Startup Failure Quotes

Demand is one of those factors which decide the fate of your business.

When you start seeing your product as your customer’s product and not as your product, you will start seeing all the missing gaps.

If you have a great idea, let nothing stop you from bringing it to life.

It’s wonderful to dream big but you still have to be realistic.

Launching a similar product still needs some kind of differentiation.

There can’t be anything more fatal to a business than making decisions based on somebody else’s assumptions.

Your business idea can wait but don’t enter a market without enough expertise and experience.

You don’t want to run your business based on mere suspicions and assumptions.

A successful business owner will know their business as good as they know their favorite celebrity, their partner, and even their dogs.

The future of your business depends on what kind of decisions you are going to make.

The process of decision-making can become efficient and effective, if the right information is handy on time.

Being successful is not that tough, you just need a little mindset change.

Perfecting a product which is not selling is a waste of time and energy.

Business growth happens when people remember you.

The fear of the unknown is deadly for our personal growth as well as for the growth of our business.

An idea gains value when you take action to bring it to life.

Accepting that you’re wrong, shows humility which will set a better example of you as a leader on your team than sticking to something that others can clearly see is wrong.

Become a leader that shows humility and not stubbornness.

Search engines' results aren’t always trustworthy. As a matter of fact, they can be easily manipulated.

While Uber was more a business-like limo car sharing, Lyft was more casual. Though with time, that distinction has become less prominent, but this definitely helped them in the starting stage.

When it comes to riding a trend for business growth, there are three important steps that we should always remember: data analysis, trend identification, and fast and effective decision making.

Fail soon so that you can succeed sooner.

Today it is cheaper to start a business than tomorrow.

Here’s some startup pedagogy for you: When confronted with any startup idea, ask yourself one simple question: How many miracles have to happen for this to succeed?

Poor distribution - not product - is the number one cause of failure.

Failure is a prerequisite to learning.

it is a story not just of talent but of tenacity, of insatiable questioning of authority, of determined informality, combined with a unique attitude toward failure, teamwork, mission, risk, and cross-disciplinary creativity.

Perfection is born of imperfection.

Most startup failures result from entrepreneurs who are better at making excuses than products.

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

The greatest risk—and hence the greatest cause of failure—in startups is not in the development of the new product but in the development of customers and markets. Startups

Success doesn't teach as many lessons as failure

Writing and achieving your goals is not failure, not having a goal to write in the first place is the start of failure.

Investors are people with more money than time. Employees are people with more time than money. Entrepreneurs are simply the seductive go-betweens. Startups are business experiments performed with other people’s money. Marketing is like sex: only losers pay for it.” “Company culture is what goes without saying. There are no real rules, only laws. Success forgives all sins. People who leak to you, leak about you. Meritocracy is the propaganda we use to bless the charade. Greed and vanity are the twin engines of bourgeois society. Most managers are incompetent and maintain their jobs via inertia and politics. Lawsuits are merely expensive feints in a well-scripted conflict narrative between corporate entities. Capitalism is an amoral farce in which every player—investor, employee, entrepreneur, consumer—is complicit.

Why fear feedback? Why stigmatize failure in the workplace when it’s bringing you closer to achieving your organizational goals.

There is a difference between failing and failure. Failing is trying something that you learn doesn't work. Failure is throwing in the towel and giving up.

Pursuing a rapid experiment and finding out you were wrong and changing directions isn’t failure. That is the road to success.

One who doesn't recognise an opportunity is bigger loser than one who tries his hand at an opportunity.

Just get on with starting, the worst and the most surprising thing to ever expect is short term failure.

Here is a key insight for any startup: You may think yourself a puny midget among giants when you stride out into a marketplace, and suddenly confront such a giant via litigation or direct competition. But the reality is that larger companies often have much more to fear from you than you from them. For starters, their will to fight is less than yours. Their employees are mercenaries who don’t deeply care, and suffer from the diffuse responsibility and weak emotional investment of a larger organization. What’s an existential struggle to you is merely one more set of tasks to a tuned-out engineer bored of his own product, or another legal hassle to an already overworked legal counsel thinking more about her next stock-vesting date than your suit. Also, large companies have valuable public brands they must delicately preserve, and which can be assailed by even small companies such as yours, particularly in a tight-knit, appearances-conscious ecosystem like that of Silicon Valley. America still loves an underdog, and you’ll be surprised at how many allies come out of the woodwork when some obnoxious incumbent is challenged by a scrappy startup with a convincing story. So long as you maintain unit cohesion and a shared sense of purpose, and have the basic rudiments of living, you will outlast, outfight, and out-rage any company that sets out to destroy you. Men with nothing to lose will stop at nothing to win.

Entrepreneurs who kept their day jobs had 33 percent lower odds of failure than those who quit. If you’re risk averse and have some doubts about the feasibility of your ideas, it’s likely that your business will be built to last. If you’re a freewheeling gambler, your startup is far more fragile.

it is not an exaggeration to state that any company designed for success in the twentieth century is doomed to failure in the twenty-first.

achieving failure: successfully executing a plan that leads nowhere.

They had “achieved failure”—successfully, faithfully, and rigorously executing a plan that turned out to have been utterly flawed.

But those start-up founders don’t hide their failures; to the contrary, they flaunt them—blogging about them, gathering to talk about them at conferences like FailCon.

Like most company failures, it had happened slowly and then all at once. A

fundamental nature of success: it’s hidden among failures.

Ideas are easy, implementation is hard. Startups cope with failure to pave the way of future. We must commend this entrepreneurial courage...

Unfortunately, “learning” is the oldest excuse in the book for a failure of execution. It’s what managers fall back on when they fail to achieve the results we promised.

FAILURE IS NOT AN OPTION. Nobody in the startup world could have such a mug, I mused; it would be ridiculous. My experience is full of situations where reality proved too unpredictable to avoid failure.

After more than ten years as an entrepreneur, I came to reject that line of thinking. I have learned from both my own successes and failures and those of many others that it’s the boring stuff that matters the most. Startup success is not a consequence of good genes or being in the right place at the right time. Startup success can be engineered by following the right process, which means it can be learned, which means it can be taught.

If you make a mistake, don’t spend precious time and energy trying to deny it or point the finger at someone else. Be a leader and own it, then spend your time and energy fixing the problem. As I’ve already noted, start-ups often fail because founders want to be seen as the smartest person in the room, which means not being wrong. Making a mistake is going to happen. None of us is perfect. But the difference between success and failure is how you handle that mistake

Most businesses get zero distribution channels to work: poor sales rather than bad product is the most common cause of failure. If you can get just one distribution channel to work, you have a great business. If you try for several but don’t nail one, you’re finished.

What differentiates the success stories from the failures is that the successful entrepreneurs had the foresight, the ability, and the tools to discover which parts of their plans were working brilliantly and which were misguided, and adapt their strategies accordingly.

Third, many entrepreneurs are afraid. Acknowledging failure can lead to dangerously low morale. Most entrepreneurs’ biggest fear is not that their vision will prove to be wrong. More terrifying is the thought that the vision might be deemed wrong without having been given a real chance to prove itself.

In the start-up world, you’re not taken seriously if you haven’t had at least one colossal failure. The unofficial motto in Silicon Valley is “Fail early and often.” Almost no one gets it right the first, second, or even third time. Failure is baked into the innovation process; it’s how they learn what doesn’t work so they can home in on what does.

Entrepreneurs who kept their day jobs had 33 percent lower odds of failure than those who quit. If you’re risk averse and have some doubts about the feasibility of your ideas, it’s likely that your business will be built to last. If you’re a freewheeling gambler, your startup is far more fragile. Like the Warby Parker crew, the entrepreneurs whose companies topped Fast Company’s recent most innovative lists typically stayed in their day jobs even after they launched. Former track star Phil Knight started selling running shoes out of the trunk of his car in 1964, yet kept working as an accountant until 1969. After inventing the original Apple I computer, Steve Wozniak started the company with Steve Jobs in 1976 but continued working full time in his engineering job at Hewlett-Packard until 1977. And although Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin figured out how to dramatically improve internet searches in 1996, they didn’t go on leave from their graduate studies at Stanford until 1998. “We almost didn’t start Google,” Page says, because we “were too worried about dropping out of our Ph.D. program.” In 1997, concerned that their fledgling search engine was distracting them from their research, they tried to sell Google for less than $2 million in cash and stock. Luckily for them, the potential buyer rejected the offer. This habit of keeping one’s day job isn’t limited to successful entrepreneurs. Many influential creative minds have stayed in full-time employment or education even after earning income from major projects. Selma director Ava DuVernay made her first three films while working in her day job as a publicist, only pursuing filmmaking full time after working at it for four years and winning multiple awards. Brian May was in the middle of doctoral studies in astrophysics when he started playing guitar in a new band, but he didn’t drop out until several years later to go all in with Queen. Soon thereafter he wrote “We Will Rock You.” Grammy winner John Legend released his first album in 2000 but kept working as a management consultant until 2002, preparing PowerPoint presentations by day while performing at night. Thriller master Stephen King worked as a teacher, janitor, and gas station attendant for seven years after writing his first story, only quitting a year after his first novel, Carrie, was published. Dilbert author Scott Adams worked at Pacific Bell for seven years after his first comic strip hit newspapers. Why did all these originals play it safe instead of risking it all?

A video game can be created and never make it through research and development. Or else it comes out and no one wants to play it. Yes, video-game creators who’ve had successes are greatly valued. But those who’ve had failures are valued, too—sometimes even more so. Start-up companies often prefer to hire a chief executive with a failed start-up in his or her background. The person who failed often knows how to avoid future failures. The person who knows only success can be more oblivious to all the pitfalls. Experience

There is an enormous difference between starting a company and running one. Thinking up great ideas, which requires mainly intelligence and knowledge, is much easier than building an organization, which also requires measures of tenacity, discipline, and understanding. Part of the reason that nineteen out of twenty high-tech start-ups end in failure must be the difficulty of making this critical transition from a bunch of guys in a rented office to a larger bunch of guys in a rented office with customers to serve. Customers? What are those?

When a new company is formed, its founders must have a startup mentality—a beginner’s mind, open to everything because, well, what do they have to lose? (This is often something they later look back upon wistfully.) But when that company becomes successful, its leaders often cast off that startup mentality because, they tell themselves, they have figured out what to do. They don’t want to be beginners anymore. That may be human nature, but I believe it is a part of our nature that should be resisted. By resisting the beginner’s mind, you make yourself more prone to repeat yourself than to create something new. The attempt to avoid failure, in other words, makes failure more likely.

It is best to be the CEO; it is satisfactory to be an early employee, maybe the fifth or sixth or perhaps the tenth. Alternately, one may become an engineer devising precious algorithms in the cloisters of Google and its like. Otherwise, one becomes a mere employee. A coder of websites at Facebook is no one in particular. A manager at Microsoft is no one. A person (think woman) working in customer relations is a particular type of no one, banished to the bottom, as always, for having spoken directly to a non-technical human being. All these and others are ways for strivers to fall by the wayside — as the startup culture sees it — while their betters race ahead of them. Those left behind may see themselves as ordinary, even failures.

Here’s some startup pedagogy for you: When confronted with any startup idea, ask yourself one simple question: How many miracles have to happen for this to succeed? If the answer is zero, you’re not looking at a startup, you’re just dealing with a regular business like a laundry or a trucking business. All you need is capital and minimal execution, and assuming a two-way market, you’ll make some profit. To be a startup, miracles need to happen. But a precise number of miracles. Most successful startups depend on one miracle only. For Airbnb, it was getting people to let strangers into their spare bedrooms and weekend cottages. This was a user-behavior miracle. For Google, it was creating an exponentially better search service than anything that had existed to date. This was a technical miracle. For Uber or Instacart, it was getting people to book and pay for real-world services via websites or phones. This was a consumer-workflow miracle. For Slack, it was getting people to work like they formerly chatted with their girlfriends. This is a business-workflow miracle. For the makers of most consumer apps (e.g., Instagram), the miracle was quite simple: getting users to use your app, and then to realize the financial value of your particular twist on a human brain interacting with keyboard or touchscreen. That was Facebook’s miracle, getting every college student in America to use its platform during its early years. While there was much technical know-how required in scaling it—and had they fucked that up it would have killed them—that’s not why it succeeded. The uniqueness and complete fickleness of such a miracle are what make investing in consumer-facing apps such a lottery. It really is a user-growth roulette wheel with razor-thin odds. The classic sign of a shitty startup idea is that it requires at least two (or more!) miracles to succeed. This was what was wrong with ours. We had a Bible’s worth of miracles to perform:

proper legal structure. The best structure is that of the Mondragon companies, which do not allow workers to own a tradable share of equity. Instead, in addition to their wages they each have an internal capital account the value of which depends on the business’s performance and on the number of hours the member works. A new member has to pay a large entrance fee, most of which is credited to his internal account. He receives interest at the end of every fiscal year, but he cannot withdraw the annually accumulating principal from his account until retirement. Almost all profits are divided between these individual accounts and a collective account that helps ensure the company’s survival. No buying or selling of shares takes place in this scheme, so it’s difficult for the firm to lose its worker-controlled status. Not until 1982, however, did the internal-capital-accounts legal structure exist in the United States (and then only in Massachusetts); prior to that, worker cooperatives had to make convoluted use of other categories, which sometimes made them vulnerable to degeneration.113 In any case, the survival rates of contemporary cooperatives put the lie to traditional theories of cooperatives’ unsustainability, for they appear to have higher rates of survival than conventional firms. During the 1970s and early 1980s, the death rate for co-ops in France (due either to dissolution or to conversion into a capitalist firm) was 6.9 percent; the comparable rate for capitalist competitors was 10 percent. A study in 1989 found much higher failure rates for capitalist companies than cooperatives in North America.114 A study conducted by Quebec’s Ministry of Industry and Commerce in 1999 concluded that “Co-op startups are twice as likely to celebrate their 10th birthday as conventionally owned private businesses.”115 A later study by the same organization found that “More than 6 out of 10 cooperatives survive more than five years, as compared to almost 4 businesses out of 10 for the private sector in Québec and in Canada in general. More than 4 out of 10 cooperatives survive more than 10 years, compared to 2 businesses out of 10 for the private sector.”116

My major goal in business was to learn. I had legislated in my mind for failure the worse possible scenario was I would learn a lot regardless of the outcome. This goal was the foundation for success of the business. Peldi, Balsamiq

With federal and state money drying up, research universities are increasingly trying to monetize their own intellectual property for revenue. In 2012, universities collectively generated $2.6 billion from their patents, a 6.8 percent jump from the previous year, according to the Association of University Technology Managers. Napolitano, of course, knows all of this. The University of California, especially its Berkeley and Los Angeles campuses, includes some of the biggest players in converting research into licensing fees and startups that might go public or be acquired. Witness the uptick in university-run incubators in the Bay Area. But someone must do the research that leads to those technologies that eventually hit the market, she said. When Napolitano first joined the University of California, one of her top priorities was to increase efficiency - to do more with less. But over time she came to realize that research is anything but efficient. But that's a good thing. "The grace note of basic research is failure," Napolitano said. "It's what doesn't work that leads to unexpected breakthroughs." There is nothing inherently wrong with seeking profit from innovation. But we must first understand that innovation starts when scientists ask how and why. Basic research "is where the action is," she said.

15 traits common for the people who do really well in start-up 1. Deal with ambiguity 2. Can work without handholding 3. Hustler and fighter 4. keep trying and never give up 5. High Passion and Energy 6. No sense of entitlements 7. Excellent in multi-tasking 8. Prototyping - start from somewhere and get better 9. Byte by byte or piece by piece approach 10. Hungry and ambitious 11. Learn from mistakes 12. Not afraid of failures 13. High on common sense 14. Dare to dream 15. Push their limits and step out of their comfort zone

Embracing Failure WE NEED TO FAIL. Churches need to fail more. Leaders need to fail more. Pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly has, since the 1990s, been hosting what he calls failure parties for scrapped research projects. 1 Edgy design company 5Crowd has a failure party every month—complete with failure high-fives and often wrapping up with a celebratory failure cake! 2 When venture capitalists assess whether to invest in a new idea, one of the key characteristics they look for is a previous failed startup. They prefer to invest in a leader who has already run a company into the ground.

in general management, a failure to deliver results is due to either a failure to plan adequately or a failure to execute properly. Both are significant lapses, yet new product development in our modern economy routinely requires exactly this kind of failure on the way to greatness.

One week into my new Silicon Valley life, and the lesson was this: if you want to be a startup entrepreneur, get used to negotiating from positions of weakness. I’d soon have trickier situations to negotiate than convincing a cop to let me take a cab. And so will you if you play the startup game. The next morning, I wasn’t merely hungover, but was in fact still mildly drunk. The company all-hands meeting, wherein the entire company gathered to hear about new deals and employees, and generally to get pep-rallied by Murthy Nukala, the CEO, was scheduled for noon that day. I had to be there or risk having my coworkers file a missing persons report, as well as look like a pussy. My frazzled brain was slow to realize my car was still somewhere in San Mateo. One hundred and thirty dollars and too much sunlight later, I was standing beside my four-wheeled Bavarian steed at the scene of last night’s triumph over the rule of law, and fifteen minutes later I was an acceptable five minutes late for the all-hands. As I walked into the company-wide meeting, a murmur was heard from a corner of the assembled crowd, expressing either surprise or amusement at my being both alive and unincarcerated. The company rumor mill had been busy that morning. I probably looked as pickled and embalmed as I felt. Murthy launched into his weekly harangue. The wheels of capitalism ground ever on.

Failure is an event, not a person. That is, if you try and fail at something it doesn’t mean that YOU are a failure. It just means that either you have a little learning or growing to do, or that the thing you’re trying to do truly cannot be done. If you’re trying to sell Underwater Basket Weaving lessons and no one is buying your ten-lesson package, it may well mean that you should try your hand at selling lemonade instead.

Being the first to start or leave does not necessarily mean that you will be the first to finish or arrive. Or that you will finish or arrive.

Initially, a start-up is dependent upon its founders for vision, leadership, direction, and management. It requires their guidance on a daily basis. As the start-up begins to realize some order of success, or begins to struggle, its future quickly moves beyond the brilliance of its founding leadership. It now requires the capability and capacity of its collective leadership. When present and functioning effectively, collective leadership removes the single point of failure—dependency on the founder—that many start-ups experience and expands the capacity and capability of the organization to lead its growth.

Great ideas and products are often born from mediocre ones. The keys are time (enough to iterate and evolve into something remarkable), humility (enough to see what’s wrong and admit a failure so you can move forward), and survival (a profitable services business can be a godsend here).

we all know stories of epic entrepreneurs who managed to pull out a victory when things seemed incredibly bleak. unfortunately,we don’t hear stories about the countless nameless others who persevered too long, leading their companies to failure.

Competing on price is what leaves most startup brands bankrupt

As a Facebook product manager, you resembled an Afghan warlord or a pirate captain: fearsome in appearance to any outsiders, the scourge of entire companies and industries, but actually barely in control of your small band of engineer-hooligans, and always one step from mutiny. To the outside world, your job was easy: a two-line email would have the senior management of any company waiting eagerly in the Facebook reception area almost instantaneously. Many were the startups I conjured thusly, they sputtering in flattery despite my showing up late and surly, demanding and getting a full walk-through of their entire product and business model, then dismissing them after a forty-five-minute meeting.

In all my experience in both startups and large companies, including and especially at Facebook, I would always prefer - a hundred times prefer - being subject to the rigors of the market, the fickleness of luck, and the whims of users than to navigate the popularity-contest politics of a large company, surrounded by the mediocre duffers who've succeeded in life through nothing more than guile and appearances.

The demands of customer discovery require people who are comfortable with change, chaos, and learning from failure and are at ease working in risky, unstable situations without a roadmap. In short, startups should welcome the rare breed generally known as entrepreneurs. They’re open to learning and discovery—highly curious, inquisitive, and creative. They must be eager to search for a repeatable and scalable business model. Agile enough to deal with daily change and operating “without a map.” Readily able to wear multiple hats, often on the same day, and comfortable celebrating failure when it leads to learning and iteration.

The path to success is paved with a lot of failures. So, when you encounter any failure, don’t be disheartened. Don’t take it as a permanent failure. Treat it just as a minor setback in your plan.

If after trying every solution, and every analysis, things still don’t work out for your business, don’t feel disheartened. Pick yourself up, raise your head high, memorize those valuable business lessons learned from this experience and start working on a new business idea. A real entrepreneur never stops. This time you will enter the industry with more experience and wisdom. And this idea is going to be yours!

People coded while they shat and needed to be provided toothbrushes at work. They had my attention.

Stanley Druckenmiller observed that huge and well-timed gambles were the essence of Soros's genius. Soros was right about the market's direction no more than other traders. What distinguished him was that when he felt a truly strong conviction, he acted on it more courageously. Likewise, Thiel had the guts to act on his understanding of the power law by betting big at the right moments. Because only a handful of startups would grow exponentially, there was no point getting excited about opportunities that seemed merely solid; in venture, the median investment was a failure. But when he encountered a potential grand slam, Thiel was ready to pile his chips onto the table.

A complex sales approach would have made Box a forgotten startup failure; instead, personal sales made it a multibillion-dollar business.

As most new businesses fail, saying start-ups have a very high rate of failure is by itself not particularly revelatory. But a start-up is not a small business. A start-up is designed from the beginning to either become very big or completely fail—the modern-day equivalent of an uncertain, cross-ocean voyage to the New World as opposed to, say, a predictable, moderately profitable seventeenth-century trading voyage from London to Amsterdam. Stakeholders in a start-up are more interested in increasing the potential magnitude of a spectacular outcome than in bettering the probability of modest returns. Thus, the financial ecosystem’s willingness to accept a high risk of capital loss made venture capital accessible to outliers and eccentrics.

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

Those who are afraid of heights Cannot take off from any flights!

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.

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.

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.

Hiring specialists too soon can cause trouble, as can delaying their recruitment. The same holds true for formal structure and systems. Such problems are rarely the main reason for a late-stage startup’s failure: The root cause is almost always that goals for speed or scope are out of whack. Nevertheless, organizational problems can act as amplifiers, boosting the odds of failure by distracting management when marketplace challenges require their full attention.

The discussion above of the Six S framework suggests that its elements frequently interact and influence each other. My analysis of scaling startups shows that these interactions frequently follow two predictable paths—each with its own catalyst. The first path starts with a drive for Speed—that is, accelerated growth for the startup’s core business. With the second path, the catalyst is a vision with ambitious Scope. As we’ll see in the chapters that follow, these two paths expose startups to unique risks—and unique modes of failure.

failures can usually be attributed to some combination of misfortunes that were outside the control of responsible parties and mistakes made by those parties.

Quincy hadn’t assembled the resources required to capitalize on its promising opportunity. As a result, it fell victim to the early-stage startup failure pattern I call “Good Idea, Bad Bedfellows.” In this context, “resources” doesn’t refer simply to capital; we see the Good Idea, Bad Bedfellows pattern play out when a startup with a promising opportunity falters due to deficiencies and dysfunction among a range of key resource providers, including its founders, other team members, investors, and strategic partners.

In fact, the romanticized narrative of the young, mostly male, high-tech wizard accounts for the smallest constellation in the universe of entrepreneurs—only about five to seven percent. Their new businesses get almost all the high-profile investment by venture capital firms, most of the media coverage, and—here’s a surprise—experience the highest failure rate of business startups. About eight in ten disappear within five years.

This is the pattern: poor quantitative results force us to declare failure and create the motivation, context, and space for more qualitative research. These investigations produce new ideas—new hypotheses—to be tested, leading to a possible pivot. Each pivot unlocks new opportunities for further experimentation, and the cycle repeats. Each time we repeat this simple rhythm: establish the baseline, tune the engine, and make a decision to pivot or persevere.

monetizable media empires on YouTube, while many freelancers make a better living on Upwork than they ever did or could at a traditional firm. My fascination with platforms emerged from a desire to understand business success and failure in the context of emerging digital business models. Platform Scale is an outcome of this growing fascination to unpack the inner workings of business models in a networked world. The ideas in this book aim to illustrate the importance of these models, the forces that power their rapid

There’s no failproof method; in fact, failure is often the best teacher.

In Korean Zen, the belief that it is good to branch out beyond what we already know is expressed in a phrase that means, literally, “not know mind.” To have a “not know mind” is a goal of creative people. It means you are open to the new, just as children are. Similarly, in Japanese Zen, that idea of not being constrained by what we already know is called “beginner’s mind.” And people practice for years to recapture and keep ahold of it. When a new company is formed, its founders must have a startup mentality—a beginner’s mind, open to everything because, well, what do they have to lose? (This is often something they later look back upon wistfully.) But when that company becomes successful, its leaders often cast off that startup mentality because, they tell themselves, they have figured out what to do. They don’t want to be beginners anymore. That may be human nature, but I believe it is a part of our nature that should be resisted. By resisting the beginner’s mind, you make yourself more prone to repeat yourself than to create something new. The attempt to avoid failure, in other words, makes failure more likely.

There are around two million new businesses started each year in the United States. Fewer than one thousand receive VC funding (a chance of one in two thousand). Typically, fewer than one hundred of those portfolio companies will create really significant wealth (one in ten VC investments). These are steep odds, so venture capitalists have developed fierce survival strategies about how, and in what, they invest their funds. They seek as high a return on their investment as possible in as short a time as possible-hundreds of times their investment within three years, if they can get it. Remember that a VC firm typically sees one significant success out of ten start-up companies. Your start up company, if successful, must therefore make enough profit, and the VC must have enough ownership, to compensate the investment firm for their other nine failures. That puts a lot of pressure on you to deliver.