Top 5 Learnings After Mentoring 100 Startups
A startup’s earliest strategic plans are likely to be hunch- or intuition-guided, and that is a good thing. To translate those instincts into data, entrepreneurs must, in Steve Blank’s famous phrase, “get out of the building” and start learning.
Eric Ries • The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses
Take, for example, the ambition to “make your venture-backed startup profitable”: to develop, market, and distribute a product or service that’s never existed before, in a form that’s valuable and accessible enough for large numbers of people to want to pay you for it, in sufficient quantity that your revenue consistently exceeds your costs.
If you... See more
If you... See more
Gena Gorlin • The Psychological Needs of the Extremely Ambitious
Classic start-up growth prioritizes efficiency in the face of uncertainty. Starting a company is like jumping off a cliff and assembling an airplane on the way down; being resource-efficient lets you “glide” to minimize the rate of descent, giving you the time to learn things about your market, technology, and team before you hit the ground. This k
... See moreChris Yeh • Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies
I should mention one sort of initial tactic that usually doesn't work: the Big Launch. I occasionally meet founders who seem to believe startups are projectiles rather than powered aircraft, and that they'll make it big if and only if they're launched with sufficient initial velocity. They want to launch simultaneously in 8 different publications, ... See more
Do Things that Don't Scale
Only 5 percent of entrepreneurship is the big idea, the business model, the whiteboard strategizing, and the splitting up of the spoils. The other 95 percent is the gritty work that is measured by innovation accounting: product prioritization decisions, deciding which customers to target or listen to, and having the courage to subject a grand visio
... See moreEric Ries • The Lean Startup: The Million Copy Bestseller Driving Entrepreneurs to Success
Ries describes five core principles: 1. Entrepreneurs are everywhere—anyone creating new products or services in the face of extreme uncertainty. 2. Entrepreneurship is management—one can use processes to navigate uncertainty, and so these processes must be managed. 3. Validated learning—startups exist to learn how to build a sustainable business.
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