Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase. Martin Luther King, Jr. The barriers for starting a company have come down. Today the total available markets for new applications are hundreds of millions if not billion of users, while new classes of investors are popping up all over (angels, [...]
Filed under: Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan, Teaching | 50 Comments »
I gave a talk at the Stanford Graduate School of Business as part of Entrepreneurship Week on the Democratization of Entrepreneurship. The first 11 minutes or so of the talk covers the post I wrote called “When It’s Darkest, Men See the Stars.” In it I observed that the barriers to entrepreneurship are not just being removed. [...]
Filed under: Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan, Customer Development | 12 Comments »
“Men wanted for hazardous journey. Low wages, bitter cold, long hours of complete darkness. Safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in event of success.” Attributed to Ernest Shackleton In 1912 Ernest Shackleton placed this ad to recruit a crew for the ship Endurance and his expedition to the South Pole. This would be one of the [...]
Filed under: Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan, Technology | 4 Comments »
In a startup “Good news needs to travel fast, but bad news needs to travel faster.” There’s something about the combination of human nature (rationalization and self deception) and large hierarchical organizations (corporations, military, government, etc.) that actively conspire to hide failure and errors. Institutional cover-up’s are so ingrained that we take them for granted. [...]
Filed under: Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan | 27 Comments »
One of the ironies of being a startup is that when you are small no one can put you out of business but you. Paradoxically, as your revenues and market share increase the risk of competitors damaging your company increases. Often the cause is the inability to grow the startup past the worldview of its [...]
Filed under: Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan | 8 Comments »
I had coffee with an ex student earlier in the week that reminded me yet again why startups burn through so many early VP’s. And after 30 years of Venture investing we still have a hard time articulating why. Here’s one possible explanation – Job titles in a startup mean something different than titles in a [...]
Filed under: Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan, Customer Development | 49 Comments »
I gave a talk last night to the Silicon Valley Product Management Association. It’s a San Francisco Bay Area forum for networking, jobs and education for over 500 Product Management professionals. This is one of the Silicon Valley organizations that remind you why this is a company-town whose main industry is entrepreneurship, (and a great example [...]
Filed under: Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan, Customer Development | 21 Comments »
One of the ways I learn is to teach. My students ask questions I can’t answer and challenge me to solve problems I never considered. At times I’ll do what I consider an extension of teaching; a two-day Customer Discovery/Validation intensive session with a large corporation serious about Customer Development at my ranch on the [...]
Filed under: Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan, Customer Development, Teaching | 9 Comments »
If you take funding from a venture capital firm or angel investor and want to build a large, enduring company (rather than sell it to the highest bidder), this isn’t the decade to do it. The collapse of the IPO market and dysfunctional math in the venture capital community has stacked the odds against you. [...]
Filed under: Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan, Technology, Venture Capital | 27 Comments »
My summer has circled around serendipity and three presentations I’ve given. Full Circle from Yosemite Nine years ago I took my young daughters on a 7-day pack trip riding mules at 10,000 feet to the Yosemite High-Sierra camps. Granite mountains and alpine green meadows during the day, unblinking stars in the frigid August nights. At [...]
Filed under: Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan, Customer Development, Venture Capital | 6 Comments »
The role of a founding CEO in a startup searching for a business model is radically different than a CEO building and growing a company. Some VC’s get it, others may not. So if you’re the founder of a startup, you may want to consider who you take money from. Is Your VC Founder Friendly? [...]
Filed under: Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan, Venture Capital | 7 Comments »
Who is an entrepreneur really? It turns out that there are four distinct types of entrepreneurial organizations; small businesses, scalable startups, large companies and social entrepreneurs. They all engage in entrepreneurship. Yet entrepreneurs in one class think that the others aren’t the “real” entrepreneurs. This post looks at the differences and similarities and explains why [...]
Filed under: Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan | 28 Comments »
It is a rare company that realizes it is time to fire the CEO when the financials are good but the business is fundamentally heading for a cliff. For me, I learned this lesson first hand. I had joined the board of a $200million public company that 15 years earlier had single-handily created an industry. [...]
Filed under: Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan, Customer Development | 23 Comments »
It’s not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one that is most responsive to change. Charles Darwin Companies have a fairly predictable life cycle. They start with an innovation, search for a repeatable business model, build the infrastructure for a company, then grow by efficiently executing the model. Over [...]
Filed under: Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan, Customer Development | 9 Comments »
Last week one of the schools I teach at invited me to judge a business plan contest. I suggested that they first might want to read my post on why business plans are a poor planning and execution tool for startups. They called back laughing and the invitation disappeared. At best I think business plan competitions [...]
Filed under: Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan, Business Model versus Business Plan, Customer Development Manifesto, Teaching | 46 Comments »
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