99 Reasons Why Startups Fail

"Learn from the mistakes of others. You can never live long enough to make them all yourself" Startup ideas inspire hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs all over the world. On the flip side, the majority of entrepreneurial ventures fail. Have you ever wondered what the catalyst for such failure is? Startup failures are complex. Most of them are not caused by stupid or simple mistakes. So, be careful when you conclude: Startup X failed because of Y. Therefore I should avoid doing Y in my own startup. It is not that simple. Startups fail because of a combination of factors and causes, some of which are almost impossible to put a finger on. This book is aimed at identifying reasons that can lead even great ideas to complete failure. It also presents how you can make your way around them, earning everlasting growth and prosperity. ABOUT THE AUTHORS Omar Mohout is a Growth Engineer. He is an expert in building repeatable, scalable customer acquisition engines for born-on-the-web companies. Omar is an entrepreneur that turned startup advisor & mentor. Après un doctorat en informatique, Carine Lucas a travaillé plusieurs années comme consultante sur des projets d'innovation. Chez Agoria, elle conseille les entreprises sur leur stratégie digitale et leur business models.

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.

When you’re starting your own venture startup, the last thing you want to focus on is failure. Nevertheless, if you explore the common reasons for failure in advance, you will be significantly less prone to succumb to them yourself. This book is a collection of the main reasons why startups come up short and tips for avoiding them.

In some cases, technology-based projects have revolutionized the way of living by contributing to job and wealth creation. These types of ventures, regardless of their outstanding relevance, are the exception rather than the norm in that they account for only a very small percentage of entrepreneurial activity. Although not ignoring these important ventures, the main goal of this title is to fully unleash the wide potential of the entrepreneurial activity, exploring and highlighting the somewhat hidden part, which is ultimately responsible for the largest part of new businesses and, as a consequence, for the wellbeing of millions of people virtually everywhere. The Handbook of Research on Approaches to Alternative Entrepreneurship Opportunities is a collection of innovative research on the methods and applications of entrepreneurial activity beyond the traditional boundaries of entrepreneurship research. While highlighting topics including collective business, organizational performance, and generational differences, this book is ideally designed for entrepreneurs, developers, researchers, business managers, industry professionals, academicians, and students seeking to draw attention to distinctive and multifaceted types of entrepreneurship.

The past ten years are characterized by a strong growth in entrepreneurship and the accelerated creation of new businesses offering innovative products and services. The focus of this book is on startups and scaleups intending to scale their business through collaboration with corporates, primarily in the capacity of client or venture partner. No startup or scaleup can go-it-alone entirely and is required to collaborate with other partners to ensure growth. It is crucial for startups and scaleups to think beyond (corporate) venture capital financings and actively use a vast spectrum of corporate partnering arrangements to scale their business. This book thus takes an expansive approach and analyses corporate partnering transactions from a much broader perspective, covering several types of partnering models for collaboration between corporates and startups and scaleups, with a very strong focus on the perspective of the startups and scaleups while engaging in these types of transactions. ABOUT THE AUTHOR David Dessers, Co-founder and Managing Partner of Cresco, is one of the go-to lawyers of the Belgian venture capital scene. David assists entrepreneurs and companies in the design and execution of their plans during all stages of the private company lifecycle, including seed and venture capital funding, acquisitions and dispositions, as well as equity incentive, contracting and intellectual property needs. He frequently represents venture capital funds and corporates in structuring, negotiating and closing investments and divestments in high-growth companies. David furthermore advises clients regularly with respect to complex commercial transactions designed to protect and maximize the value of technology assets, including technology licenses and acquisitions, research and development collaborations, and corporate partnering transactions. He obtained his law degree at the universities of Antwerp and Leuven in Belgium. He also holds an LLM from the universities of Oxford, Hamburg and Rotterdam. David is recommended as leading lawyer by Chambers Global, Chambers Europe, Legal500 and IFLR1000 for Corporate and M&A, Banking, Finance and Capital Markets, and Information Technology. David has given workshops and seminars at leading corporates on a wide variety of topics, including corporate venturing transactions and alliances. He is an active speaker at incubation and acceleration organizations, such as imec.ventures, B-Hive.eu, Watt Factory, Tech Tour, Level Up and Antwerp Management School. David is a founding partner of Cresco, a premier Belgian law firm for entrepreneurs, companies and investors with market-leading capabilities and thorough experience in private equity and venture capital, emerging and growth companies, mergers and acquisitions, technology and innovation counseling, and complex corporate alliances and commercial agreements.

People want to change things, improve the world. Our mind cannot live without meaning. Just like the body asks for food. We all know that we have the leverage to make things happen. It’s important to know what to do, but it’s even more important to remember why you do what you do. Leaving a legacy is about impact surviving the erosion of time. About scaling and accelerating positive impact. Be ready to get inspired about leaving your own legacy. How do you leave a legacy? What drives a legacy? How about your legacy statement? And how about increasing your impact? Will you choose for scaling up, scaling deep, scaling out, or maybe even scaling down? Get carried away by the impact point of view and discover how you can increase the impact of your organization too. This book reveals strategies of a diversity of organizations, from NPO’s over associations, governmental and knowledge institutes to commercial organizations, who succeeded in increasing their social impact. Because no matter in what kind of organization you are spending your days, you too may leave a legacy that has improved our world socially or ecologically. ABOUT THE AUTHORS Kaat Peeters is an impact maker with a track record in associations as well as governmental institutes. Kaat established a European network and was responsible, as manager, to develop two newly founded associations in the cultural field into solid organizations. Meanwhile, Kaat ran a shop in Persian and Arabic interior objects and a Bed&Breakfast. In 2013, Kaat established the ‘Sociale Innovatiefabriek’, a Belgian based accelerator that stimulates and facilitates social innovation and social entrepreneurship counting an amazing community of more than 500 innovators. Nowadays, Kaat is lecturer social innovation at the University College ‘Erasmushogeschool’ and with her consulting organisation ‘Impact Projects’, Kaat supports impact organisations with their growth strategies. As hands-on Board of Directors member of cultural associations and social enterprises, making impact is always of paramount importance in her work. Impact has become the baseline of both her personal and professional life. Omar Mohout, currently Entrepreneurship Fellow at Sirris, is a former technology entrepreneur, a widely published technology author, C-level advisor to high growth startups as well as Fortune 500 companies and Professor of Entrepreneurship at the University of Antwerp, the Antwerp Management School, ULB and Solvay Brussels School of Economics and Management. He is Co-chair of the Circle Of Growth; Community host for Corporate Venturing Europe; Organizer of the Growth Hacking Meetup, Co-founder of the #BeTech Community and keeps track of European funding and scaleups on scaleups.sirris.be.

This book is the disquisition of what I know and truly believe makes products a success and how you can replicate it within your company. What is this book about? Why should I read this book? Why did you write this book? These were the three questions I received from a good friend. So what is this book about my good friend asks? This book is like a cookbook with recipes for lean innovation, a collection of concrete techniques and strategies that are invaluable and lead to the same end: game-changing innovation. The book is a compilation of what I consider the fundamental models for lean innovation and some of my own complementary models for successful innovation1. A supplement to the existing international reference works on innovation (Alexander Osterwalder, Eric Ries, Ash Maurya, Clayton Christensen...) I will complement and adapt the existing tools and methods. Enhance their flavor “monter la sauce” as they say in France. The book is mainly a “how to” book and a “lessons learned” book, substantiated by good analysis and reflection. Like a chess book to improve your play this book will improve your innovation. The book provides an analysis of proven tactics and strategies on how to win the lean innovation game as well as a post mortem on why it is so often lost. Should you read this book? Here is some bad news, if you were hoping to improve on your innovation by spending more on R&D, it won’t work. The consulting giant PWC confirmed in its Global Innovation 1000 research that just increasing R&D resources will not solve the innovation problem ! The presented methodology can be quickly employed and implemented by the reader with the book as an instruction manual !

How do you innovate, how do you structure your organization, your team, your personal life? You need a detailed plan and everything laid out for the future! Really? Well, maybe not always. Maybe you need to operate also with the Spaghetti Principle. Discover how you can embrace this special principle and really make innovation stick. Specifically, you will learn how to deal in today’s dynamic and uncertain environment. With practical examples from leaders and companies you will see how a totally different approach to strategy and innovation can revolutionize your work. With examples from fields as diverse as the Startup world, nature, opera, TED, Lars Sudmann will awaken you to an inspiring and thought-provoking journey of innovation. You will see innovation and experimentation with different eyes after reading this book. Lars Sudmann has been a CFO and a strategy manager at leading organisations. He is now a corporate advisor, university lecturer and explorer of what makes innovation and change possible. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Lars Sudmann - Lars Sudmann is an explorer of innovation and leadership. He searches for the tools and strategies that the best leaders on the frontiers of leadership use and apply and makes these available for everyday users. His TEDx talks on leadership and innovation are top-ranked with more than 500.000 views, and he has been featured on Fast Company, BBC Capital, The Economist Career Network, Trends, The Chicago Tribune and many more. Professionally, he has had various roles, ranging from Innovation Portfolio Strategy manager, CFO Belgium at Procter & Gamble, Guest Professor on Decision Making, and Startup Board Advisor. He now advises corporates, SMEs, startups and high-performing individuals. More about Lars Sudmann can be found at www.lars-sudmann.com.