Download or read book Why Startups Fail written by Tom Eisenmann and published by Currency. This book was released on 2021-03-30 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If you want your startup to succeed, you need to understand why startups fail. “Whether you’re a first-time founder or looking to bring innovation into a corporate environment, Why Startups Fail is essential reading.”—Eric Ries, founder and CEO, LTSE, and New York Times bestselling author of The Lean Startup and The Startup Way Why do startups fail? That question caught Harvard Business School professor Tom Eisenmann by surprise when he realized he couldn’t answer it. So he launched a multiyear research project to find out. In Why Startups Fail, Eisenmann reveals his findings: six distinct patterns that account for the vast majority of startup failures. • Bad Bedfellows. Startup success is thought to rest largely on the founder’s talents and instincts. But the wrong team, investors, or partners can sink a venture just as quickly. • False Starts. In following the oft-cited advice to “fail fast” and to “launch before you’re ready,” founders risk wasting time and capital on the wrong solutions. • False Promises. Success with early adopters can be misleading and give founders unwarranted confidence to expand. • Speed Traps. Despite the pressure to “get big fast,” hypergrowth can spell disaster for even the most promising ventures. • Help Wanted. Rapidly scaling startups need lots of capital and talent, but they can make mistakes that leave them suddenly in short supply of both. • Cascading Miracles. Silicon Valley exhorts entrepreneurs to dream big. But the bigger the vision, the more things that can go wrong. Drawing on fascinating stories of ventures that failed to fulfill their early promise—from a home-furnishings retailer to a concierge dog-walking service, from a dating app to the inventor of a sophisticated social robot, from a fashion brand to a startup deploying a vast network of charging stations for electric vehicles—Eisenmann offers frameworks for detecting when a venture is vulnerable to these patterns, along with a wealth of strategies and tactics for avoiding them. A must-read for founders at any stage of their entrepreneurial journey, Why Startups Fail is not merely a guide to preventing failure but also a roadmap charting the path to startup success.

Download or read book The Fail Safe Startup written by Tom Eisenmann and published by Penguin Business. This book was released on 2021-04 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Why Startups Fail written by Tom Eisenmann and published by Currency. This book was released on 2021-03-30 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If you want your startup to succeed, you need to understand why startups fail. “Whether you’re a first-time founder or looking to bring innovation into a corporate environment, Why Startups Fail is essential reading.”—Eric Ries, founder and CEO, LTSE, and New York Times bestselling author of The Lean Startup and The Startup Way Why do startups fail? That question caught Harvard Business School professor Tom Eisenmann by surprise when he realized he couldn’t answer it. So he launched a multiyear research project to find out. In Why Startups Fail, Eisenmann reveals his findings: six distinct patterns that account for the vast majority of startup failures. • Bad Bedfellows. Startup success is thought to rest largely on the founder’s talents and instincts. But the wrong team, investors, or partners can sink a venture just as quickly. • False Starts. In following the oft-cited advice to “fail fast” and to “launch before you’re ready,” founders risk wasting time and capital on the wrong solutions. • False Promises. Success with early adopters can be misleading and give founders unwarranted confidence to expand. • Speed Traps. Despite the pressure to “get big fast,” hypergrowth can spell disaster for even the most promising ventures. • Help Wanted. Rapidly scaling startups need lots of capital and talent, but they can make mistakes that leave them suddenly in short supply of both. • Cascading Miracles. Silicon Valley exhorts entrepreneurs to dream big. But the bigger the vision, the more things that can go wrong. Drawing on fascinating stories of ventures that failed to fulfill their early promise—from a home-furnishings retailer to a concierge dog-walking service, from a dating app to the inventor of a sophisticated social robot, from a fashion brand to a startup deploying a vast network of charging stations for electric vehicles—Eisenmann offers frameworks for detecting when a venture is vulnerable to these patterns, along with a wealth of strategies and tactics for avoiding them. A must-read for founders at any stage of their entrepreneurial journey, Why Startups Fail is not merely a guide to preventing failure but also a roadmap charting the path to startup success.

Download or read book Why Startups Fail written by David Feinleib and published by Apress. This book was released on 2012-03-28 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For the want-to-be entrepreneur thinking about taking the leap, the boot-strapped entrepreneur trying to energize a business three or four years in, and the venture-backed entrepreneur trying to scale, Why Startups Fail shows you the key mistakes new ventures make—and how to avoid them. Nearly everyone has an idea for a product they could build or a company they could start. But eight out of 10 new businesses fail within the first three years. Even only one in ten venture-backed startups succeeds, and venture capitalists turn down some 99% of the business plans they see. The odds appear to be stacked against you! But entrepreneurs often make the same avoidable mistakes over and over. Why Startups Fail can help you beat the odds and avoid the pitfalls and traps that lead to early startup death. It’s easy to point to successes like Apple, Google, and Facebook. But the biggest lessons can come from failure. What decisions were made, and why? What would the founders have done differently? How did one company become a billion-dollar success while another—with a better product and in the same market—fail? Drawing on personal experience as well as the wisdom of the Silicon Valley startup community, serial entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and blogger Dave Feinleib analyzes companies that have come and gone. In short, powerful chapters, he reveals the keys to successful entrepreneurship: Excellent product/market fit, passion, superb execution, the ability to pivot, stellar team, good funding, and wise spending. In Why Startups Fail, you’ll learn from the mistakes Feinleib has seen made over and over and find out how to position your startup for success. Why Startups Fail: Shows venture-backed startups and boot-strappers alike how to succeed where others fail. Is equally valuable for companies still on the drawing board as well as young firms taking their first steps. Takes you through the key decisions and pitfalls that caused startups to fail and what you can learn from their failures. Covers the critical elements of entrepreneurial success.

Download or read book Learning from Entrepreneurial Failure written by Dean A. Shepherd and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2016-03-04 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Learning from Entrepreneurial Failure provides an important counterweight to the multitude of books that focus on entrepreneurial success. Failure is by far the most common scenario for new ventures and a critical part of the entrepreneurial process is learning from failure and having the motivation to try again. This book examines the various obstacles to learning from failure and explores how they can be overcome. A range of topics are discussed that include: why some people have a more negative emotional reaction to failure than others and how these negative emotions can be managed; why some people delay the decision to terminate a poorly performing entrepreneurial venture; anti-failure biases and stigmatism in organizations and society; and the role that the emotional content of narratives plays in the sense-making process. This thought-provoking book will appeal to academic researchers, graduate students and professionals in the fields of entrepreneurship and industrial psychology.

Download or read book Success and Failure of Microbusiness Owners in Africa written by Michael Frese and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2000-02-28 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Only if they do the right thing at the right time will owners of small businesses succeed. Simple enough, but what are the factors in their psychological makeup that enable them to do it? Frese and his contributors have studied small businesses in four African countries from a psychological perspective—the first time this has been done—and report that it's the psychological aspects of their strategies, not just the strategies themselves, that contribute significantly to their success. They also prove that many of the stereotypes that seem to characterize the owners of microbusinesses are clearly incorrect. Executives, analysts, bankers, international entrepreneurs, and their academic colleagues will discover that many of the conclusions they have drawn from previous studies can not be generalized. Only by separating those that can be generalized from those that can not, can we get a true understanding of the small business entrepreneurial dynamic. Frese and his colleagues focus on South Africa, Zimbabwe, Uganda, and Zambia to produce a clear overview of the research on microbusiness and entrepreneurship in developing countries. They find that psychological strategies are closely related to entrepreneurial success, but because conditions in these countries differ widely, the particulars of certain strategies and their effectiveness may also differ. They show that a number of ideas prevalent among professionals and entrepreneurship researchers in developing countries need to be challenged. Among them, that microenterprise owners who started their companies because they were unemployed do worse than those who started for other, more positive reasons. Also, that human capital (education) represents the most important set of variables to be considered for success (it isn't), or that employing family members decreases success (it doesn't). Well written and impeccably researched, the book is an essential contribution to corporate and academic libraries, as well as to the knowledge of individuals in business, psychology, entrepreneurial and regional studies, and related fields.

Download or read book The Fail Safe Startup written by Tom Eisenmann and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2021-04-01 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Creating something from nothing is a daring act. Tom's wisdom and encouragement will give any reader the confidence to take the leap.' Eric Ries, bestselling author of The Lean Startup ________________ 90% of start-ups fail. But why? And is there a way to avoid the common pitfalls when you start your own business? Over the past 23 years at Harvard Business School Tom Eisenmann has helped launch thousands of startups. An astonishing 13 of these have reached unicorn status. For a decade he has explored the question of why startups fail and in The Fail-Safe Startup explains how you can succeed against the odds. Eisenmann's fascinating, often counter-intuitive, advice will help you avoid common mistakes including: * Launching too early * Aiming too high, too soon * And letting early success lead to misplaced confidence Drawing on case studies from startups of all shapes and sizes from around the world The Fail-Safe Startup will show you how to analyse the failure of others to ensure your success. ________________ 'A must read for any entrepreneur, investor, or startup team member.' Michelle Zatlyn, CEO, Cloudfare 'Eisenmann has truly helped illuminate a path to success by shining a spotlight on common startup failure patterns. His insights are invaluable, whether you're just getting started, or you're eyeing your endgame.' Jenn Hyman, CEO, Rent the Runway

Download or read book Entrepreneurial Success and Failure in the Aviation Industry written by Howard G. Jones and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation shows how the history of the Waco Aircraft Company reflects the transformation of the American economy in the twentieth century. Beginning just after the First World War, its entrepreneur, Clayton J. Brukner, developed a network of relationships within the aviation industry. This allowed his company to develop significant competitive advantages in the private flying market. Those advantages and the popular appeal of aviation helped Waco to become the largest manufacturer of civilian aircraft by 1929. The transformation of business-government relations during the New Deal demanded changes in Brukner's business strategy. The depression significantly cut sales of its popular biplanes, but Waco kept its Troy, Ohio, factory open and earned some profits during the downturn. Brukner's involvement with the trade associations in the 1930s revealed the critical role the government, the military in particular, played in the development of aviation. His flawed leadership in the changing context led to decisions that degraded the quality of its network signals and diminished Waco's effectiveness in crafting appropriate policies. As the international situation grew increasingly tense throughout the 1930s, Waco, like other manufacturers, turned to exports to enhance sales. Contracts with foreign governments partially offset the setback the depression had caused domestically. They did not, however, drive Brukner to evaluate sufficiently Waco's potential participation in the U.S. military market. Only after the Munich Crisis in September 1938, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt decided to call for increased military spending, did the Waco Aircraft Company position itself to receive defense contracts. It was almost three years, however, before the Army Air Forces directed the company to design and manufacture transport aircraft and cargo gliders. In the meantime Brukner had not developed the organizational capabilities needed to manage military contracts.

Download or read book Anticipate Failure written by Lak Ananth and published by Ideapress Publishing. This book was released on 2021-10-26 with total page 185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Quibi was going to put short, premium-quality videos in the hands of millions of content-hungry mobile consumers around the globe. The Apple Newton combined cool with indispensable in a way that was expected to spark a new mobile device market that was much bigger than the personal computing market. The $2,500 Tata Nano automobile was touted as a major gamechanger for India and the millions of aspiring middle-class customers who would surely buy one. The Segway personal transporter was introduced with fanfare as a marvel of technology that was poised to change urban transportation. Each one of these products was to set the world on fire--disrupting markets and changing our lives forever. Until they didn't. In his groundbreaking book, Anticipate Failure, Lak Ananth--CEO of global venture capital firm Next47--describes the most common patterns of failure in innovation. He starts with the premise that building a business based on innovation is a perilous endeavor, and failures big and small are always around the corner. Ananth then dives into instances of failures, guiding the reader to understand root causes. Finally, he provides readers with insights and coaching that will enable them not just to avoid failure, but to anticipate it and then get through it on the way to success. Anticipate Failure contains a riveting mix of stories of high-profile failures in innovation as well as many new stories that will be found nowhere else. In addition, Ananth has interviewed some of today's most successful founders and executives for the book, including Filip Kaliszan, CEO of Verkada; Gokul Rajaram, on the DoorDash executive team, Dr. Roland Busch, CEO of Siemens; James Joaquin, Managing Director of Obvious Ventures, Eran Ben-Shushan, CEO of Bizzabo; Andre Hartung, President of Diagnostic Imaging at Siemens Healthineers; Li Pu, President of Segway Robotics; and many others. Anticipate Failure is not a "do-these-things-and-you-will-succeed" prescriptive kind of business book. Instead, it is a coach and trusted companion that will help any business founder, executive, and manager get through some of the most difficult challenges they will face when they embark on innovation and building a new business. Read it, then put the lessons you learn to work in your own business

Download or read book Fail Fast Fail Often written by Ryan Babineaux and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2013-12-26 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Bold, bossy and bracing, Fail Fast, Fail Often is like a 200-page shot of B12, meant to energize the listless job seeker." —New York Times What if your biggest mistake is that you never make mistakes? Ryan Babineaux and John Krumboltz, psychologists, career counselors, and creators of the popular Stanford University course “Fail Fast, Fail Often,” have come to a compelling conclusion: happy and successful people tend to spend less time planning and more time acting. They get out into the world, try new things, and make mistakes, and in doing so, they benefit from unexpected experiences and opportunities. Drawing on the authors’ research in human development and innovation, Fail Fast, Fail Often shows readers how to allow their enthusiasm to guide them, to act boldly, and to leverage their strengths—even if they are terrified of failure.

Download or read book Trailblazing in Entrepreneurship written by Dean A. Shepherd and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-01-21 with total page 299 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license.In this book, the authors present a challenge for future research to build a stronger, more complete understanding of entrepreneurial phenomena. They argue that this more complete picture of entrepreneurial phenomena will likely come from scholars who undertake at least some trailblazing projects; from scholars who broaden the range of research questions, the potential outcomes of entrepreneurial action, and the selection and combination of research methods; and from researchers who avoid the endless debates about the margins of the field and its sub-fields or about whether one theoretical or philosophical lens is superior to another. This book offers suggestions for future research through a variety of topics including prosocial action, innovation, family business, sustainability and development, and the financial, social, and psychological costs of failure. It promises to make an important contribution to the development of the field and help academics, organizations, and society make useful contributions to the generation of entrepreneurial research.

Download or read book The Other F Word written by John Danner and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2015-03-04 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Leverage the power of failure in your organization Nobody wants to fail, but failure is a fact of life. Most of us treat it as a regrettable, even shameful, event best overlooked. In truth, failure can be a game-changing strategic resource that can help you and your organization achieve the greater success you crave. The Other "F" Word shows how successful leaders and teams are putting failure to work every day - to re-engage employees, spark innovation and accelerate growth. Authors Danner and Coopersmith - with their rare blend of senior-level executive experience, global advising, teaching acumen and cross-discipline perspective - share these valuable new practices, and show how they can improve results across your organization. Based on exclusive interviews with prominent leaders and insightful examples from their own in-depth work, the book features a practical seven-stage framework to liberate failure as a force to advance your leadership agenda. After all, everyone creates and confronts failure on a daily basis. Why not use it to your advantage? The Other "F" Word shows you how to: Start an open, productive conversation about failure across your organization Reduce the fear of failure that stifles initiative, creativity and engagement Anticipate, prepare for and respond to failure, so you can leverage it when it happens Harness failure as a catalyst to drive innovation, improve performance and strengthen culture Failure's like gravity – pervasive and powerful. Whether you're a leader or team member of a startup, a growing business, or an established enterprise, failure is today's lesson for tomorrow. Let The Other "F" Word show you how to apply this lesson and take your company where it needs to go.

Download or read book 6 Secrets to Startup Success written by John BRADBERRY and published by AMACOM Div American Mgmt Assn. This book was released on 2011-03-20 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It takes passion to start a new business. But that same entrepreneurial enthusiasm can also lead you astray.Over six million Americans start businesses every year. That's 11 startups a minute launched by passionate dreamers hoping to transform their lives for the better. But a huge gap exists between the skyrocketing levels of desire and what entrepreneurs actually achieve. The harsh reality is that most new businesses fail within a few years of launch. Why do so few startups make it? And what distinguishes those that do succeed? Entrepreneur, consultant, and investor John Bradberry set out to discover the answer and came to a surprising conclusionùthat the passion that drives and energizes so many founders is also the very thing that leads many of them astray. Filled with compelling real-life stories of both success and failure, this groundbreaking book reveals the key principles entrepreneurs must follow to ensure their big idea is on the right track. In 6 Secrets to Startup Success, readers will learn how to: Convert their passion into economic value with a moneymaking business model ò Improve their readiness to launch and lead a new venture ò Manage funding and cash flows ò Chart a path to breakeven and beyond ò Avoid the pitfalls that often accompany unfettered passion ò Build the stamina needed to persevere over time Complete with indispensable tools including an assessment to gauge a venture's strengths and weaknesses, 6 Secrets to Startup Success will help entrepreneurs everywhere turn their dreams into reality.

Download or read book Entrepreneurial Failure written by Dean A. Shepherd and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2013 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Entrepreneurs act in environments of great risk and high uncertainty, and as a result, failure is a common occurrence. For this volume, Professor Shepherd has made a judicious selection of published articles, which explore the antecedents to and potential outcomes of entrepreneurial failure. By understanding these causes and consequences, entrepreneurs may become better able to manage failure, to reduce its costs and to capitalize on its benefits. With an insightful original introduction by the editor, the book provides an authoritative guide to current scholarly debate in this topical area and lays a foundation for future study.

Download or read book The Great Entrepreneurial Divide written by Charles F. Goetz and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Failing My Way to Success written by Steve Lobel and published by . This book was released on 2015-11-17 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Embracing Failure written by Jessica Jo Santana and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In most places, failure is stigmatized. Yet, failure is the most likely outcome in entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurs, particularly those wishing to remain in entrepreneurship, must be able to navigate failure. This dissertation is motivated by the question of how entrepreneurs recover from failure. Through interviews with founders of failed firms, I learn that entrepreneurs turn to failure narratives to make sense of entrepreneurial failure. By analyzing these failure narratives as cultural artifacts with audiences and genres, I learn that peers are a significant yet undertheorized audience of entrepreneurial failure narratives. After scoping the phenomenon to public peer-to-peer entrepreneurial failure narratives, I propose that peers are an ideally situated audience for making sense of failure while avoiding stigma because they are close enough to the failure experience to understand it but not so close as to be harmed by it. Because of this privileged position, entrepreneurs can turn to peers to learn from failure, collectively redefine failure on more positive terms, access necessary social capital, and re-affirm their entrepreneurial identity, which all contribute to recovery from failure and entrepreneurial persistence. I further propose that this peer engagement is made possible, vitally so in the case of isolated entrepreneurs, through the publication of the failure narrative. However, publication of a failure narrative should invoke stigma. Attribution theory suggests that entrepreneurial failure narrative authors may avoid peer stigma through rhetoric that externalizes failure, which should destigmatize their failure experience and help them to recover their social capital. I apply inductive computational text analysis and correspondence analysis to a set of startup postmortems published on blogging platform Medium.com to analyze how entrepreneurs talk about failure and how peers react to these rhetorics. I combine this with LinkedIn data to identify whether narrators continue in entrepreneurship. I find evidence to support the argument that externalizing rhetoric results in destigmatization. But I also find evidence that entrepreneurs turn to internalizing rhetoric to claim the entrepreneurial identity through their failure narrative. I show how positive peer response may play a critical role in entrepreneurial persistence by providing an empathetic support network that connects failed entrepreneurs to social capital. The final empirical chapter of the dissertation investigates community network dynamics as one mechanism for this relationship. I test the argument that more centrally embedded peer community members engage in more exclusionary community boundary work in response to failure narratives using data from a virtual entrepreneur community on Reddit. I confirm the importance of such online interactions through interviews with authors and commenters of failure narratives to determine whether commentary ties are activated off-line and whether they influence subsequent entrepreneurial outcomes. In a regression of comment sentiment on three measures of community embeddedness -- degree, betweenness, and tenure -- I find that embeddedness, particularly tenure, is directly related to stigmatization of failed members. However, by looking beyond the structure to the content of the tie, my findings suggest that the sentiment of a peer's response might instead predict future centrality, such that boundary work is the explanans rather than explanandum of peer community structure. In such a case, rather than gatekeepers excluding the stigmatized, supportive peers might act as a bridge that connects the stigmatized with social capital for failure recovery and ultimately expands the peer community. I conclude with prospective avenues for future research made possible by these studies.