I have been involved in many startup and early stage companies as a founder, angel, investor and advisor. I have a broad range of contacts and have been investing for more than 30 years. Its more likely that a random High School basketball player will be the MVP in the finals than any random startup will be a headline success story. There are probably many tens of thousands of abject business failures across the country for every success story in Silicon Valley. And that's just the abject failures-thats not even counting the living dead companies which never achieve what they set out to do but which don't close their doors. For every unicorn, there are probably a million business failures. And to be clear, failure is rarely equivocal.