> At the pre-seed stage, startups often waste months in the planning phase, locked in cycles of research, theoretical validation, and endless brainstorming

Data would be useful here. Do startup actually often spend months in the planning phase and if so, is that time wasted?

It would be nice to see, for example, a correlation between “time spent thinking before writing the first line of code” and “fraction of startups alive after 5 years” or something like that.

My guess would be getting a good dataset on that is very hard because potentially lots of “time spent before thinking” happens before the startup is created.

Possibly, a startup that’s started after thinking about a problem for years is both more likely to be successful and more likely to start coding earlier, but not more likely yo be successful because it starts coding earlier.