Why Startups Fail
Why Startups Fail

Author: Tom Eisenmann

Publisher: Currency

Published: 2021-03-30

Total Pages: 370

ISBN-13: 0593137027

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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.

Motivation
Motivation

Author: Brian Tracy

Publisher: AMACOM Div American Mgmt Assn

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 131

ISBN-13: 0814433111

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Most of your employees have all the ingredients for greatness inside them already. They simply need you to motivate them. Learn how today!

Start a Successful Business
Start a Successful Business

Author: Colleen DeBaise

Publisher: AMACOM

Published: 2018-02-01

Total Pages: 271

ISBN-13: 0814439195

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With stories and advice from a fleet of trusted experts, this book is for anyone wishing to get their business off the ground and become the next wildly successful entrepreneur everyone is reading about. 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. 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 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. Start a Successful Business gathers these important lessons into a single path-charting guide.

How Successful People Think
How Successful People Think

Author: John C. Maxwell

Publisher: Center Street

Published: 2009-06-01

Total Pages: 120

ISBN-13: 1599952157

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Gather successful people from all walks of life -- what would they have in common? The way they think! Now you can think as they do and revolutionize your work and life! A Wall Street Journal bestseller, How Successful People Think is the perfect, compact read for today's fast-paced world. America's leadership expert John C. Maxwell will teach you how to be more creative and when to question popular thinking. You'll learn how to capture the big picture while focusing your thinking. You'll find out how to tap into your creative potential, develop shared ideas, and derive lessons from the past to better understand the future. With these eleven keys to more effective thinking, you'll clearly see the path to personal success. The 11 keys to successful thinking include: Big-Picture Thinking - seeing the world beyond your own needs and how that leads to great ideas Focused Thinking - removing mental clutter and distractions to realize your full potential Creative Thinking - thinking in unique ways and making breakthroughs Shared Thinking - working with others to compound results Reflective Thinking - looking at the past to gain a better understanding of the future.

The Founder's Dilemmas
The Founder's Dilemmas

Author: Noam Wasserman

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2013-04

Total Pages: 490

ISBN-13: 0691158304

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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.

HBR Guide to Buying a Small Business
HBR Guide to Buying a Small Business

Author: Richard S. Ruback

Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press

Published: 2017-01-17

Total Pages: 220

ISBN-13: 1633692515

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An all-in-one guide to helping you buy and own your own business. 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 Arm yourself with the advice you need to succeed on the job, with the most trusted brand in business. Packed with how-to essentials from leading experts, the HBR Guides provide smart answers to your most pressing work challenges.

Heart, Smarts, Guts, and Luck
Heart, Smarts, Guts, and Luck

Author: Anthony K. Tjan

Publisher: Harvard Business Press

Published: 2012

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 1422161943

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Examines the traits that define most people who achieve success, heart, smarts, guts, and luck, and helps readers to determine which traits they possess.

Start Your Business in 7 Days
Start Your Business in 7 Days

Author: James Caan

Publisher: Penguin UK

Published: 2012-03-01

Total Pages: 183

ISBN-13: 014197107X

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Work for yourself in just one week with Britain's most dynamic entrepreneur 'Everybody wants to be an entrepreneur. Every single day of my life I am bombarded by people with pitches. But 90% of new businesses fail, because their founders failed to ask themselves the simplest of questions. I can save you years of wasted time and thousands of pounds of wasted money by giving you the ammunition to ask the right questions, and helping you make the decision that is right for you. I will show you how to spend a maximum of seven days deciding if your idea is workable and bankable. How to say 'I'm in', but equally importantly, to have the courage to say 'I'm out'. How to become your own Dragon. Each piece of advice in this book is based on my thirty years of starting businesses. You will find all the fundamental ingredients for any new company, whatever sector you want to be in, whatever size of business you have in mind, along with the tools to make it work. Answer all the tough questions I am going to get you to ask yourself and you will have a business that genuinely has a chance of success. You can be one of the 10% of businesses that do make it.' - James Caan. James Caan is one of the UK's most successful and dynamic entrepreneurs, having built and sold businesses since 1985. After dropping out of school at sixteen and starting his first business in a Pall Mall broom cupboard - armed with little more than charm and his father's advice - Caan went on to make his fortune in the recruitment industry, founding the Alexander Mann Group, a company with a turnover of £130m. A 2003 graduate of Harvard Business School, Caan's most recent endeavour has been to set up private equity firm Hamilton Bradshaw. Caan hit our screens when he joined the panel of the BBC's Dragons' Den in 2007. He is a regular in the national and business press, advises on various Government programmes, and initiates numerous philanthropic projects via the James Caan Foundation.

The Lean Startup
The Lean Startup

Author: Eric Ries

Publisher: Crown Currency

Published: 2011-09-13

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 0307887898

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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.