I’m writing a book so I only have the capacity to work with 2 additional startups at present. Contact me here for inquiries.
I can dramatically accelerate the success of your startup.
If you like Lean Startup, Customer Development, The Business Model Canvas and Growth Hacking, I’ve taken all of those methodologies to the next level by integrating them into a single, unified Business Operating System called Startup Science, so that entrepreneurs can create better, faster and more successful Startups that transform the World.
In 2011, I co-founded the Startup Genome Project and over the last 5 years we’ve conducted the largest data-driven studies in the world with over 34,000 startups on what makes them succeed or fail. You can check out our 5 critically acclaimed reports here.
What we’ve learned from these studies is that the #1 factor that differentiates successful startups from failed startups is the executive’s team ability to deal with uncertainty. A startup’s success is not determined by how well it executes but rather by how well it determines the right things to work on.
Most startups fail because they efficiently execute tasks that turn out to be irrelevant. In the beginning of the startup journey that most often translates to building a product nobody wants. Later on if a startup is in the rare group that manages to reach Product / Market Fit, common misprioritizations include:
– Spending too many resources on optimizing the product at the expense of customer growth
– Failing to find a repeatable and scalable sales and marketing strategy
– Focusing energy optimizing the wrong metrics
– Getting jerked around by investors perceptions of what your company should be doing
– Being unable to create a productive and harmonious culture
Running a startup is a massive juggling act that requires coordinating a myriad of variables with very limited resources: fundraising, recruiting, culture, product development, customer development, sales and marketing. And all this has to be juggled while constantly racing against the clock. If you try to bootstrap and you’re on to something big, a competitor will come out of the woodwork and eat your lunch. If you raise money from investors, you will constantly have the clock reset every new financing round, with about 18 months of runway to hit your next milestones, so you can raise your next 18 months of financing.
Most founders try to manage this complexity using their intuition or other methodologies that are not designed for startups. The problem is, that simply isn’t good enough. Startups are too complex and are under too much pressure. The margin for error for creating a successful startup is too thin. If your startup runs too far in the wrong direction, by building the wrong product or running a failed marketing strategy, your company could be too short on runway to survive to see another day. Therefore, having the right strategy is absolutely critical.
So what is the alternative to the status quo?
Using proven principles, frameworks and methodologies designed for startups that allow you make sense of complexity that lead to insights that create massive progress.
Over the last decade the startup world has generated a plethora of ideas in books, blog posts and speeches about how to successfully run a company. Unfortunately, there is now so much information out there that many startup executives describe to me that they are overwhelmed by it all.
How is a Startup Executives to know which information is most important? What to do with all the contradictory information? And how and when to apply particular ideas?
What’s missing is a comprehensive, coherent and cohesive model that describes how all of these ideas fit together.
That’s what I’ve been working since 2009: laying the foundations for a Management Science of Entrepreneurship by creating the most integrated, predictive and actionable model of a modern, 21st century, high-growth technology startup.
Large companies have a management science. Its foundations were laid a few hundreds years ago by Frederick Taylor, Henry Ford and Alfred Sloan. And its knowledge, principles and practices have been continuously improved and disseminated in Business Schools and MBA programs all around the world. This management science is a big part of what makes large companies so successful. But their management science is built around efficiency, precision and execution. Startups require a new kind management science built around uncertainty, learning and speed.
My team and I can work with you to both understand this new management science and apply it to holistically diagnose and solve many of your company’s most important problems. This can save you months of time and increase your valuation by millions of dollars.
