The analogy breaks right at the start, start-ups are not &#x27;fatal&#x27; in the same sense that rock-climbing is fatal. So the GP is right, the race really would be won by those willing to cut corners and sacrifice safety and procedure even though statistically quite a few of those would end up &#x27;dead&#x27; for those exact same reasons with possible fall-out for their end-users as well (hacked, data loss and so on).<p>The strategy widens the bell curve and lowers it, whereas the rock-climbers try very hard to narrow it to where there are <i>no</i> outliers and everybody makes it to safety.<p>Imagine a strategy where <i>every</i> start-up would survive in the long term, there would be very few outliers in such a situation and that&#x27;s why start-ups that are comfortable with some risks at the expense of safety but a huge increase in productivity will be more likely to be amongst the winners than those that play it safe all the time.<p>I don&#x27;t think this is a huge problem anyway because very few people doing start-ups are risk averse.