Pitch decks and promotional collateral talk about world domination and changing the way we work, play, and live. [...] "This is not a small social app," the founder of Clinkle, a small payment app, said. "What we're trying to do here is fundamentally change how people trade. Every human being, every day, has to do this." The existing markets are always broken, the pitch decks say, and the time is always now.

For the startups that fail, however, most of these words fall on empty rooms. The founder of Powa Technologies once proclaimed, "What we're building here is the biggest tech company in living memory." They shuttered a year later.

Regardless of the market, the product, or the team, the story structure remains. Paul Graham charted the arc in a whiteboard drawing called the startup cuve, now since turned into books, how-tos, and thinkpieces. But as in the hero's journey, or Kurt Vonnegut's Man in a Hole story arc, the startup monomyth requires a struggle. Performing startup requires rugged individualism, just as the American Dream requires arriving in a land of opportunity and achieving success through hard work and determination. For performing startup, the land of opportunity is the market ripe for disruption, the hard work is shipping code, and the success is fundraising, traction, and power.

Though there are many forms and scales of success, the story of failure is common. The perception of struggle, however, is key to the performance of startup and how it absorbs failure. Startups face the "trough of sorrow" while coasting on borrowed money but perform s if they are frontiersmen in a hostile environment. Failed startups that perform startup well achieve soft landings in the form of talent acquisitions, or easy fundraising for the founders' next ventures. To perform failure correctly, it must be in awe rather than spite. While primarily procedural and commonplace, a failed startup's path is always a journey, and the journey is always incredible.

That startup can be performed means that startup can be templatized. Pitch deck templates from successful startups, accelerators or venture capital firms are spread and shared like get-rich quick books. Startups now exist to help other startups create t-shirts, cater lunch, and build their own waiting list landing pages [...] The templates themselves are now a market.