Grow fast, fail slowly: Untrepreneurial ecosystems and the fast failure paradox

“Failing fast” features prominently in entrepreneurship discourse as a mechanism for reallocating resources and strengthening ecosystem resilience. However, existing research has yet to explain how entrepreneurs decide when to terminate an unviable venture, as failure studies remain focused on individual biases, while ecosystem studies largely overlook the early failure phase. Addressing this gap, this study examines how social, economic, and cultural dynamics within Amsterdam’s entrepreneurial ecosystem shape entrepreneurs’ decisions to discontinue their ventures. While stakeholders adopt a fast-failure rhetoric and entrepreneur-centred support framing to maintain legitimacy, their practices are driven by diverse institutional interests, thereby creating conditions that prolong failing ventures rather than enabling timely exit. These insights shift the locus of entrepreneurial failure from individual decision-making to systemic conditions and challenge the dominant view of ecosystems as entrepreneur-centric, showing instead that they primarily serve stakeholder interests, rendering them in effect Untrepreneurial ecosystems.