; a third were dead certain (10/10); the same people rated similar businesses 5.9/10.
Gorman, M., & Sahlman, W. A. (1989). “What do venture capitalists do?” Journal of Business Venturing, 4(4), 231–248. sciencedirect.com
49 VCs, 96 troubled companies: roughly two-thirds of the trouble traced to people problems. The figure is often miscredited to Wasserman's 10,000-founder dataset — this is the actual source. Companion: Wasserman, N. (2012), The Founder's Dilemmas — prior social ties between cofounders predict less stable founding teams.
Kirtley, J., & O'Mahony, S. (2023). “What is a pivot?” Strategic Management Journal, 44(1), 197–230. wiley.com
93 strategic decisions tracked: a pivot is not a single decision — pivots are accumulations, not epiphanies. Caveat: small qualitative sample (7 startups); framing, not percentages.
Eisenmann, T. (2021). Why Startups Fail. Currency; companion essay in Harvard Business Review, May–June 2021. hbr.org
More than two-thirds of startups never deliver a positive return to investors (backed by Ghosh, HBS, ~2,000 VC-backed companies 2004–2010).
Gans, J., Stern, S., & Wu, J. (2019). “Foundations of entrepreneurial strategy.” Strategic Management Journal, 40(5), 736–756. wiley.com
Timing interacts with strategy — it is not a lottery ticket you hold passively.
Edmondson, A. C. (2023). Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well. Atria. amycedmondson.com
Basic / complex / intelligent failures — a conceptual typology, not an empirical percentage, and used as one.
Parasuraman, S., & Simmers, C. A. (2001). “Type of employment, work–family conflict and well-being.” Journal of Organizational Behavior, 22(5), 551–568. wiley.com
The self-employed report more autonomy and higher work–family conflict. “Business ownership is not a panacea.”
Freeman, M. A., Staudenmaier, P. J., Zisser, M. R., & Andresen, L. A. (2019). “The prevalence and co-occurrence of psychiatric conditions among entrepreneurs and their families.” Small Business Economics, 53(2), 323–342. springer.com
Entrepreneurs report depression at roughly twice the comparison group (30% vs 15%). Caveat, as spoken on stage: lifetime self-report, self-selected sample — hold the number loosely. But hold it.
World Health Organization (2019). ICD-11, QD85 “Burn-out.” who.int
Three dimensions: energy depletion, mental distance, reduced efficacy — the structure behind the people-leader ritual above.
McDaniel, B. T., & Radesky, J. S. (2018). “Technoference: Parent Distraction With Technology and Associations With Child Behavior Problems.” Child Development, 89(1), 100–109. wiley.com
170 families; nearly half of parents (48%) report devices interrupting interactions with their children three or more times a day.
Mitchell, D. J., Russo, J. E., & Pennington, N. (1989). “Back to the future: Temporal perspective in the explanation of events.” Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 2(1), 25–38; Klein, G. (2007). “Performing a Project Premortem.” Harvard Business Review. hbr.org
Prospective hindsight generated ~30% more reasons for an outcome. Caveat: more reasons generated — the quality of reasons was never assessed; no “30% better decisions” claim survives the source.
Marmer, M., Herrmann, B. L., Dogrultan, E., & Berman, R. (2011). Startup Genome Report Extra: Premature Scaling. startupgenome.com
3,200+ high-growth startups. Caveat, as spoken on stage: self-reported opt-in data, definitional circularity, not peer-reviewed — but the direction is confirmed everywhere Felix has ever looked.
Gross, B. (2015). “The single biggest reason why start-ups succeed.” TED. ted.com
Timing 42 / Team 32 / Idea 28 / Business model 24 / Funding 14, across ~200 companies. Mandatory caveat: informal analysis, hand-scored by Gross's own staff, half his own portfolio, never published or peer-reviewed, hindsight-bias risk.
General Magic: General Magic (documentary, 2018); Fadell, T. (2022). Build. generalmagicthemovie.com
The canonical timing failure: Sony Magic Link, 1994, $800 — by most accounts fewer than four thousand sold, mostly to family and friends. Alumni went on to build the iPod, iPhone, Android, the Apple Watch, and eBay's first version.
Webvan vs Instacart: Webvan S-1 and shutdown coverage (SEC EDGAR; CNET/NYT, July 2001); Instacart S-1 and IPO coverage (Reuters, September 2023). sec.gov
Webvan: ~$7.9B day-one market cap on $395K cumulative revenue; dead July 9, 2001. Instacart: IPO September 2023 at ~$10B — honestly, a fraction of its 2021 private peak. Down-round, and it lived.
Stewart Butterfield: Glitch closing announcement (Tiny Speck, November 2012, archived); Slack/Salesforce press release, December 1, 2020.
Game Neverending became Flickr. Glitch ($17.5M raised) died with a shutdown page urging employers to hire its people — and its internal tool became Slack. Salesforce acquisition: $27.7B.
Graham, P. (2013). “Do Things That Don't Scale.” paulgraham.com
The four-word test behind Gate 2.
Wald, A. (1943). “A Method of Estimating Plane Vulnerability Based on Damage of Survivors.” Statistical Research Group; reprinted CRC 432, Center for Naval Analyses. dtic.mil
Survivorship bias — the math is verified. Caveat: the famous scene with the generals and the red-dot diagram is folklore; it appears in no primary document. The lesson survives the legend.
Everything on this page as a printable A4 PDF — the method, the exercises, and every source.
Print versions of the field card and templates: email felix@vulpine-industries.com and name the talk.
Live version with clickable links: https://felixlenhard.com/fivegates/
The Book
Subtract to Ship
A four-volume methodology. Publishing 2026.
The Five Gates and the Failure Filter are the diagnostic layer of the Subtract to Ship system. The book contains the full dataset, the research behind each gate, the three failures in detail, and the implementation framework for founders, investors, and team leads.
About the BooksBook Felix for Your Event
Keynotes (20–45 min). Workshops (half-day). Post-talk office hours. Available in English and German. Based in Graz, Austria — available internationally.
The Five Gates talk features an ancient con game, five volunteers, and a lesson about failure that audiences do not forget.