The question should be is the rate of churn of startups going up.

One might interpret the facts as presented to indicate that startups are fashionable, and more people are starting them. A certain percentage are likely to fail.

This can happen BECAUSE economy is shit.

I am in Brazil, right now completely unemployed (technically I never was employed in first place, so I don't count as unemployed in statistics), and out of work.

So I am thinking of what business to start, this time... (I legally own 3 business, and I think I am heir of more 3 or 4) Because the ones I have none are profitable at all, and I can't find any work (not even supermarket cashier).

And I noticed, that on social sites (Facebook for example) that shows employment, lots of people are becoming business-people too, for example I noticed scores of 18 year olds that own some business selling cakes, or making clothes, or other stuff like that.

It is basically desperation, people can't find jobs, so they start their own business out of desperation, and of course most of these will fail anyway, from the smallest one (someone selling cupcakes from their garage) to the biggest ones (venture-backed stuff post-IPO...)

> And I noticed, that on social sites (Facebook for example) that shows employment, lots of people are becoming business-people too, for example I noticed scores of 18 year olds that own some business selling cakes, or making clothes, or other stuff like that.

I'm not sure how it is in Brazil, but in some parts of the US, there are many young adults 18-22 who start businesses like this. They either start right out of high school or drop out of college, create an LLC, then start a business. Once every so often, someone does well. They make it 5+ years before calling it quits for various reasons. Most of them fail right out of the gate.

The reality of, "Oh crap. This is my business. I can do whatever I want, but I am literally responsible for everything - including generating income" hits. They see that it's not so easy bootstrapping a photography business or cake business from scratch when there is no formal training in the area. No one wants photos that are washed out when a professional can do it for a few dollars more. No one wants a cake that can be replicated by spending 1/3 the price for a store bought cake mix.

Then they stop actually participating in the business, but their social media profile still says "Owner of Pop Flash Photography" or "Sole Proprietor of Wake n Bake Cakes".

One thing that some CS students in my area have done is to start an LLC once they've written something demoable. It doesn't have to be new or innovative (could be a simple calculator app that's on the app store), but if they can distribute it for use, they license it and publish it under the LLC. They make business cards for the LLC. Then they say things like, "I'm the Founder/Owner of Living Room Launched Software. We have a small app on the app store. Here's my card. Contact me if you need something."

This isn't to knock young people who have the entrepreneurial spirit! I think it's great for people to explore what they want to do in life, and it's better to fail fast straight out of HS than to blow their life savings in their mid-40s. Some kid fresh out of high school looking to get rich quick off of something easy is markedly different from the churn discussed in this article.

This may be true but I doubt that most bootstrapped businesses need the services of a company like this one.

The scope of this article seems to be VC-backed businesses, and more specifically ones that have had more than one round of funding, but have either run out of money, or are on the obvious path to run out of money..

Would be interesting to compare this to the number of start-ups being funded and whether that has increased.