Canadian billionaire and former Shark Tank investor Kevin O’Leary has delivered a sharp warning to startup founders, according to a report by Benzinga. O’Leary has urged the startup founders to recognise their failure early and avoid pouring more money into businesses that are not working. Sharing his advice on X, O’Leary said: “The worst mistake you can make as an entrepreneur is refusing to admit when something has failed.” O’Leary also cautioned that continued spending cannot turn an unsuccessful concept into a viable business. “Bad ideas do not become good ideas just because you keep throwing more money at them,” he wrote. Instead, he advised founders to embrace losses, learn from them, and move on. He added: “80% of startups fail. You cannot cry about every one.”
Kevin O’Leary’s warning to startup founders
O’Leary shared his advice on X, arguing that one of the costliest mistakes entrepreneurs make is refusing to acknowledge when a business has failed. He said the single worst mistake an entrepreneur can make is denying that something has already failed.O’Leary was equally direct about the limits of persistence, warning that no amount of continued spending can turn a fundamentally flawed business idea into a viable one — bad ideas, he said, don’t become good ideas just because more money keeps getting thrown at them. His advice for founders facing that reality was simple: accept the loss, extract the lesson from it, and move forward.O’Leary also put the stakes in blunt statistical terms, noting that roughly 80% of startups fail, and that founders can’t afford to mourn every single one.“The worst mistake you can make as an entrepreneur is refusing to admit when something has failed. Bad ideas do not become good ideas just because you keep throwing more money at them. Embrace the loss, learn from it, and move on. 80% of startups fail. You cannot cry about every one,” wrote O’Leary.
Lessons from other startup leaders
O’Leary’s comments join a string of recent public advice from prominent entrepreneurs and investors aimed at founders navigating early-stage decisions.Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham has said founders often struggle to accurately judge their own startup’s performance, largely because first-time entrepreneurs lack real benchmarks for comparison — he has pointed to growth rate as one of the clearest available measures of whether a startup is actually succeeding.Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong has encouraged founders to pursue genuinely difficult problems rather than easier, lower-ambition ones, arguing that harder problems tend to attract less competition and make it easier to recruit talented people. Armstrong has also advised entrepreneurs to work backward from their long-term vision while identifying an early, realistic path to their first dollar of revenue.Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has offered a different angle, advising aspiring entrepreneurs to first gain experience at an already-successful company before launching a business of their own. Bezos has said that learning foundational skills — like how to hire and interview effectively — at a well-run organization can meaningfully improve a future founder’s odds of building a successful startup.