It's far easier to say that a business plan sucks balls and be right 90+% of the time than to get a business plan right.
In practice even the good business plans run into myriad reasons why they aren't actually good plans, they are just lucky enough and have a determined enough team to survive reality.
That's not to say there aren't good business plans, but I think that criticizing Silicon Valley culture for having a high failure rate is counter-productive to encouraging people to take necessary and potentially transformative risks. Whenever you're trying to do new stuff, a lot of retrospectively dumb stuff will get discarded along the way, and it's easy in hindsight to point at the survivors and say "why didn't all of the failures just give up sooner?" I think that underestimates how much the successful ideas only just barely avoided ending up also on the side of the road.
In practice even the good business plans run into myriad reasons why they aren't actually good plans, they are just lucky enough and have a determined enough team to survive reality.
That's not to say there aren't good business plans, but I think that criticizing Silicon Valley culture for having a high failure rate is counter-productive to encouraging people to take necessary and potentially transformative risks. Whenever you're trying to do new stuff, a lot of retrospectively dumb stuff will get discarded along the way, and it's easy in hindsight to point at the survivors and say "why didn't all of the failures just give up sooner?" I think that underestimates how much the successful ideas only just barely avoided ending up also on the side of the road.