The "Dead Horse" Theory

In the fast-paced world of startups, resilience is often celebrated. Being a 4x founder, I can vouch that founders are encouraged to “never give up,” “push through adversity,” and “keep going no matter what.” But what if perseverance is actually holding you back?

Enter the Dead Horse Theory—a concept that every entrepreneur, founder, and leader must understand to avoid sinking time, energy, and resources into a lost cause.

What is the Dead Horse Theory?

The Dead Horse Theory is a metaphor for situations where individuals, teams, or organizations persist in a course of action long after it has become unviable. It stems from an old Dakota Sioux proverb: “When you discover that you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount.”

However, in business, we often refuse to dismount. Instead, we try all sorts of counterproductive tactics:

• Buying a stronger whip (pushing employees or yourself harder)
• Changing the rider (hiring new leadership, hoping for a turnaround)
• Forming a committee to analyze the dead horse (spending more time diagnosing instead of acting)
• Declaring the dead horse is “still alive in spirit” (rebranding without fixing the core issue)
• Comparing your dead horse to others (convincing yourself that the market will eventually shift in your favor)

These tactics lead to wasted resources, prolonged failure, and missed opportunities to pivot towards something that works.

My Personal Experience: The Cost of Riding a Dead Horse

Having been involved in multiple startups—some successful, others not—I’ve personally faced the dilemma of when to persist and when to pivot. My first startup was a B2C franchise model that grew to 15 stores across Delhi-NCR in about 3 years. It was undoubtedly exciting, scalable, and attracting investors, but as we scaled, fundamental cracks started to appear since I was a solo founder & a non-technical one.

And though I had the sales & marketing pieces covered (14 years in Sales prior to starting up), I admit initially there were operational inefficiencies, lack of standardization, and even though we were using a customized CRM, the franchise support system on crossing 10 branches was quite tough.

I'll be honest - instead of recognizing that we were riding a dead horse, we kept doubling down. We sold more franchises, used that money to hire more people, restructured teams believing a new team could fix a broken model.

We spent heavily on marketing, hoping more customers would compensate for our inefficiencies.

In hindsight, we should have pivoted earlier. I was lucky that my wife & serial founder herself, Arpita, advised me to get out since this would be a disaster soon. As usual, I paid heed to her advice and we saw a very successful exit, but not before draining a significant amount of time and effort that could have been better utilized elsewhere (like building Brain Box Catalysts a year before we actually started!).

When to Pivot vs. When to Persevere...

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