Description
If you want your startup to succeed, you need to understand why startups fail.โWhether youโre a first-time founder or looking to bring innovation into a corporate environment, Why Startups Fail is essential reading.โโEric 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 couldnโt answer it.
So he launched a multiyear research project to find out. In Why Startups Fail, Eisenmann reveals his six distinct patterns that account for the vast majority of startup failures.
โข Bad Bedfellows. Startup success is thought to rest largely on the founderโs talents and instincts. But the wrong team, investors, or partners can sink a venture just as quickly.
โข False Starts. In following the oft-cited advice to โfail fastโ and to โlaunch before youโre ready,โ founders risk wasting time and capital on the wrong solutions.
โข False Promises. Success with early adopters can be misleading and give founders unwarranted confidence to expand.
โข Speed Traps. Despite the pressure to โget big fast,โ hypergrowth can spell disaster for even the most promising ventures.
โข 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.
โข 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 promiseโfrom 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 vehiclesโEisenmann 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. ISBN:9780593137024
