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 Running a Successful Business After the Start Up Phase written by Liz Broomfield and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2014-07-10 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The follow-up to "How I Survived my First Year of Full-Time Self-Employment: Going it Alone at 40", "Running a Successful Business After the Start-up Phase" looks at what happens once you have survived those start-up years. With sections on building your customer base, investing in your business, blogging and social media, this book gives the mature business-owner an essential toolkit for making more money, having more fun and reclaiming their work-life balance. Read on its own or in conjunction with "How I Survived my First Year of Full-Time Self-Employment" for a no-nonsense and practical guide to EXACTLY how to do things. There are no special secrets to buy or courses to take; the book links to extra resources on the Libro website which can be accessed free of charge. Do you want to know how to: -Say yes to the right customers and no to the wrong ones -Build your social media platform in a reciprocating and principled way -Make more money doing less work -Reclaim your work-life balance -Build links with other people in your industry and beyond -Succeed in a mature business If the answer to any of these is yes, read this book now!

Download or read book The Founder s Dilemmas written by Noam Wasserman and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2013-04 with total page 490 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Founder's Dilemmas examines how early decisions by entrepreneurs can make or break a startup and its team. Drawing on a decade of research, including quantitative data on almost ten thousand founders as well as inside stories of founders like Evan Williams of Twitter and Tim Westergren of Pandora, Noam Wasserman reveals the common pitfalls founders face and how to avoid them.

Download or read book Super Founders written by Ali Tamaseb and published by PublicAffairs. This book was released on 2021-05-18 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Super Founders uses a data-driven approach to understand what really differentiates billion-dollar startups from the rest—revealing that nearly everything we thought was true about them is false! Ali Tamaseb has spent thousands of hours manually amassing what may be the largest dataset ever collected on startups, comparing billion-dollar startups with those that failed to become one—30,000 data points on nearly every factor: number of competitors, market size, the founder’s age, his or her university’s ranking, quality of investors, fundraising time, and many, many more. And what he found looked far different than expected. Just to mention a few: Most unicorn founders had no industry experience; There's no disadvantage to being a solo founder or to being a non-technical CEO; Less than 15% went through any kind of accelerator program; Over half had strong competitors when starting--being first to market with an idea does not actually matter. You will also hear the stories of the early days of billion-dollar startups first-hand. The book includes exclusive interviews with the founders/investors of Zoom, Instacart, PayPal, Nest, Github, Flatiron Health, Kite Pharma, Facebook, Stripe, Airbnb, YouTube, LinkedIn, Lyft, DoorDash, Coinbase, and Square, venture capital investors like Elad Gil, Peter Thiel, Alfred Lin from Sequoia Capital and Keith Rabois of Founders Fund, as well as previously untold stories about the early days of ByteDance (TikTok), WhatsApp, Dropbox, Discord, DiDi, Flipkart, Instagram, Careem, Peloton, and SpaceX. Packed with counterintuitive insights and inside stories from people who have built massively successful companies, Super Founders is a paradigm-shifting and actionable guide for entrepreneurs, investors, and anyone interested in what makes a startup successful.

Download or read book Entering StartUpLand written by Jeffrey Bussgang and published by Harvard Business Press. This book was released on 2017-10-10 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many professionals aspire to work for startups. Executives from large companies view them as models to help them adapt to today's dynamic innovation economy, while freshly minted MBAs see magic in founding something new. Yes, startups look magical, but they can also be chaotic and inaccessible. Many books are written for those who aspire to be founders, but a company only has one or two of those. What's needed is something that deconstructs the typical startup organization for the thousands of employees who join a fledgling company and do the day-to-day work required to grow it into something of value. Entering StartUpLand is a practical, step-by-step guide that provides an insider's analysis of various startup roles and responsibilities--including product management, marketing, growth, and sales--to help you figure out if you want to join a startup and what to expect if you do. You'll gain insight into how successful startups operate and learn to assess which ones you might want to join--or emulate. Inside this book you'll find: A tour of typical startup roles to help you determine which one might be the best fit for you Profiles of startup executives across many different functions who share their stories and describe their responsibilities A methodology to identify and evaluate startups and position yourself to find the opportunity that's right for you Written by an experienced venture capitalist, entrepreneur, and Harvard Business School professor, Entering StartUpLand will guide you as you seek your ideal entry point into this popular, cutting-edge organizational paradigm.

Download or read book Disrupted written by Dan Lyons and published by Hachette Books. This book was released on 2016-04-05 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An instant New York Times bestseller, Dan Lyons' "hysterical" (Recode) memoir, hailed by the Los Angeles Times as "the best book about Silicon Valley," takes readers inside the maddening world of fad-chasing venture capitalists, sales bros, social climbers, and sociopaths at today's tech startups. For twenty-five years Dan Lyons was a magazine writer at the top of his profession--until one Friday morning when he received a phone call: Poof. His job no longer existed. "I think they just want to hire younger people," his boss at Newsweek told him. Fifty years old and with a wife and two young kids, Dan was, in a word, screwed. Then an idea hit. Dan had long reported on Silicon Valley and the tech explosion. Why not join it? HubSpot, a Boston start-up, was flush with $100 million in venture capital. They offered Dan a pile of stock options for the vague role of "marketing fellow." What could go wrong? HubSpotters were true believers: They were making the world a better place ... by selling email spam. The office vibe was frat house meets cult compound: The party began at four thirty on Friday and lasted well into the night; "shower pods" became hook-up dens; a push-up club met at noon in the lobby, while nearby, in the "content factory," Nerf gun fights raged. Groups went on "walking meetings," and Dan's absentee boss sent cryptic emails about employees who had "graduated" (read: been fired). In the middle of all this was Dan, exactly twice the age of the average HubSpot employee, and literally old enough to be the father of most of his co-workers, sitting at his desk on his bouncy-ball "chair."

Download or read book Startup Leadership written by Derek Lidow and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2014-03-03 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anyone can start a business. But only leaders can succeed. Most entrepreneurs know the long odds: only a fraction of them will lead their enterprises through the rocky stages of growth to launch self-sustaining companies. Very few know how to outflank the failures that await them at every turn, including the most painful—being abandoned by key members of their team or getting pushed out by their board just as their business starts to generate real value. Derek Lidow is on a mission to improve these odds and change these outcomes. Throughout his long career—as CEO, innovator, and entrepreneur—he has tested virtually every aspect of launching a business. Lidow now argues that success is far less dependent upon a firm’s idea or any grand strategy than it is upon something more personal: leadership. Emerging companies have specific leadership requirements, stage by fast-moving stage. Few founders have been able to leverage the tremendous power of this underrecognized reality—until now. Startup Leadership demonstrates how founders can adopt the skills that are required at each stage of their journey. Whether you are at the idea stage or managing a more mature enterprise, you can start to recognize the fundamental conflict: how to balance your selfish drives with the more selfless leadership required by the organization at any given time. The book shows you how to achieve this balance by: Assessing your unique motivations, traits, and skills Creating a personal leadership strategy that leverages your strengths and mitigates your weaknesses Mastering how to lead teams, including boards Understanding the five prerequisites for driving change Taking control of your inevitable crises, thereby strengthening your team and your leadership With Lidow’s help, you will learn how to become the startup leader your business needs, and you’ll move forward with your plans with greater confidence and success.

Download or read book The Start Up J Curve written by Howard Love and published by Greenleaf Book Group. This book was released on 2016-08-30 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A predictable pattern of success Entrepreneurs who have read early drafts of The Start-Up J Curve responded, ''I wish I had this book years ago.'' A start-up unfolds in a predictable pattern; the more aware entrepreneurs are of this pattern, the better able they will be to capitalize on it. Author Howard Love calls this pattern the start-up J Curve: The toughest part of the endeavor is the time between the actual start of a new business and when the product and model are firmly established. The Start-Up J Curve gives entrepreneurs the tools they need to get through the early challenges so they can reach the primary value creation that lies beyond. Love brings thirty-five years of start-up experience to this comprehensive guide to starting a business. He outlines the six predictable stages of start-up growth and details the activities that should be undertaken at each stage to ensure success and to avoid common pitfalls. Instead of feeling lost and confused after a setback, start-up founders and investors can anticipate the challenges, overcome the obstacles, and ride the curve to the top.

Download or read book HBR Guide to Buying a Small Business written by Richard S. Ruback and published by Harvard Business Review Press. This book was released on 2017-01-17 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Think big, buy small. Are you looking for an alternative to a career path at a big firm? Does founding your own start-up seem too risky? There is a radical third path open to you: You can buy a small business and run it as CEO. Purchasing a small company offers significant financial rewards—as well as personal and professional fulfillment. Leading a firm means you can be your own boss, put your executive skills to work, fashion a company environment that meets your own needs, and profit directly from your success. But finding the right business to buy and closing the deal isn't always easy. In the HBR Guide to Buying a Small Business, Harvard Business School professors Richard Ruback and Royce Yudkoff help you: Determine if this path is right for you Raise capital for your acquisition Find and evaluate the right prospects Avoid the pitfalls that could derail your search Understand why a "dull" business might be the best investment Negotiate a potential deal with the seller Avoid deals that fall through at the last minute

Download or read book Starting a Business written by Walter Grant and published by . This book was released on 2020-03-24 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Do you hate your day job and find yourself staring relentlessly at the clock every day, counting down the minutes to when you can finally go home? Are you looking for a change? Keep reading... Would you like to quit your boring job and never return? Do you have a genius business idea that you are passionate about turning into a reality, yet don't know a single thing about owning a business, let alone starting one? Are you in search of a new adventure, a new phase of your life where you become the boss and make decisions according to your own visions? With how repetitive work life can get, it's difficult not to fantasize about how life would be like if you didn't have to wake up at 6 am every morning, drive to work, and be someone's puppet for an entire day. What if you were told that that dream didn't have to be a figment of your imagination, but a reality? Your reality. No matter how many businesses pop up around the world, there will always be room for new ones to emerge. In this forever-evolving modern world, new ideas are always welcome. So, the question is: What life-changing ideas will you bring to the market? In This Book, you will discover: Step-by-step instructions on how to launch your own business in just 30 days without prior experience A checklist for each step of the way, guiding you along your journey and making sure you have all your ducks in a row before proceeding onwards to your next move The 8 key skills you must adapt in order to become a successful entrepreneur and achieve the unthinkable How to gain loyal customers all while staying true to your morals which will have them supporting you until the end of time The one step you cannot skip, or else it may prove to be the demise of your business Why your employees' mindsets could make or break your business, as well as how to mold them into one like-minded team The secret to mastering salesmanship without years of training--say goodbye to using sleazy sales techniques no one enjoys falling victim to. And much more.. If you're an absolute business novice and don't know the first thing about what it takes to launch your own startup, then don't worry, even you can follow along. With straightforward guidance, clear instructions, and a checklist to assist you every step of the way, becoming a business owner is not far from your reach. You need not have saved up loads of cash over the past few years either, as funding a business is not as black-and-white as you may think. There are plenty of ways to find the money you need in order to finance your situation according to your level of comfort and the amount required, all of which will be covered. If you have a business idea you know there will be customers for, don't keep waiting around! You need to get on track to construct the business of your dreams before someone else beats you to it. And if millionaire Fraser Doherty, the founder of Super Jam, was able to start his own business at the young age of 14, then so can you. The possibilities are endless! It's just up to you to take the initiative... If you want to discover how you can ditch your 9-5, become your own boss and lead the business of your dreams, then scroll up and click the "Add to Cart" button right now.

Download or read book Traversing the Traction Gap written by Bruce Cleveland and published by Radius Book Group. This book was released on 2019-02-21 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traction. Startups Need It. Learn How To Get It. Vision, groundbreaking ideas, total commitment, and boundless enthusiasm characterize most startups, but they require capital to go from promising product to scalable business. More than 80 percent of all early-stage startups fail. Most of them can build a product, but the vast majority stumble when it comes time to take those products to market due to poor “market engineering” skills. Traversing the Traction Gap exposes the reasons behind that scary failure rate and provides a prescriptive how-to guide, focused specifically on market engineering techniques, so startups can succeed. The go-to-market hurdle is insurmountable to many startups. Just when they most need to establish a foothold in the market, they run short on time and money. This is the Traction Gap, that period of time introducing a new product into the marketplace and being able to scale it during a rapidly closing window of opportunity. Traversing the Traction Gap is a practical guidebook for navigating the tumultuous early life of a startup. Based on real-life examples, the advice from Cleveland and the members of the Wildcat Venture Partners team provides a roadmap and metrics for succeeding where others have failed.

Download or read book How to Start a Business in 27 Days written by Bill Curtis and published by CreateSpace. This book was released on 2015-03-13 with total page 124 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If you dream of starting and running a successful business but don't know how to start-this book will help you achieve that dream. You don't need a business degree to create a successful business. This valuable book is loaded with tips, strategies, and best practices you can rely on to start your business right, step-by-step. Too many aspiring entrepreneurs get stuck in the idea or planning phase or they focus on the wrong priorities and spend needless time and energy fixing common startup mistakes. A lot of new businesses fail, but many of those failures are preventable. This book is laid out in a sequential, day-by-day format so you can go from idea to business launch in as little as 27 days. An investment of 3 hours per day for 27 days is all you need to achieve your dream of business ownership. Need it done faster? You can start your new business in about 80 hours using our proven, systematized process and the resources outlined in the book. If you don't have the time to dedicate 3 hours every day, you can also take a slower pace and apply these steps over several months to methodically lay the groundwork for your future success as a business owner. In this book you will discover how to - Create job security as an entrepreneur and business owner, - Avoid common startup pitfalls, - Discover alternative financing for startups and new entrepreneurs, - Prevent wasted time and resources, - Implement proven tips and startup strategies, - Gain confidence in the quality of your business idea, - Deal with changes in today's business environment, - Make your product or service better and more valuable to your customers, - Prioritize startup expenses, - Test and prove your ideas and assumptions, - Disrupt your competitors and position yourself to be unique in the marketplace, - Discover the market fundamentals that will help you find and attract scores of customers, - Focus your products and services to a very specific niche to more deeply connect with your ideal customers, - Obtain the legal forms you need and learn where to file them, - Understand the importance of social media and how to start building your social media marketing platform, - Get online resources and time saving templates to accelerate your launch. Use this book as your guide to plan and launch your new business the right way. Don't waste your time and effort trying to figure out the process on your own. The authors are experienced, long-time business partners, and for them, how to start a business is not just theory. Apply the valuable information in this book to maximize your potential for success for you and your new business.

Download or read book Start a Successful Business written by Colleen DeBaise and published by AMACOM. This book was released on 2018-02-01 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For decades, makers, doers, and dreamers have turned to Inc. for help in getting their businesses off the ground. The insanely successful entrepreneurs behind organizations like Skullcandy, Spanx, Elon Musk, and Airbnb learned lessons at every stage, experienced unexpected setbacks, and in the end triumphed wildly. All along, Inc. was there capturing it all so that others could experience even greater successes than these titans of business.Start a Successful Business gathers these important lessons into a single path-charting guide. From brainstorming to crowdfunding to building partnerships, the book walks new and aspiring founders through seven crucial stages, including:• Establishing a brilliant business idea• Selecting the best structure and strategy for your startup• Getting the word out and building clientele• Preparing to go global• And more!Learn how Elon Musk stays wildly productive. Discover how Sarah Blakely got the inspiration for Spanx. Read the stories of how a hashtag accelerated Airbnb’s success and how Warby Parker shook up the eyewear industry with its innovative, socially conscious business model. With the war stories and keen advice from a fleet of trusted experts, Start a Successful Business provides the all-encompassing guide for anyone wishing to not only get their business off the ground, but to become the next wildly successful entrepreneur everyone is reading about.

Download or read book The Lean Startup written by Eric Ries and published by Crown Currency. This book was released on 2011-09-13 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Most startups fail. But many of those failures are preventable. The Lean Startup is a new approach being adopted across the globe, changing the way companies are built and new products are launched. Eric Ries defines a startup as an organization dedicated to creating something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty. This is just as true for one person in a garage or a group of seasoned professionals in a Fortune 500 boardroom. What they have in common is a mission to penetrate that fog of uncertainty to discover a successful path to a sustainable business. The Lean Startup approach fosters companies that are both more capital efficient and that leverage human creativity more effectively. Inspired by lessons from lean manufacturing, it relies on “validated learning,” rapid scientific experimentation, as well as a number of counter-intuitive practices that shorten product development cycles, measure actual progress without resorting to vanity metrics, and learn what customers really want. It enables a company to shift directions with agility, altering plans inch by inch, minute by minute. Rather than wasting time creating elaborate business plans, The Lean Startup offers entrepreneurs—in companies of all sizes—a way to test their vision continuously, to adapt and adjust before it’s too late. Ries provides a scientific approach to creating and managing successful startups in a age when companies need to innovate more than ever.

Download or read book Profit First written by Mike Michalowicz and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2017-02-21 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Author of cult classics The Pumpkin Plan and The Toilet Paper Entrepreneur offers a simple, counterintuitive cash management solution that will help small businesses break out of the doom spiral and achieve instant profitability. Conventional accounting uses the logical (albeit, flawed) formula: Sales - Expenses = Profit. The problem is, businesses are run by humans, and humans aren't always logical. Serial entrepreneur Mike Michalowicz has developed a behavioral approach to accounting to flip the formula: Sales - Profit = Expenses. Just as the most effective weight loss strategy is to limit portions by using smaller plates, Michalowicz shows that by taking profit first and apportioning only what remains for expenses, entrepreneurs will transform their businesses from cash-eating monsters to profitable cash cows. Using Michalowicz's Profit First system, readers will learn that: · Following 4 simple principles can simplify accounting and make it easier to manage a profitable business by looking at bank account balances. · A small, profitable business can be worth much more than a large business surviving on its top line. · Businesses that attain early and sustained profitability have a better shot at achieving long-term growth. With dozens of case studies, practical, step-by-step advice, and his signature sense of humor, Michalowicz has the game-changing roadmap for any entrepreneur to make money they always dreamed of.

Download or read book HBR s 10 Must Reads on Entrepreneurship and Startups featuring Bonus Article Why the Lean Startup Changes Everything by Steve Blank written by Harvard Business Review and published by Harvard Business Press. This book was released on 2018-01-23 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The best entrepreneurs balance brilliant business ideas with a rigorous commitment to serving their customers' needs. If you read nothing else on entrepreneurship and startups, read these 10 articles by experts in the field. We've combed through hundreds of articles in the Harvard Business Review archive and selected the most important ones to help you build your company for enduring success. Leading experts and practitioners such as Clayton Christensen, Marc Andreessen, and Reid Hoffman provide the insights and advice that will inspire you to: Understand what makes entrepreneurial leaders tick Know what matters in a great business plan Adopt lean startup practices such as business model experimentation Be prepared for the race for scale in Silicon Valley Better understand the world of venture capital--and know what you'll get along with VC funding Take an alternative approach to entrepreneurship: buy an existing business and run it as CEO This collection of articles includes "Hiring an Entrepreneurial Leader," by Timothy Butler; "How to Write a Great Business Plan," by William A. Sahlman; "Why the Lean Start-Up Changes Everything," by Steve Blank; "The President of SRI Ventures on Bringing Siri to Life," by Norman Winarsky; "In Search of the Next Big Thing," an interview with Marc Andreessen by Adi Ignatius; "Six Myths About Venture Capitalists," by Diane Mulcahy; "Chobani's Founder on Growing a Start-Up Without Outside Investors," by Hamdi Ulukaya; "Network Effects Aren’t Enough," by Andrei Hagiu and Simon Rothman; "Blitzscaling," an interview with Reid Hoffman by Tim Sullivan; "Buying Your Way into Entrepreneurship," by Richard S. Ruback and Royce Yudkoff; and "The Founder's Dilemma," by Noam Wasserman.

Download or read book Disciplined Entrepreneurship written by Bill Aulet and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-08-12 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 24 Steps to Success! Disciplined Entrepreneurship will change the way you think about starting a company. Many believe that entrepreneurship cannot be taught, but great entrepreneurs aren’t born with something special – they simply make great products. This book will show you how to create a successful startup through developing an innovative product. It breaks down the necessary processes into an integrated, comprehensive, and proven 24-step framework that any industrious person can learn and apply. You will learn: Why the “F” word – focus – is crucial to a startup’s success Common obstacles that entrepreneurs face – and how to overcome them How to use innovation to stand out in the crowd – it’s not just about technology Whether you’re a first-time or repeat entrepreneur, Disciplined Entrepreneurship gives you the tools you need to improve your odds of making a product people want. Author Bill Aulet is the managing director of the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship as well as a senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management. For more please visit http://disciplinedentrepreneurship.com/