Joel Splosky quoting Jessica Livingston of Y Combinator in How Hard Could It Be?: Start-up Static when talking about why startups fail.

“That would be boring,” she told me. “They all fail for the same reason: People just stop working on their business.” Um, yeah, well, sure, and most people die because their heart stops beating. But somehow dying in different ways is still interesting enough to support 40 hours a week of prime-time programming.

I couldn’t agree with this statement more. I believe that most startups don’t realize that they’ve “made it” untill they’ve been making it for a while and it’s obvious to everyone except the person hard at work worried sick that tomorrow he’ll run out of money and have to fire someone. If success happens that slowly why would anyone think that failure happens any faster?