No one counts the autistic founders who fail, a Think Autism panellist said

The question came from the floor, and it was one the panel could not answer with evidence. An audience member at Think Autism Sydney in May 2025 told the panel that autistic entrepreneurship is difficult, that their own experience had not always been positive, and that while funding exists for social entrepreneurship it is not always accessible to autistic people. The discussion, they said, tended to assume that going into autistic entrepreneurship means you will succeed, which is not always the case, and “we don’t hear about the failures”. The audience member asked whether anyone gathers data on how autistic and neurodivergent founders actually fare, and whether it was worth gathering.

The first answer from the panel was direct. “There isn’t that data.” Rather than treat the gap as the end of the discussion, the panellist reached back to an older program, the New Enterprise Incentive Scheme, and to what the panellist remembered of its evaluation from years ago. The panellist recalled being told that it was the “successful unsuccessful program”. As the panellist explained the phrase, people who got out and did things through the scheme found that opportunities came through that were not the business itself. Other pathways opened from the experience of trying.