Entrepreneurial Success Quotes

The type of person you are is usually reflected in your business. To improve your business, first improve yourself.

When you work on something that only has the capacity to make you 5 dollars, it does not matter how much harder you work – the most you will make is 5 dollars.

Money is always eager and ready to work for anyone who is ready to employ it.

Success in life is not for those who run fast, but for those who keep running and always on the move.

While others were dreaming about it - I was getting it done.

The bigger the 'why' the easier the 'how'.

An entrepreneur is a man who knows he can fail, but he does not accept to fail before he actually fails, and when he fails he learns from his errors and moves on.

The greatest threat to a robust, autonomous civil society is the ever-growing Leviathan state and those like Obama who see it as the ultimate expression of the collective. Obama compounds the fallacy by declaring the state to be the font of entrepreneurial success. How so? It created the infrastructure - roads, bridges, schools, Internet - off which we all thrive. Absurd. We don't credit the Swiss postal service with the Special Theory of Relativity because it transmitted Einstein's manuscript to the Annalen der Physik.

What I'm getting at here is that you can be entrepreneurial without being an entrepreneur. Entrepreneurial people are passionate about what they do, comfortable taking risks, and quick at moving on from failures.

The difference between successful and unsuccessful people is that successful ones know that the most unprofitable thing ever manufactured is an excuse.

Building a family is an entrepreneurial experience.

A new week means new goals. New goals means new success. No goals mean no success and no success means a wasted week.

Your confidence, competence and belief will sustain you through the fear, uncertainty and doubt you will face. Knowing with everything you are, that you can do it.

Be brave enough to try something new; you might just succeed.

Success doesn't teach as many lessons as failure

To be successful, innovation is not just about value creation, but value capture.

Building a family is an entrepreneurial experience. No doubt about it. The family is the greatest and most important enterprise on earth. Lead yours with passion and joy!

...successful research doesn't depend on mathematical skill, or even the deep understanding of theory. It depends to a large degree on choosing an important problem and finding a way to solve it, even if imperfectly at first. Very often ambition and entrepreneurial drive, in combination, beat brilliance.

REAL Entrepreneurs will be the one's who change the world for the better. Governments must become PUBLIC servants to create the best context and mindsets for people to succeed. We need to ReThink Entrepreneurial success and the role of Public Service in supporting that... or we, and our children, will pay the ultimate price.

The Art of Earning a Living requires a great deal of self-inquiry into what, exactly, the difference you want to make is, and also a lot of creative, entrepreneurial problem solving to figure out how you could make decent money while making that difference.

Transforming the complex to the simple is pure genius.

The five essential entrepreneurial skills for success are concentration, discrimination, organization, innovation, and communication

Every single part of our entrepreneurial journey will begin as an idea that will only become reality when we show up and bring it into the world.

A negative mind will never find success. I have never heard a positive idea come from a person in a negative state.

Does your story inspire you? If not, it's time to change it.

According to Aman Mehndiratta, Persuasion of the idea and planning the strategy is the key activity for every business not only for the entrepreneurial business. But there goes an extra emphasis on the business started as an entrepreneurship. As here, everything including decisions, responsibilities, failures, success, appreciation, and criticism belongs to you only. Proper strategy and planning are necessary if one wants to avoid the future risks.

The 5 Clues to Spotting the Next Starbucks They permanently change people's habits. They're copycats. Their success is validated by the competition. They are driven by the founder's vision and passion. They have superb entrepreneurial management and execution.

Be prepared for twists and turns on the road to success.

Your Core Values are the "glue" that holds your business together.

The most successful people have the same twenty-four hours in a day that you do.

An entrepreneur is not deterred by his lack of perfection, he knows no one else is

Seth Godin, in his 2005 book, All Marketers Are Liars, wrote that “all marketing is about telling stories . . . painting pictures that they (customers) choose to believe.”8

Don't be afraid to step into the spotlight! Your time to shine will be determined by you!

It's more difficult, you know, to bring about positive change than it is to make money. It's much easier to make money, because it's a much easier way to measure success — the bottom line. When it comes to social consequences, they've got all different people acting in different ways, very difficult to even have a proper criterion of success. So, it's a difficult task. Why not use an entrepreneurial, rather than a bureaucratic, approach. As long as people genuinely care for the people they're trying to help, they can actually do a lot of good.

The simplest way to learn about a market is the old-fashioned way. Get out and talk to people whose opinions you trust: potential customers, industry colleagues, and respected competitors.

I saw the figure of 178 Billion wasted/stolen from the people of a country by its corrupt and inept government. Such a figure could truly transform the entire country; education, health, roads, schooling, entrepreneurial environment... of millions of people, rather than be secreted away as a few more 0000's in global bank accounts for the greeders. We need to Rethink Public Service, Values, Ethics and Leadership.

Above all, we know that an entrepreneurial strategy has more chance of success the more it starts out with the users – their utilities, their values, their realities. An innovation is a change in market or society. It produces a greater yield for the user, greater wealth-producing capacity for society, higher value or greater satisfaction. The test of an innovation is always what it does for the user. Hence, entrepreneurship always needs to be market-focused, indeed, market-driven.

Regardless of whether one subscribes to the aims of the four movements whose stories we have told, there is much to appreciate about them as movements. They have overcome schisms; disbandment; leadership scandals; and/or the deaths of their founders. They have developed a highly innovative strategy—bypassing the state—to overcome the obstacles that their ideological strictness; ambitious agendas; and reluctance to compromise present. They have shown a strong entrepreneurial spirit in building effective social service agencies, medical facilities, schools, and businesses that often put the state’s efforts to shame. While they are not the Christian militias, al-Qaeda cells, or Jewish extremist groups whose terrorism has attracted much attention, the Muslim Brotherhood, Shas, Comunione e Liberazione, and the Salvation Army, with their strategy of rebuilding society, one institution at a time, may well prove more successful in sacralizing their societies than movements that use violence.

People know us best for our entrepreneurial success as the founders of Three Dog Bakery; what they don’t know is that we owe it all to a gigantic deaf dog named Gracie. But even though Gracie sowed the seeds of our success, this isn’t a book about “making it.” This is the story of a dog who was born with the cards stacked against her, but whose passionate, joyful nature helped her turn what could have been a dog’s life into a victory of the canine spirit—and, in the process, save two guys who thought they were saving her.

The entrepreneur of the world handles difficult situations with stress, worry and frustration relying only on the knowledge they have access to. The entrepreneur with God’s favor has an omniscient presence living inside and is blessed to have answers and solutions to tough problems flow directly to them. Having the favor of God resting on you is a wonderful position to be in, CEO! He has strategically placed us in this entrepreneurial army, not only to defeat the enemy and his advances, but to also go above-and-beyond, reaching success that few obtain.

I remember this event so clearly because it was at this point in my career that I fully realized the value of tenacity. I just had to assume there was a way through any obstacle, and then I’d find it. This is perhaps my most fundamental principle of entrepreneurialism, and to success in general.

Successful research doesn't depend on mathematical skill, or even the deep understanding of theory. It depends to a large degree on choosing an important problem and finding a way to solve it, even if imperfectly at first. Very often ambition and entrepreneurial drive, in combination, beat brilliance.

The mighty Toyota Company was born from the ashes of a failed weaving business. And perhaps you have heard of Wrigley’s gum? William Wrigley started off his company trying to sell baking soda and soap, but he never turned a profit, and so he turned to making and selling chewing gum instead. These men share one thing in common—they were open to change and they listened to their intuition. Sometimes we hear a whisper in the air that guides us positively. This whisper we hear, it is not passive—it is a response to our own enthusiasm, passion, and commitment. We put in the effort and we get back a divine message. Call it inspiration if you want. Call it an entrepreneurial muse. But it feels and sounds like a whisper in your soul. If you hear it, listen to it. You must be willing to change course when it tells you to.

Entrepreneurs are everywhere. You don’t have to work in a garage to be in a startup. The concept of entrepreneurship includes anyone who works within my definition of a startup: a human institution designed to create new products and services under conditions of extreme uncertainty. That means entrepreneurs are everywhere and the Lean Startup approach can work in any size company, even a very large enterprise, in any sector or industry. 2. Entrepreneurship is management. A startup is an institution, not just a product, and so it requires a new kind of management specifically geared to its context of extreme uncertainty. In fact, as I will argue later, I believe “entrepreneur” should be considered a job title in all modern companies that depend on innovation for their future growth. 3. Validated learning. Startups exist not just to make stuff, make money, or even serve customers. They exist to learn how to build a sustainable business. This learning can be validated scientifically by running frequent experiments that allow entrepreneurs to test each element of their vision. 4. Build-Measure-Learn. The fundamental activity of a startup is to turn ideas into products, measure how customers respond, and then learn whether to pivot or persevere. All successful startup processes should be geared to accelerate that feedback loop. 5. Innovation accounting. To improve entrepreneurial outcomes and hold innovators accountable, we need to focus on the boring stuff: how to measure progress, how to set up milestones, and how to prioritize work. This requires a new kind of accounting designed for startups—and the people who hold them accountable.

But, although the future is unknowable, it is not unimaginable. As Ludwig von Mises put it: “The entrepreneurial idea that carries on and brings profit is precisely that idea which did not occur to the majority. It is not correct foresight as such that yields profits, but foresight better than that of the rest. The prize goes only to the dissenters, who do not let themselves be misled by the errors accepted by the multitude.”6

The literature is full of discussions of these questions; full of stories of the ‘entrepreneurial personality’ and of people who will never do anything but innovate. In the light of our experience – and it is considerable – these discussions are pointless. By and large, people who do not feel comfortable as innovators or as entrepreneurs will not volunteer for such jobs; the gross misfits eliminate themselves. The others can learn the practice of innovation. Our experience shows that an executive who has performed in other assignments will do a decent job as an entrepreneur. In successful entrepreneurial businesses, nobody seems to worry whether a given person is likely to do a good job of development or not. People of all kinds of temperaments and backgrounds apparently do equally well. Any young engineer in 3M who comes to top management with an idea that makes sense is expected to take on its development.

Equity financing, on the other hand, is unappealing to cooperators because it may mean relinquishing control to outside investors, which is a distinctly capitalist practice. Investors are not likely to buy non-voting shares; they will probably require representation on the board of directors because otherwise their money could potentially be expropriated. “For example, if the directors of the firm were workers, they might embezzle equity funds, refrain from paying dividends in order to raise wages, or dissipate resources on projects of dubious value.”105 In any case, the very idea of even partial outside ownership is contrary to the cooperative ethos. A general reason for traditional institutions’ reluctance to lend to cooperatives, and indeed for the rarity of cooperatives whether related to the difficulty of securing capital or not, is simply that a society’s history, culture, and ideologies might be hostile to the “co-op” idea. Needless to say, this is the case in most industrialized countries, especially the United States. The very notion of a workers’ cooperative might be viscerally unappealing and mysterious to bank officials, as it is to people of many walks of life. Stereotypes about inefficiency, unprofitability, inexperience, incompetence, and anti-capitalism might dispose officials to reject out of hand appeals for financial assistance from co-ops. Similarly, such cultural preconceptions may be an element in the widespread reluctance on the part of working people to try to start a cooperative. They simply have a “visceral aversion” to, and unfamiliarity with, the idea—which is also surely a function of the rarity of co-ops itself. Their rarity reinforces itself, in that it fosters a general ignorance of co-ops and the perception that they’re risky endeavors. Additionally, insofar as an anti-democratic passivity, a civic fragmentedness, a half-conscious sense of collective disempowerment, and a diffuse interpersonal alienation saturate society, this militates against initiating cooperative projects. It is simply taken for granted among many people that such things cannot be done. And they are assumed to require sophisticated entrepreneurial instincts. In most places, the cooperative idea is not even in the public consciousness; it has barely been heard of. Business propaganda has done its job well.106 But propaganda can be fought with propaganda. In fact, this is one of the most important things that activists can do, this elevation of cooperativism into the public consciousness. The more that people hear about it, know about it, learn of its successes and potentials, the more they’ll be open to it rather than instinctively thinking it’s “foreign,” “socialist,” “idealistic,” or “hippyish.” If successful cooperatives advertise their business form, that in itself performs a useful service for the movement. It cannot be overemphasized that the most important thing is to create a climate in which it is considered normal to try to form a co-op, in which that is seen as a perfectly legitimate and predictable option for a group of intelligent and capable unemployed workers. Lenders themselves will become less skeptical of the business form as it seeps into the culture’s consciousness.

The fascist leaders were outsiders of a new type. New people had forced their way into national leadership before. There had long been hard-bitten soldiers who fought better than aristocratic officers and became indispensable to kings. A later form of political recruitment came from young men of modest background who made good when electoral politics broadened in the late nineteenth century. One thinks of the aforementioned French politician Léon Gambetta, the grocer’s son, or the beer wholesaler’s son Gustav Stresemann, who became the preeminent statesman of Weimar Germany. A third kind of successful outsider in modern times has been clever mechanics in new industries (consider those entrepreneurial bicycle makers Henry Ford, William Morris, and the Wrights). But many of the fascist leaders were marginal in a new way. They did not resemble the interlopers of earlier eras: the soldiers of fortune, the first upwardly mobile parliamentary politicians, or the clever mechanics. Some were bohemians, lumpen-intellectuals, dilettantes, experts in nothing except the manipulation of crowds and the fanning of resentments: Hitler, the failed art student; Mussolini, a schoolteacher by trade but mostly a restless revolutionary, expelled for subversion from Switzerland and the Trentino; Joseph Goebbels, the jobless college graduate with literary ambitions; Hermann Goering, the drifting World War I fighter ace; Heinrich Himmler, the agronomy student who failed at selling fertilizer and raising chickens. Yet the early fascist cadres were far too diverse in social origins and education to fit the common label of marginal outsiders. Alongside street-brawlers with criminal records like Amerigo Dumini or Martin Bormann one could find a professor of philosophy like Giovanni Gentile or even, briefly, a musician like Arturo Toscanini. What united them was, after all, values rather than a social profile: scorn for tired bourgeois politics, opposition to the Left, fervent nationalism, a tolerance for violence when needed.

repeated failure is key to doing bold things, to being entrepreneurial. Try stuff, fail, fail fast, try again. When Sam Walton was asked why Walmart was so successful, he said, “We do a lot of things right.” Then asked how they did things right, he said, “Because we did them wrong the first time.

The best way to determine the Values you will enforce in your business is to clarify your personal values.

Your mission or purpose is like a magnet that keeps you moving is a well established direction

Asked to paint a picture of the company in 20 years, the executives mentioned such things as “on the cover of Business Week as a model success story . . . the Fortune most admired top-ten list . . . the best science and business graduates want to work here . . . people on airplanes rave about one of our products to seatmates . . . 20 consecutive years of profitable growth . . . an entrepreneurial culture that has spawned half a dozen new divisions from within . . .

Your business values can make you soar above the competition.

My experience says that there is hardly any linkage between being highly educated and having successful entrepreneurship ventures. It is found that entrepreneurial success rate is high with college drop-outs or people with drive. It is also found that fully qualified people look for stability in career life as compared to confronting uncertainty or seeking sales role. Of course, few exceptions always exist.…see more

The decision to partner the government was clearly a top-down decision taken by Suzuki himself, based on Nakanishi’s positive report. The speed of decision making was a result of the pressure from the Indian side as well as the dynamism and ability of Suzuki to take truly entrepreneurial risks. When asked as to why he took what appeared to most people, including the Japanese embassy in India, as an unwarranted risk, Suzuki explained that he always believed that it was people who determined how any project performed, and everything else was secondary. He said that at the time of the first meeting with Krishnamurthy and me, he was convinced that he could work with us and ensure success. If he did not have this feeling, he would not have asked the Maruti team to stay back till he returned from the United States. I wonder how many people in the world could take a decision to invest $25 million on this ground. Suzuki showed that his faith in the importance of people as the basis for doing business was better than the technical evaluations which companies made and which showed that India was not a good place to invest money.

Develop an entrepreneurial spirit so that in the event that one thing falls apart, you won't fall a part.

Develop an entrepreneurial spirit so that in the event that one thing falls apart, you won't fall apart.

Early in the solution development process, an entrepreneur is likely to create both “works like” and “looks like” prototypes. “Works like” prototypes explore technical feasibility and show how a solution will deliver required functionality.

Every good-to-great transition in our research began with a Level 5 leader who motivated people more with inspired standards than inspiring personality. Every 10x entrepreneurial success in our research had founders and leaders who, while sometimes colorful characters, never confused leadership with personality; they were utterly obsessed with making the company truly great and ensuring it endured beyond themselves.

In today’s entrepreneurial time, a brand with a human side has more chances of becoming successful than its counterparts.

Here are some tips on finding a mentor: 1. Identify who could be a good mentor for you. Remember, you don’t need to aim too high; somebody simply a couple of years ahead of you on their journey might be enough. 2. Get their attention ‒ break through the noise. These people receive huge numbers of messages asking for help and advice, and offers to meet for lunch or coffee so that their brains can be picked. Naturally, they put most of these long emails (they’re often really long) straight in the junk folder to protect the most valuable thing for them ‒ their time. Bear that in mind. To break through the noise, you need to be straight to the point and you need to do Step 3… 3. Seek to add value. Just because potential mentors are successful or higher status, this doesn’t mean you can’t add value to them. Have faith that you have some way of helping them. Study what they’re doing. Are they involved in any philanthropy or social impact causes? How can you help? That’s a great way to get their attention. 4. Act normal. This applies wherever there’s an imbalance of status. For example, when you meet somebody that you’re interested in romantically, and you feel as if they’re probably ‘out of your league, you have to not let that make you behave strangely. If you are too deferential, too reverent, and basically tripping over yourself to do stuff for them because you perceive them to be on another level, then they are unlikely to feel attracted to you. And conversely, sometimes acting ‘not normal’ means you go the other way, and behave like a schoolboy pulling the pigtails of the girl he fancies, going too far in overcompensating. Again, that is not good. Be pleasant to be around. 5. Apply what your mentor advises you to do as quickly as possible, then immediately feedback to them on the outcome of the action. This feedback loop will generate and strengthen the mentor-mentee relationship in the fastest possible way, because entrepreneurial mentors love coachable people who take action. And they feel more and more responsibility when they’re the ones directing your action and you’re coming back to them to report what happened. It’s like an interesting and fun game for them, and they want to know that they’re helping you in a tangible way. Be coachable.

Innovation accounting. To improve entrepreneurial outcomes and hold innovators accountable, we need to focus on the boring stuff: how to measure progress, how to set up milestones, and how to prioritize work. This requires a new kind of accounting designed for startups—and the people who hold them accountable.

entrepreneurial success and wealth creation, as well as wealth attraction, requires a willingness to risk and experience failure, and the emotional resiliency to recover from it quickly, decisively, passionately, and persistently.

The former head of this operation, Gary Wendt, who is credited with much of the enormous success of GEFS, used his personal agenda as a simple but inordinately powerful tool for growing the business into ever new entrepreneurial arenas. Over the years, he used his personal agenda to make it unequivocally clear that he expected entrepreneurial business growth from every member of management. At every major meeting, the topic of business development was on the agenda (usually in the number one spot). In every annual review, managers were asked to demonstrate the revenues they had created from businesses that did not exist five years before. From division heads to newly hired analysts, everyone was held accountable for some set of activities having to do with creating entrepreneurial revenue and profit streams. In short, no one who worked in the organization could avoid the unremitting focus on new business development. You need to make sure that you are similarly consistent, predictable, and focused, and that you sustain this emphasis over a long period. Pressure applied only once is soon forgotten, and alternating pressure (as in flavor-of-the-month management) will cause people to be confused, disillusioned, or angry. Wendt’s consistent, visible, and predictable attention to business development created a pressure in GEFS for entrepreneurial business growth that took it from the $300 million installment loan portfolio we looked at in chapter 6 to a financial services behemoth with $250 billion in assets under management when he left in 1998. Examples of Wendt’s single-minded determination to drive growth through entrepreneurial transformation at GEFS are numerous. Years ago, for instance, he was asked whether his agenda would change if someone rushed in and told him that the computer room was on fire (implying that his business could be completely destroyed). Wendt replied that he employed firefighters to handle such emergencies. As the leader, his most important job was to keep people focused on business development. Since business development is an uncomfortable and unpredictable process, Wendt knew that if he allowed it to appear to be a low priority for him, all those working for him would heave a sigh of relief and go back to business as usual, with new businesses struggling to find a place on the priority list. In fact, as he remarked, even if he did try to get involved in putting out the fire, he would probably only interfere with the efforts of the highly competent people employed to do so.

Who are we, the people who have ADHD? We are the problem kid who drives his parents crazy by being totally disorganized, unable to follow through on anything, incapable of cleaning up a room, or washing dishes, or performing just about any assigned task; the one who is forever interrupting, making excuses for work not done, and generally functioning far below potential in most areas. We are the kid who gets daily lectures on how we’re squandering our talent, wasting the golden opportunity that our innate ability gives us to do well, and failing to make good use of all that our parents have provided. We are also sometimes the talented executive who keeps falling short due to missed deadlines, forgotten obligations, social faux pas, and blown opportunities. Too often we are the addicts, the misfits, the unemployed, and the criminals who are just one diagnosis and treatment plan away from turning it all around. We are the people Marlon Brando spoke for in the classic 1954 film On the Waterfront when he said, “I coulda been a contender.” So many of us coulda been contenders, and shoulda been for sure. But then, we can also make good. Can we ever! We are the seemingly tuned-out meeting participant who comes out of nowhere to provide the fresh idea that saves the day. Frequently, we are the “underachieving” child whose talent blooms with the right kind of help and finds incredible success after a checkered educational record. We are the contenders and the winners. We are also imaginative and dynamic teachers, preachers, circus clowns, and stand-up comics, Navy SEALs or Army Rangers, inventors, tinkerers, and trend setters. Among us there are self-made millionaires and billionaires; Pulitzer and Nobel prize winners; Academy, Tony, Emmy, and Grammy award winners; topflight trial attorneys, brain surgeons, traders on the commodities exchange, and investment bankers. And we are often entrepreneurs. We are entrepreneurs ourselves, and the great majority of the adult patients we see for ADHD are or aspire to be entrepreneurs too. The owner and operator of an entrepreneurial support company called Strategic Coach, a man named Dan Sullivan (who also has ADHD!), estimates that at least 50 percent of his clients have ADHD as well.

Base Camp With “tough tech” ventures—in which product development demands a vast amount of leading-edge science and engineering work—entrepreneurs often consider creating ancillary businesses before launching their primary business. These pared-down versions serve as the first application for the technologies they’re developing. Samir Kaul and his partners at Khosla Ventures have likened these ancillary businesses to a base camp, where mountaineers pause to organize their provisions and get acclimated to low oxygen levels before their final push to the summit.

The real secret of Silicon Valley is that it’s really all about the people. Sure, there are plenty of stories in the press about the industry’s young geniuses, but surprisingly few about its management practices. What the mainstream press misses is that Silicon Valley’s success comes from the way its companies build alliances with their employees. Here, talent really is the most valuable resource, and employees are treated accordingly. The most successful Silicon Valley businesses succeed because they use the alliance to recruit, manage, and retain an incredibly talented team of entrepreneurial employees

Is grit the only psychological factor that determines success? Not at all. A lot of factors determine success. Emotional intelligence. Physical talent. Intelligence. Conscientiousness. Self-control. Imagination. The list goes on. For everyday functioning, my research suggests that grit isn’t as important as self-control in the face of distractions and temptations. For making friends, emotional intelligence is probably more useful. And as I mentioned in chapter 13, there is a long list of character strengths more consequential than grit in a moral sense. Greatness is wonderful but goodness ever so much more so. And, of course, there is luck. And opportunity. Grit isn’t everything. So, why a whole book—and a whole research career—centered on grit? Because grit holds special significance for the achievement of excellence. This is true whether the endeavor in question is physical, mental, entrepreneurial, civic, or artistic. When you look at the best of the best across domains, the combination of passion and perseverance sustained over the long term is a common denominator. It’s often said that the last mile is the longest. Grit keeps you on the path.

It is worth noting that Elon Musk enjoys certain privileges that may not be available to everyone. For instance, he is situated in the United States, which is a developed country with a large population of over 300 million people, and where funding opportunities are relatively more abundant. His previous entrepreneurial successes have also placed him in favourable positions to secure funding for his ambitious projects.

Unlike ventures that are caught in a Speed Trap, with the Help Wanted pattern, a startup sustains product-market fit as it grows but cannot mobilize the resources needed to continue expanding.

Failure is not the worst thing; the worst thing is working on something for years with no end in sight. —Andrew Lee, Esper co-founder

It turns out that these two responses are related: The time spent wrestling with the intense emotions engendered by a struggling startup—or avoiding these emotions—leads some entrepreneurs to delay shutting down longer than they should. They are Running on Empty—to the detriment of all concerned. The longer this goes on, the longer employees are wasting time on a lost cause, when they could be moving on to their next act. And the longer a founder hopes in vain that new investors or an attractive acquisition will save the day, the longer he is burning through capital that could be returned to investors.

Successful pivots like these often have one thing in common, however: They happen early in the venture’s development.

a startup may not have enough runway left to complete the pivot successfully. Recall Eric Ries’s definition of “runway”: the number of pivots that a startup can complete before cash balances are exhausted. That number may be zero if the startup has just enough cash to commence a pivot but—absent an infusion of fresh capital—cannot survive long enough to see whether the pivot is working.

Humans are wired to oversimplify explanations for both good and bad outcomes through what philosophers call the single cause fallacy. We shine a spotlight on one big reason for a calamity—say, a failed presidential bid (“neglect of a key swing state”) or a sports team’s late-season collapse (“the star pitcher’s torn hamstring”)—when the outcome is actually a result of multiple factors.

Furthermore, we’re prone to make what psychologists call the fundamental attribution error. Research shows that when we observe others, our explanations for their behaviors tend to overemphasize dispositional factors—their personality type and the values we assume they have—while downplaying situational factors, such as social pressures or environmental circumstances. By contrast, when explaining our own behaviors, we tend to attribute good outcomes to dispositional factors—in particular, our skill and diligence—and bad outcomes to situational ones.

the definition of entrepreneurial failure that I’ll use in this book: A venture has failed if its early investors did not—or never will—get back more money than they put in. Why early investors? Because, when a startup fares poorly, later investors may get all of their money back while early investors generally receive less than the full amount they invested—or nothing at all.

after raising a Series D round, fewer than 40 percent of startups still have a founder as their CEO. I will keep founders’ personal goals in sharp focus throughout this book, but we shouldn’t use founders’ goal fulfillment as our main measure of success.

The diamond-and-square framework provides the answers. The framework’s diamond breaks down the startup’s opportunity—that is, the “horse”—into four constituent parts: its customer value proposition, technology and operations, marketing, and profit formula. The diamond is framed by a square whose corners denote the venture’s key resource providers: its founders (that is, the “jockeys”), other team members, outside investors, and strategic partners.

An early-stage startup has promising prospects when the eight elements of the diamond-and-square framework are in alignment—that is, when they work together harmoniously. Furthermore, alignment must be dynamic: As the startup matures, its opportunity will evolve, as will the nature of the support needed from resource providers.

Such barriers—called “moats” by some entrepreneurs—come in two types: proprietary assets and business model attributes. Proprietary assets are either difficult to duplicate or are in scarce supply.

Business model attributes are those that can confer an advantage in attracting and retaining customers, like high customer switching costs and strong network effects.

Switching costs aren’t just financial expenditures; they can also include inconveniences and risks incurred when a customer changes from one vendor to another. Consider, for example, the costs and risks when switching dog walkers. A family must trust the new walker with keys to their residence, must brief the new walker on their pet’s patterns and preferences, and run the risk that their dog may not take to this new human in its life. Switching costs can be a double-edged sword. For example, to attract customers, Baroo had to overcome these barriers. However, once it did, Baroo retained customers because they faced the high cost of switching to a competitor.

An early-stage startup has three important choices to make regarding its customer value proposition—choices that will have a big impact on its odds for success:

Target a Single Customer Segment?

An alternative to targeting multiple segments with a single product is creating separate versions of the product, each with different features and branding. This solution takes care of positioning problems but boosts costs and complexity.

How Much Innovation? When designing their first product, founders must decide how much to innovate. Some entrepreneurs believe that more innovation is always better, but as we’ll see, that mindset can get them in trouble.

Entrepreneurial innovation comes in three flavors: 1) new business models, as with Rent the Runway offering apparel for rent rather than sale; 2) new technologies, as with Solyndra, a failed maker of cylindrical solar panels built with a proprietary thin-film material; and 3) combining existing technologies in new ways, as with Quincy Apparel using a measurement system akin to that used for men’s suiting to offer better-fitting clothing for women.

Looking back, Wallace concluded that instead of raising funds from VC firms, Quincy could have sought financial backing from a clothing factory. That would have solved two problems: A factory with an equity stake in Quincy would have expedited orders and worked harder to correct production problems, and factory owners with deep industry experience would have known how to set an optimal pace for the growth of a new apparel line—in contrast to Quincy’s VCs, who pressured the founders to grow at full tilt.

The fundraising dilemmas confronting Quincy’s founders are echoed in the results of my survey of early-stage startups. Consistent with Quincy’s experience, the startups I surveyed that were struggling or shut down were more likely than their successful counterparts to have missed their targets in their initial round of fundraising. Likewise, the founder/CEOs of these struggling startups were more likely to have been disappointed with the quality of advice they received from their investors and more likely to report frequent, serious, and divisive conflict with investors over strategic priorities.

Finding the right strategic partners can have a major impact on an early-stage startup’s performance. Partners can lend their resources—key technologies, manufacturing capacity, warehouses, call centers, and so forth—to a new venture that lacks the wherewithal and/or time to develop such resources in-house. However, the asymmetry in bargaining power between a big, mature, resource-rich company and a fledgling startup can make it difficult to secure the right resources on reasonable terms.

Quincy’s struggle to get good service from its factory partners highlights a risk endemic to early-stage startups when they partner with established players. It’s easy for a mouse to get trampled by an elephant. Even an elephant with good intentions may be clumsy and too slow moving to avoid squashing the mouse.

the complexity posed another problem: There is no way to run a lean experiment to prove, in advance, that a planned production process will work. You must fully develop the process and then run it in order to demonstrate its effectiveness. Producing apparel in sample quantities, which Quincy’s founders did successfully after their trunk show tests, is a completely different ball game compared to manufacturing it in volume.

startups are more likely to be vulnerable to the Good Idea, Bad Bedfellows failure pattern when they pursue opportunities that involve 1) complex operations requiring the tight coordination of different specialists’ work; 2) inventory of physical goods; and 3) large, lumpy capital requirements. By contrast, consider the more modest management demands on a purely software-based startup like Twitter when it launched. A small team of engineers created the site, and it spread virally without a paid marketing push. Capital requirements were modest and there was no physical inventory to manage. As Twitter grew, it eventually added an array of specialists to manage various functions—for example, community relations, server infrastructure, copyright compliance, etc. But it didn’t need these specialists at the outset.

Founders who fear that they may not be able to amass the resources required to pursue an attractive opportunity should also consider ways to constrain that opportunity. They can do this by reducing the scope of their effort—at least initially, until proof of concept is established and it becomes easier to mobilize resources. This approach is somewhat counterintuitive because startup dogma holds that growth is the prime goal for a new venture. Instead, with this contrarian approach, a startup should start small in order to get big.

Nagaraj and his new team were heading for a False Start—a failure pattern common to many early-stage ventures. A false start occurs when a startup rushes to launch its first product before conducting enough customer research—only to find that the opportunities they’ve identified are rife with problems. By giving short shrift to early and accurate customer feedback and by neglecting to test their assumptions with MVPs, they simply run out of time to fix all the flaws, thus turning Lean Startup’s “Fail Fast” mantra into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

But Triangulate’s team, like many entrepreneurs, neglected yet another Lean Startup precept: complete “customer discovery”—a thorough round of interviews with prospective customers—before designing and developing a minimum viable product. In Nagaraj’s postmortem analysis of Triangulate’s failure, he acknowledged skipping this crucial early step: “In retrospect, I should have spent a few months talking to as many customers as possible before we started to code.

Latecomers who fail to offer a superior solution will almost always face an uphill battle, especially if they target a market—like online dating—with strong network effects.

These arrows represent an initial focus on divergent thinking—generating lots of ideas—followed by an emphasis on convergent thinking—deciding which ideas are best. For the problem definition phase, divergent thinking means exploring the full range of customer segments you might plausibly serve and, for each segment, identifying the full set of unmet needs you could conceivably address. Next, convergent thinking allows you to home in on which customer segments you will target and which needs you will focus on. The same “diverge then converge” rhythm applies to solution development. You generate lots of possible solutions to customers’ problems and then select the most promising one.

Iteration should stop only when you’re confident you have formulated a compelling customer value proposition—also known as a positioning statement—that includes answers to all of the blanks listed below: For [INSERT: target customer segments] dissatisfied with [INSERT: existing solution] due to [INSERT: unmet needs], [INSERT: venture name] offers a [INSERT: product category] that provides [INSERT: key benefits of your defensible, differentiated solution].