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David opens with the weekly update in Southern Venture and then interviews Tom Eisenmann. He's a professor at Harvard Business School focused on entrepreneurship and authored the book Why Startups Fail. David previously interviewed him for E60 and today is talking about what founders and investors can do to proactively reduce the risk of failure and discuss the opportunities for AI to help founders and investors. He outlines the HBS Foundry effort for AI education for founders as well as MIT's Orbit, another AI tool for founders. (interview recorded 1.21.25)Follow David on LinkedIn or reach out to David on Twitter/X @DGRollingSouth2 for comments. Follow Paul on LinkedIn or reach out to Paul on Twitter/X @PalmettoAngel We invite your feedback and suggestions at www.ventureinthesouth.com or email david@ventureinthesouth.com. Learn more about RollingSouth at rollingsouth.vc or email david@rollingsouth.vc.
Jeremy Au talked about the multifaceted nature of startup failures through insights from Professor Tom Eisenmann's book, "Why Startups Fail." He highlighted how startup failure is more common than people think, revealing that only 4% of companies were able to achieve 10x to 50x or higher returns. He discussed the six types of startup failures from the book: good idea, bad fellows, where a promising concept flounders due to team issues; false start, involving misjudged product-market fit; false positives, where early enthusiasm doesn't translate to broad market appeal; speed trap, depicting rapid growth that outpaces sustainable development; help wanted, indicating operational or strategic missteps in a growing company; and cascading miracles, which requires multiple, high-risk achievements for success. He underscored that learning from these failures can equip founders, investors, and operators with the knowledge to navigate the complex startup ecosystem more effectively. Watch, listen or read the full insight in English at https://www.bravesea.com/blog/why-startups-fail Saksikan, dengarkan atau baca wawasan lengkapnya dalam Bahasa Indonesia di https://www.bravesea.com/blog/why-startups-fail-id 观看、收听或阅读全文,请访问 https://www.bravesea.com/blog/why-startups-fail-cn Get transcripts, startup resources & community discussions at www.bravesea.com WhatsApp: https://chat.whatsapp.com/CeL3ywi7yOWFd8HTo6yzde TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@jeremyau Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jeremyauz Twitter: https://twitter.com/jeremyau LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/bravesea TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@jeremyau Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jeremyauz Twitter: https://twitter.com/jeremyau LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/bravesea English: Spotify | YouTube | Apple Podcasts Bahasa Indonesia: Spotify | YouTube | Apple Podcasts Chinese: Spotify | YouTube | Apple Podcasts Join the Singapore Growth & AI Summit with Sean Ellis! Use code seanbrave7 today.
In this episode of Product Thinking, Tom Eisenmann, Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, joins Melissa Perri to dive into "Why Startups Fail," his transformative book. Specifically, they dive into the inspiration of the book, six unique types of startup failures and how to avoid them, as well as strategies for hiring your first product manager.
99% of business media stories on startups are essentially PR for the startup itself. This makes these stories a one-sided source of information on what it's like to operate and grow a startup. While there are more and more discussions of mistakes, basically no one at Inc or Entrepreneur or anywhere else really will ever greenlight a debate on this or that failed startup unless, like Theranos, it ended in some massive ethical scandal. Failure is depressing, they say. Not me.I'm honored to bring you a past podcast, the second part in a two-part interview with Professor Tom Eisenmann of the Harvard Business School (HBS). He and I chat about themes from his new book Why Startups Fail and how these patterns play out in the world of consumer packaged goods (CPG). In the second part of our interview, we discuss more advanced themes in failure: the Speed Trap, Help Wanted, and the challenges of staffing up quicklySince joining the HBS faculty in 1997, Tom has led The Entrepreneurial Manager, an introductory course taught to all first-year MBAs, and launched fourteen electives on all aspects of entrepreneurship, including one on startup failure. Eisenmann has authored more than one hundred HBS case studies, and his writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, and Forbes.Your Host: Dr. James F. Richardson of Premium Growth Solutions, LLC www.premiumgrowthsolutions.com Please send feedback on this or other episodes to: admin@premiumgrowthsolutions.com
99% of business media stories on startups are essentially PR for the startup itself. This makes these stories a one-sided source of information on what it's like to operate and grow a startup. While there are more and more discussions of mistakes, basically no one at Inc or Entrepreneur or anywhere else really will ever greenlight a debate on this or that failed startup unless, like Theranos, it ended in some massive ethical scandal. Failure is depressing, they say. Not me. I'm honored to bring you a past episode, the first in a two-part interview with Professor Tom Eisenmann of the Harvard Business School (HBS). He and I chat about themes from his new book Why Startups Fail and how these patterns play out in the world of consumer packaged goods (CPG). In this episode, we discuss what to do when you have little business training, how unit economics evolve differently in CPG vs. tech startups, and how to prevent False Positives by doing just the right pre-revenue research.Since joining the HBS faculty in 1997, Tom has led The Entrepreneurial Manager, an introductory course taught to all first-year MBAs, and launched fourteen electives on all aspects of entrepreneurship, including one on startup failure. Eisenmann has authored more than one hundred HBS case studies, and his writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, and Forbes.Your Host: Dr. James F. Richardson of Premium Growth Solutions, LLC www.premiumgrowthsolutions.com Please send feedback on this or other episodes to: admin@premiumgrowthsolutions.com
Matthew Prince, Co-founder & CEO at Cloudflare, joins Corey on Screaming in the Cloud to discuss how and why Cloudflare is working to solve some of the Internet's biggest problems. Matthew reveals some of his biggest issues with cloud providers, including the tendency to charge more for egress than ingress and the fact that the various clouds don't compete on a feature vs. feature basis. Corey and Matthew also discuss how Cloudflare is working to change those issues so the Internet is a better and more secure place. Matthew also discusses how transparency has been key to winning trust in the community and among Cloudflare's customers, and how he hopes the Internet and cloud providers will evolve over time.About MatthewMatthew Prince is co-founder and CEO of Cloudflare. Cloudflare's mission is to help build a better Internet. Today the company runs one of the world's largest networks, which spans more than 200 cities in over 100 countries. Matthew is a World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, winner of the 2011 Tech Fellow Award, and serves on the Board of Advisors for the Center for Information Technology and Privacy Law. Matthew holds an MBA from Harvard Business School where he was a George F. Baker Scholar and awarded the Dubilier Prize for Entrepreneurship. He is a member of the Illinois Bar, and earned his J.D. from the University of Chicago and B.A. in English Literature and Computer Science from Trinity College. He's also the co-creator of Project Honey Pot, the largest community of webmasters tracking online fraud and abuse.Links Referenced: Cloudflare: https://www.cloudflare.com/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/eastdakota TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. One of the things we talk about here, an awful lot is cloud providers. There sure are a lot of them, and there's the usual suspects that you would tend to expect with to come up, and there are companies that work within their ecosystem. And then there are the enigmas.Today, I'm talking to returning guest Matthew Prince, Cloudflare CEO and co-founder, who… well first, welcome back, Matthew. I appreciate your taking the time to come and suffer the slings and arrows a second time.Matthew: Corey, thanks for having me.Corey: What I'm trying to do at the moment is figure out where Cloudflare lives in the context of the broad ecosystem because you folks have released an awful lot. You had this vaporware-style announcement of R2, which was an S3 competitor, that then turned out to be real. And oh, it's always interesting, when vapor congeals into something that actually exists. Cloudflare Workers have been around for a while and I find that they become more capable every time I turn around. You have Cloudflare Tunnel which, to my understanding, is effectively a VPN without the VPN overhead. And it feels that you are coming at building a cloud provider almost from the other side than the traditional cloud provider path. Is it accurate? Am I missing something obvious? How do you see yourselves?Matthew: Hey, you know, I think that, you know, you can often tell a lot about a company by what they measure and what they measure themselves by. And so, if you're at a traditional, you know, hyperscale public cloud, an AWS or a Microsoft Azure or a Google Cloud, the key KPI that they focus on is how much of a customer's data are they hoarding, effectively? They're all hoarding clouds, fundamentally. Whereas at Cloudflare, we focus on something of it's very different, which is, how effectively are we moving a customer's data from one place to another? And so, while the traditional hyperscale public clouds are all focused on keeping your data and making sure that they have as much of it, what we're really focused on is how do we make sure your data is wherever you need it to be and how do we connect all of the various things together?So, I think it's exactly right, where we start with a network and are kind of building more functions on top of that network, whereas other companies start really with a database—the traditional hyperscale public clouds—and the network is sort of an afterthought on top of it, just you know, a cost center on what they're delivering. And I think that describes a lot of the difference between us and everyone else. And so oftentimes, we work very much in conjunction with. A lot of our customers use hyperscale public clouds and Cloudflare, but increasingly, there are certain applications, there's certain data that just makes sense to live inside the network itself, and in those cases, customers are using things like R2, they're using our Workers platform in order to be able to build applications that will be available everywhere around the world and incredibly performant. And I think that is fundamentally the difference. We're all about moving data between places, making sure it's available everywhere, whereas the traditional hyperscale public clouds are all about hoarding that data in one place.Corey: I want to clarify that when you say hoard, I think of this, from my position as a cloud economist, as effectively in an economic story where hoarding the data, they get to charge you for hosting it, they get to charge you serious prices for egress. I've had people mishear that before in a variety of ways, usually distilled down to, “Oh, and their data mining all of their customers' data.” And I want to make sure that that's not the direction that you intend the term to be used. If it is, then great, we can talk about that, too. I just want to make sure that I don't get letters because God forbid we get letters for things that we say in the public.Matthew: No, I mean, I had an aunt who was a hoarder and she collected every piece of everything and stored it somewhere in her tiny little apartment in the panhandle of Florida. I don't think she looked at any of it and for the most part, I don't think that AWS or Google or Microsoft are really using your data in any way that's nefarious, but they're definitely not going to make it easy for you to get it out of those places; they're going to make it very, very expensive. And again, what they're measuring is how much of a customer's data are they holding onto whereas at Cloudflare we're measuring how much can we enable you to move your data around and connected wherever you need it. And again, I think that that kind of gets to the fundamental difference between how we think of the world and how I think the hyperscale public clouds thing of the world. And it also gets to where are the places where it makes sense to use Cloudflare, and where are the places that it makes sense to use an AWS or Google Cloud or Microsoft Azure.Corey: So, I have to ask, and this gets into the origin story trope a bit, but what radicalized you? For me, it was the realization one day that I could download two terabytes of data from S3 once, and it would cost significantly more than having Amazon.com ship me a two-terabyte hard drive from their store.Matthew: I think that—so Cloudflare started with the basic idea that the internet's not as good as it should be. If we all knew what the internet was going to be used for and what we're all going to depend on it for, we would have made very different decisions in how it was designed. And we would have made sure that security was built in from day one, we would have—you know, the internet is very reliable and available, but there are now airplanes that can't land if the internet goes offline, they are shopping transactions shut down if the internet goes offline. And so, I don't think we understood—we made it available to some extent, but not nearly to the level that we all now depend on it. And it wasn't as fast or as efficient as it possibly could be. It's still very dependent on the geography of where data is located.And so, Cloudflare started out by saying, “Can we fix that? Can we go back and effectively patch the internet and make it what it should have been when we set down the original protocols in the '60s, '70s, and '80s?” But can we go back and say, can we build a new, sort of, overlay on the internet that solves those problems: make it more secure, make it more reliable, make it faster and more efficient? And so, I think that that's where we started, and as a result of, again, starting from that place, it just made fundamental sense that our job was, how do you move data from one place to another and do it in all of those ways? And so, where I think that, again, the hyperscale public clouds measure themselves by how much of a customer's data are they hoarding; we measure ourselves by how easy are we making it to securely, reliably, and efficiently move any piece of data from one place to another.And so, I guess, that is radical compared to some of the business models of the traditional cloud providers, but it just seems like what the internet should be. And that's our North Star and that's what just continues to drive us and I think is a big reason why more and more customers continue to rely on Cloudflare.Corey: The thing that irks me potentially the most in the entire broad strokes of cloud is how the actions of the existing hyperscalers have reflected mostly what's going on in the larger world. Moore's law has been going on for something like 100 years now. And compute continues to get faster all the time. Storage continues to cost less year over year in a variety of ways. But they have, on some level, tricked an entire generation of businesses into believing that network bandwidth is this precious, very finite thing, and of course, it's going to be ridiculously expensive. You know, unless you're taking it inbound, in which case, oh, by all means back the truck around. It'll be great.So, I've talked to founders—or prospective founders—who had ideas but were firmly convinced that there was no economical way to build it. Because oh, if I were to start doing real-time video stuff, well, great, let's do the numbers on this. And hey, that'll be $50,000 a minute, if I read the pricing page correctly, it's like, well, you could get some discounts if you ask nicely, but it doesn't occur to them that they could wind up asking for a 98% discount on these things. Everything is measured in a per gigabyte dimension and that just becomes one of those things where people are starting to think about and meter something that—from my days in data centers where you care about the size of the pipe and not what's passing through it—to be the wrong way of thinking about things.Matthew: A little of this is that everybody is colored by their experience of dealing with their ISP at home. And in the United States, in a lot of the world, ISPs are built on the old cable infrastructure. And if you think about the cable infrastructure, when it was originally laid down, it was all one-directional. So, you know, if you were turning on cable in your house in a pre-internet world, data fl—Corey: Oh, you'd watch a show and your feedback was yelling at the TV, and that's okay. They would drop those packets.Matthew: And there was a tiny, tiny, tiny bit of data that would go back the other direction, but cable was one-directional. And so, it actually took an enormous amount of engineering to make cable bi-directional. And that's the reason why if you're using a traditional cable company as your ISP, typically you will have a large amount of download capacity, you'll have, you know, a 100 megabits of down capacity, but you might only have a 10th of that—so maybe ten megabits—of upload capacity. That is an artifact of the cable system. That is not just the natural way that the internet works.And the way that it is different, that wholesale bandwidth works, is that when you sign up for wholesale bandwidth—again, as you phrase it, you're not buying this many bytes that flows over the line; you're buying, effectively, a pipe. You know, the late Senator Ted Stevens said that the internet is just a series of tubes and got mocked mercilessly, but the internet is just a series of tubes. And when Cloudflare or AWS or Google or Microsoft buys one of those tubes, what they pay for is the diameter of the tube, the amount that can fit through it. And the nature of this is you don't just get one tube, you get two. One that is down and one that is up. And they're the same size.And so, if you've got a terabit of traffic coming down and zero going up, that costs exactly the same as a terabit going up and zero going down, which costs exactly the same as a terabit going down and a terabit going up. It is different than your home, you know, cable internet connection. And that's the thing that I think a lot of people don't understand. And so, as you pointed out, but the great tragedy of the cloud is that for nothing other than business reasons, these hyperscale public cloud companies don't charge you anything to accept data—even though that is actually the more expensive of the two operations for that because writes are more expensive than reads—but the inherent fact that they were able to suck the data in means that they have the capacity, at no additional cost, to be able to send that data back out. And so, I think that, you know, the good news is that you're starting to see some providers—so Cloudflare, we've never charged for egress because, again, we think that over time, bandwidth prices go to zero because it just makes sense; it makes sense for ISPs, it makes sense for connectiv—to be connected to us.And that's something that we can do, but even in the cases of the cloud providers where maybe they're all in one place and somebody has to pay to backhaul the traffic around the world, maybe there's some cost, but you're starting to see some pressure from some of the more forward-leaning providers. So Oracle, I think has done a good job of leaning in and showing how egress fees are just out of control. But it's crazy that in some cases, you have a 4,000x markup on AWS bandwidth fees. And that's assuming that they're paying the same rates as what we would get at Cloudflare, you know, even though we are a much smaller company than they are, and they should be able to get even better prices.Corey: Yes, if there's one thing Amazon is known for, it as being bad at negotiating. Yeah, sure it is. I'm sure that they're just a terrific joy to be a vendor to.Matthew: Yeah, and I think that fundamentally what the price of bandwidth is, is tied very closely to what the cost of a port on a router costs. And what we've seen over the course of the last ten years is that cost has just gone enormously down where the capacity of that port has gone way up and the just physical cost, the depreciated cost that port has gone down. And yet, when you look at Amazon, you just haven't seen a decrease in the cost of bandwidth that they're passing on to customers. And so, again, I think that this is one of the places where you're starting to see regulators pay attention, we've seen efforts in the EU to say whatever you charge to take data out is the same as what you should charge it to put data in. We're seeing the FTC start to look at this, and we're seeing customers that are saying that this is a purely anti-competitive action.And, you know, I think what would be the best and healthiest thing for the cloud by far is if we made it easy to move between various cloud providers. Because right now the choice is, do I use AWS or Google or Microsoft, whereas what I think any company out there really wants to be able to do is they want to be able to say, “I want to use this feature at AWS because they're really good at that and I want to use this other feature at Google because they're really good at that, and I want to us this other feature at Microsoft, and I want to mix and match between those various things.” And I think that if you actually got cloud providers to start competing on features as opposed to competing on their overall platform, we'd actually have a much richer and more robust cloud environment, where you'd see a significantly improved amount of what's going on, as opposed to what we have now, which is AWS being mediocre at everything.Corey: I think that there's also a story where for me, the egress is annoying, but so is the cross-region and so is the cross-AZ, which in many cases costs exactly the same. And that frustrates me from the perspective of, yes, if you have two data centers ten miles apart, there is some startup costs to you in running fiber between them, however you want to wind up with that working, but it's a sunk cost. But at the end of that, though, when you wind up continuing to charge on a per gigabyte basis to customers on that, you're making them decide on a very explicit trade-off of, do I care more about cost or do I care more about reliability? And it's always going to be an investment decision between those two things, but when you make the reasonable approach of well, okay, an availability zone rarely goes down, and then it does, you get castigated by everyone for, “Oh it even says in their best practice documents to go ahead and build it this way.” It's funny how a lot of the best practice documents wind up suggesting things that accrue primarily to a cloud provider's benefit. But that's the way of the world I suppose.I just know, there's a lot of customer frustration on it and in my client environments, it doesn't seem to be very acute until we tear apart a bill and look at where they're spending money, and on what, at which point, the dawning realization, you can watch it happen, where they suddenly realize exactly where their money is going—because it's relatively impenetrable without that—and then they get angry. And I feel like if people don't know what they're being charged for, on some level, you've messed up.Matthew: Yeah. So, there's cost to running a network, but there's no reason other than limiting competition why you would charge more to take data out than you would put data in. And that's a puzzle. The cross-region thing, you know, I think where we're seeing a lot of that is actually oftentimes, when you've got new technologies that come out and they need to take advantage of some scarce resource. And so, AI—and all the AI companies are a classic example of this—right now, if you're trying to build a model, an AI model, you are hunting the world for available GPUs at a reasonable price because there's an enormous scarcity of them.And so, you need to move from AWS East to AWS West, to AWS, you know, Singapore, to AWS in Luxembourg and bounce around to find wherever there's GPU availability. And then that is crossed against the fact that these training datasets are huge. You know, I mean, they're just massive, massive, massive amounts of data. And so, what that is doing is you're having these AI companies that are really seeing this get hit in the face, where they literally can't get the capacity they need because of the fact that whatever cloud provider in whatever region they've selected to store their data isn't able to have that capacity. And so, they're getting hit not only by sort of a double whammy of, “I need to move my data to wherever there's capacity. And if I don't do that, then I have to pay some premium, an ever-escalating price for the underlying GPUs.” And God forbid, you have to move from AWS to Google to chase that.And so, we're seeing a lot of companies that are saying, “This doesn't make any sense. We have this enormous training set. If we just put it with Cloudflare, this is data that makes sense to live in the network, fundamentally.” And not everything does. Like, we're not the right place to store your long-term transaction logs that you're only going to look at if you get sued. There are much better places, much more effective places do it.But in those cases where you've got to read data frequently, you've got to read it from different places around the world, and you will need to decrease what those costs of each one of those reads are, what we're seeing is just an enormous amount of demand for that. And I think these AI startups are really just a very clear example of what company after company after company needs, and why R2 has had—which is our zero egress cost S3 competitor—why that is just seeing such explosive growth from a broad set of customers.Corey: Because I enjoy pushing the bounds of how ridiculous I can be on the internet, I wound up grabbing a copy of the model, the Llama 2 model that Meta just released earlier this week as we're recording this. And it was great. It took a little while to download here. I have gigabit internet, so okay, it took some time. But then I wound up with something like 330 gigs of models. Great, awesome.Except for the fact that I do the math on that and just for me as one person to download that, had they been paying the listed price on the AWS website, they would have spent a bit over $30, just for me as one random user to download the model, once. If you can express that into the idea of this is a model that is absolutely perfect for whatever use case, but we want to have it run with some great GPUs available at another cloud provider. Let's move the model over there, ignoring the data it's operating on as well, it becomes completely untenable. It really strikes me as an anti-competitiveness issue.Matthew: Yeah. I think that's it. That's right. And that's just the model. To build that model, you would have literally millions of times more data that was feeding it. And so, the training sets for that model would be many, many, many, many, many, many orders of magnitude larger in terms of what's there. And so, I think the AI space is really illustrating where you have this scarce resource that you need to chase around the world, you have these enormous datasets, it's illustrating how these egress fees are actually holding back the ability for innovation to happen.And again, they are absolutely—there is no valid reason why you would charge more for egress than you do for ingress other than limiting competition. And I think the good news, again, is that's something that's gotten regulators' attention, that's something that's gotten customers' attention, and over time, I think we all benefit. And I think actually, AWS and Google and Microsoft actually become better if we start to have more competition on a feature-by-feature basis as opposed to on an overall platform. The choice shouldn't be, “I use AWS.” And any big company, like, nobody is all-in only on one cloud provider. Everyone is multi-cloud, whether they want to be or not because people end up buying another company or some skunkworks team goes off and uses some other function.So, you are across multiple different clouds, whether you want to be or not. But the ideal, and when I talk to customers, they want is, they want to say, “Well, you know that stuff that they're doing over at Microsoft with AI, that sounds really interesting. I want to use that, but I really like the maturity and robustness of some of the EC2 API, so I want to use that at AWS. And Google is still, you know, the best in the world at doing search and indexing and everything, so I want to use that as well, in order to build my application.” And the applications of the future will inherently stitch together different features from different cloud providers, different startups.And at Cloudflare, what we see is our, sort of, purpose for being is how do we make that stitching as easy as possible, as cost-effective as possible, and make it just make sense so that you have one consistent security layer? And again, we're not about hording the data; we're about connecting all of those things together. And again, you know, from the last time we talked to now, I'm actually much more optimistic that you're going to see, kind of, this revolution where egress prices go down, you get competition on feature-by-features, and that's just going to make every cloud provider better over the long-term.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by Panoptica. Panoptica simplifies container deployment, monitoring, and security, protecting the entire application stack from build to runtime. Scalable across clusters and multi-cloud environments, Panoptica secures containers, serverless APIs, and Kubernetes with a unified view, reducing operational complexity and promoting collaboration by integrating with commonly used developer, SRE, and SecOps tools. Panoptica ensures compliance with regulatory mandates and CIS benchmarks for best practice conformity. Privacy teams can monitor API traffic and identify sensitive data, while identifying open-source components vulnerable to attacks that require patching. Proactively addressing security issues with Panoptica allows businesses to focus on mitigating critical risks and protecting their interests. Learn more about Panoptica today at panoptica.app.Corey: I don't know that I would trust you folks to the long-term storage of critical data or the store of record on that. You don't have the track record on that as a company the way that you do for being the network interchange that makes everything just work together. There are areas where I'm thrilled to explore and see how it works, but it takes time, at least from the sensible infrastructure perspective of trusting people with track records on these things. And you clearly have the network track record on these things to make this stick. It almost—it seems unfair to you folks, but I view you as Cloudflare is a CDN, that also dabbles in a few other things here in there, though, increasingly, it seems it's CDN and security company are becoming synonymous.Matthew: It's interesting. I remember—and this really is going back to the origin story, but when we were starting Cloudflare, you know, what we saw was that, you know, we watched as software—starting with companies like Salesforce—transition from something that you bought in the box to something that you bought as a service [into 00:23:25] the cloud. We watched as, sort of, storage and compute transition from something that you bought from Dell or HP to something that you rented as a service. And so the fundamental problem that Cloudflare started out with was if the software and the storage and compute are going to move, inherently the security and the networking is going to move as well because it has to be as a service as well, there's no way you can buy a you know, Cisco firewall and stick it in front of your cloud service. You have to be in the cloud as well.So, we actually started very much as a security company. And the objection that everybody had to us as we would sort of go out and describe what we were planning on doing was, “You know, that sounds great, but you're going to slow everything down.” And so, we became just obsessed with latency. And Michelle, my co-founder, and I were business students and we had an advisor, a guy named Tom [Eisenmann 00:24:26] in business school. And I remember going in and that was his objection as well and so we did all this work to figure it out.And obviously, you know, I'd say computer science, and anytime that you have a problem around latency or speed caching is an obvious part of the solution to that. And so, we went in and we said, “Here's how we're going to do it: [unintelligible 00:24:47] all this protocol optimization stuff, and here's how we're going to distribute it around the world and get close to where users are. And we're going to use caching in the places where we can do caching.” And Tom said, “Oh, you're building a CDN.” And I remember looking at him and then I'm looking at Michelle. And Michelle is Canadian, and so I was like, “I don't know that I'm building a Canadian, but I guess. I don't know.”And then, you know, we walked out in the hall and Michelle looked at me and she's like, “We have to go figure out what the CDN thing is.” And we had no idea what a CDN was. And even when we learned about it, we were like, that business doesn't make any sense. Like because again, the CDNs were the first ones to really charge for bandwidth. And so today, we have effectively built, you know, a giant CDN and are the fastest in the world and do all those things.But we've always given it away basically for free because fundamentally, what we're trying to do is all that other stuff. And so, we actually started with security. Security is—you know, my—I've been working in security now for over 25 years and that's where my background comes from, and if you go back and look at what the original plan was, it was how do we provide that security as a service? And yeah, you need to have caching because caching makes sense. What I think is the difference is that in order to do that, in order to be able to build that, we had to build a set of developer tools for our own team to allow them to build things as quickly as possible.And, you know, if you look at Cloudflare, I think one of the things we're known for is just the rapid, rapid, rapid pace of innovation. And so, over time, customers would ask us, “How do you innovate so fast? How do you build things fast?” And part of the answer to that, there are lots of ways that we've been able to do that, but part of the answer to that is we built a developer platform for our own team, which was just incredibly flexible, allowed you to scale to almost any level, took care of a lot of that traditional SRE functions just behind the scenes without you having to think about it, and it allowed our team to be really fast. And our customers are like, “Wow, I want that too.”And so, customer after customer after customer after customer was asking and saying, you know, “We have those same problems. You know, if we're a big e-commerce player, we need to be able to build something that can scale up incredibly quickly, and we don't have to think about spinning up VMs or containers or whatever, we don't have to think about that. You know, our customers are around the world. We don't want to have to pick a region for where we're going to deploy code.” And so, where we built Cloudflare Workers for ourself first, customers really pushed us to make it available to them as well.And that's the way that almost any good developer platform starts out. That's how AWS started. That's how, you know, the Microsoft developer platform, and so the Apple developer platform, the Salesforce developer platform, they all start out as internal tools, and then someone says, “Can you expose this to us as well?” And that's where, you know, I think that we have built this. And again, it's very opinionated, it is right for certain applications, it's never going to be the right place to run SAP HANA, but the company that builds the tool [crosstalk 00:27:58]—Corey: I'm not convinced there is a right place to run SAP HANA, but that's probably unfair of me.Matthew: Yeah, but there is a startup out there, I guarantee you, that's building whatever the replacement for SAP HANA is. And I think it's a better than even bet that Cloudflare Workers is part of their stack because it solves a lot of those fundamental challenges. And that's been great because it is now allowing customer after customer after customer, big and large startups and multinationals, to do things that you just can't do with traditional legacy hyperscale public cloud. And so, I think we're sort of the next generation of building that. And again, I don't think we set out to build a developer platform for third parties, but we needed to build it for ourselves and that's how we built such an effective tool that now so many companies are relying on.Corey: As a Cloudflare customer myself, I think that one of the things that makes you folks standalone—it's why I included security as well as CDN is one of the things I trust you folks with—has been—Matthew: I still think CDN is Canadian. You will never see us use that term. It's like, Gartner was like, “You have to submit something for the CDN-like ser—” and we ended up, like, being absolute top-right in it. But it's a space that is inherently going to zero because again, if bandwidth is free, I'm not sure what—this is what the internet—how the internet should work. So yeah, anyway.Corey: I agree wholeheartedly. But what I've always enjoyed, and this is probably going to make me sound meaner than I intend it to, it has been your outages. Because when computers inherently at some point break, which is what they do, you personally and you as a company have both taken a tone that I don't want to say gleeful, but it's sort of the next closest thing to it regarding the postmortem that winds up getting published, the explanation of what caused it, the transparency is unheard of at companies that are your scale, where usually they want to talk about these things as little as possible. Whereas you've turned these into things that are educational to those of us who don't have the same scale to worry about but can take things from that are helpful. And that transparency just counts for so much when we're talking about things as critical as security.Matthew: I would definitely not describe it as gleeful. It is incredibly painful. And we, you know, we know we let customers down anytime we have an issue. But we tend not to make the same mistake twice. And the only way that we really can reliably do that is by being just as transparent as possible about exactly what happened.And we hope that others can learn from the mistakes that we made. And so, we own the mistakes we made and we talk about them and we're transparent, both internally but also externally when there's a problem. And it's really amazing to just see how much, you know, we've improved over time. So, it's actually interesting that, you know, if you look across—and we measure, we test and measure all the big hyperscale public clouds, what their availability and reliability is and measure ourselves against it, and across the board, second half of 2021 and into the first half of 2022 was the worst for every cloud provider in terms of reliability. And the question is why?And the answer is, Covid. I mean, the answer to most things over the last three years is in one way, directly or indirectly, Covid. But what happened over that period of time was that in April of 2020, internet traffic and traffic to our service and everyone who's like us doubled over the course of a two-week period. And there are not many utilities that you can imagine that if their usage doubles, that you wouldn't have a problem. Imagine the sewer system all of a sudden has twice as much sewage, or the electrical grid as twice as much demand, or the freeways have twice as many cars. Like, things break down.And especially the European internet came incredibly close to just completely failing at that time. And we all saw where our bottlenecks were. And what's interesting is actually the availability wasn't so bad in 2020 because people were—they understood the absolute critical importance that while we're in the middle of a pandemic, we had to make sure the internet worked. And so, we—there were a lot of sleepless nights, there's a—and not just at with us, but with every provider that's out there. We were all doing Herculean tasks in order to make sure that things came online.By the time we got to the sort of the second half of 2021, what everybody did, Cloudflare included, was we looked at it, and we said, “Okay, here were where the bottlenecks were. Here were the problems. What can we do to rearchitect our systems to do that?” And one of the things that we saw was that we effectively treated large data centers as one big block, and if you had certain pieces of equipment that failed in a way, that you would take that entire data center down and then that could have cascading effects across traffic as it shifted around across our network. And so, we did the work to say, “Let's take that one big data center and divide it effectively into multiple independent units, where you make sure that they're all on different power suppliers, you make sure they're all in different [crosstalk 00:32:52]”—Corey: [crosstalk 00:32:51] harder than it sounds. When you have redundant things, very often, the thing that takes you down the most is the heartbeat that determines whether something next to it is up or not. It gets a false reading and suddenly, they're basically trying to clobber each other to death. So, this is a lot harder than it sounds like.Matthew: Yeah, and it was—but what's interesting is, like, we took it all that into account, but the act of fixing things, you break things. And that was not just true at Cloudflare. If you look across Google and Microsoft and Amazon, everybody, their worst availability was second half of 2021 or into 2022. But it both internally and externally, we talked about the mistakes we made, we talked about the challenges we had, we talked about—and today, we're significantly more resilient and more reliable because of that. And so, transparency is built into Cloudflare from the beginning.The earliest story of this, I remember, there was a 15-year-old kid living in Long Beach, California who bought my social security number off of a Russian website that had hacked a bank that I'd once used to get a mortgage. He then use that to redirect my cell phone voicemail to a voicemail box he controlled. He then used that to get into my personal email. He then used that to find a zero-day vulnerability in Google's corporate email where he could privilege-escalate from my personal email into Google's corporate email, which is the provider that we use for our email service. And then he used that as an administrator on our email at the time—this is back in the early days of Cloudflare—to get into another administration account that he then used to redirect one of Cloud Source customers to a website that he controlled.And thankfully, it wasn't, you know, the FBI or the Central Bank of Brazil, which were all Cloudflare customers. Instead, it was 4chan because he was a 15-year-old hacker kid. And we fix it pretty quickly and nobody knew who Cloudflare was at the time. And so potential—Corey: The potential damage that could have been caused at that point with that level of access to things, like, that is such a ridiculous way to use it.Matthew: And—yeah [laugh]—my temptation—because it was embarrassing. He took a bunch of stuff from my personal email and he put it up on a website, which just to add insult to injury, was actually using Cloudflare as well. And I wanted to sweep it under the rug. And our team was like, “That's not the right thing to do. We're fundamentally a security company and we need to talk about when we make mistakes on security.” And so, we wrote a huge postmortem on, “Here's all the stupid things that we did that caused this hack to happen.” And by the way, it wasn't just us. It was AT&T, it was Google. I mean, there are a lot of people that ended up being involved.Corey: It builds trust with that stuff. It's painful in the short term, but I believe with the benefit of hindsight, it was clearly the right call.Matthew: And it was—and I remember, you know, pushing ‘publish' on the blog post and thinking, “This is going to be the end of the company.” And quite the opposite happened, which was all of a sudden, we saw just an incredible amount of people who signed up the next day saying, “If you're going to be that transparent about something that was incredibly embarrassing when you didn't have to be, then that's the sort of thing that actually makes me trust that you're going to be transparent the future.” And I think learning that lesson early on, has been just an incredibly valuable lesson for us and made us the company that we are today.Corey: A question that I have for you about the idea of there being no reason to charge in one direction but not the other. There's something that I'm not sure that I understand on this. If I run a website, to use your numbers of a terabit out—because it's a web server—and effectively nothing in—because it's a webserver; other than the request, nothing really is going to come in—that ingress bandwidth becomes effectively unused and also free. So, if I have another use case where I'm paying for it anyway, if I'm primarily caring about an outward direction, sure, you can send things in for free. Now, there's a lot of nuance that goes into that. But I'm curious as to what the—is their fundamental misunderstanding in that analysis of the bandwidth market?Matthew: No. And I think that's exactly, exactly right. And it's actually interesting. At Cloudflare, our infrastructure team—which is the one that manages our connections to the outside world, manages the hardware we have—meets on a quarterly basis with our product team. It's called the Hot and Cold Meeting.And what they do is they go over our infrastructure, and they say, “Okay, where are we hot? Where do we have not enough capacity?” If you think of any given server, an easy way to think of a server is that it has, sort of, four resources that are available to it. This is, kind of, vast simplification, but one is the connectivity to the outside world, both transit in and out. The second is the—Corey: Otherwise it's just a complicated space heater.Matthew: Yeah [laugh]. The other is the CPU. The other is the longer-term storage. We use only SSDs, but sort of, you know, hard drives or SSD storage. And then the fourth is the short-term storage, or RAM that's in that server.And so, at any given moment, there are going to be places where we are running hot, where we have a sort of capacity level that we're targeting and we're over that capacity level, but we're also going to be running cold in some of those areas. And so, the infrastructure team and the product team get together and the product team has requests on, you know, “Here's some more places we would be great to have more infrastructure.” And we're really good at deploying that when we need to, but the infrastructure team then also says, “Here are the places where we're cold, where we have excess capacity.” And that turns into products at Cloudflare. So, for instance, you know, the reason that we got into the zero-trust space was very much because we had all this excess capacity.We have 100 times the capacity of something like Zscaler across our network, and we can add that—that is primar—where most of our older products are all about outward traffic, the zero-trust products are all about inward traffic. And the reason that we can do everything that Zscaler does, but for, you know, a much, much, much more affordable prices, we going to basically just layer that on the network that already exists. The reason we don't charge for the bandwidth behind DDoS attacks is DDoS attacks are always about inbound traffic and we have just a ton of excess capacity around that inbound traffic. And so, that unused capacity is a resource that we can then turn into products, and very much that conversation between our product team and our infrastructure team drives how we think about building new products. And we're always trying to say how can we get as much utilization out of every single piece of equipment that we run everywhere in the world.The way we build our network, we don't have custom machines or different networks for every products. We build all of our machines—they come in generations. So, we're on, I think, generation 14 of servers where we spec a server and it has, again, a certain amount of each of those four [bits 00:39:22] of capacity. But we can then deploy that server all around the world, and we're buying many, many, many of them at any given time so we can get the best cost on that. But our product team is very much in constant communication with our infrastructure team and saying, “What more can we do with the capacity that we have?” And then we pass that on to our customers by adding additional features that work across our network and then doing it in a way that's incredibly cost-effective.Corey: I really want to thank you for taking the time to, basically once again, suffer slings and arrows about networking, security, cloud, economics, and so much more. If people want to learn more, where's the best place for them to find you?Matthew: You know, used to be an easy question to answer because it was just, you know, go on Twitter and find me but now we have all these new mediums. So, I'm @eastdakota on Twitter. I'm eastdakota.com on Bluesky. I'm @real_eastdakota on Threads. And so, you know, one way or another, if you search for eastdakota, you'll come across me somewhere out there in the ether.Corey: And we will, of course, put links to that in the show notes. Thank you so much for your time. I appreciate it.Matthew: It's great to talk to you, Corey.Corey: Matthew Prince, CEO and co-founder of Cloudflare. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice along with an angry, insulting comment that I will of course not charge you inbound data rates on.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.
In the start-up world, when is it possible to grow too fast? Harvard Business School professor Tom Eisenmann and entrepreneur Lindsey Hyde discuss what led to the failure of Hyde's pet care start-up, Baroo.
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with @skominers @smc90In this deep dive and tour through key business concepts, from theory to practice, we cover the topics of strategy, competitive advantage, network effects, moats, and more -- covering both both basic foundations, as well as the tricky nuances in a new world of open source, including web3. In the first half of this discussion, we cover foundational business concepts and questions -- such as the nature of competition, and how it *really* changes in web3; as well as how network effects really work -- and then, in the second half (in case you want to skip ahead), we cover mindsets and general guidance for builders…Our expert guest -- in conversation with editor in chief and host Sonal Chokshi -- is a16z crypto research partner Scott Duke Kominers, who is also a professor at Harvard Business School; a faculty affiliate in Harvard's Department of Economics; and advises several companies on marketplace development, incentive design, and more; as well as advises, and is directly involved, in several NFT communities. Scott also teaches on these topics -- both at Harvard and also recently at our Crypto Startup School -- so be sure to subscribe to our playlist for those talks on the a16z crypto YouTube channel to get the latest updates as we release more videos from the 2023 cohort. Listen to web3 with a16z: https://web3-with-a16z.simplecast.com/related links // see also:Can web3 bring back competition to digital platforms? by Christian Catalini and Scott Duke KominersWhy build in web3 by Jad Esber and Scott Duke KominersVampire attacks: A theory (and thread) on 'blood sucking' platform competition by John William Hatfield and Scott Duke KominersWhy NFT creators are going cc0 by Flashrekt and Scott Duke KominersDecentralized identity: Your reputation travels with you by Scott Duke Kominers and Jad EsberIncreasing returns and the new world of business (1996) by W. Brian ArthurNetwork effects, origin Stories, and the evolution of tech with W. Brian Arthur, Marc Andreeessen, and Sonal ChokshiThe five competitive forces that shape strategy (2008 reformulation of 1979 paper) by Michael PorterStrategies for two-sided markets (2006) by Tom Eisenmann, Geoffrey Parker, and Marshall Van Alstyne Stay Updated: Find a16z on Twitter: https://twitter.com/a16zFind a16z on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/a16zSubscribe on your favorite podcast app: https://a16z.simplecast.com/Follow our host: https://twitter.com/stephsmithioPlease note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures.
with @skominers @smc90In this deep dive and tour through key business concepts, from theory to practice, we cover the topics of strategy, competitive advantage, network effects, moats, and more -- covering both both basic foundations, as well as the tricky nuances in a new world of open source, including web3. In the first half of this discussion, we cover foundational business concepts and questions -- such as the nature of competition, and how it *really* changes in web3; as well as how network effects really work -- and then, in the second half (in case you want to skip ahead), we cover mindsets and general guidance for builders…Our expert guest -- in conversation with editor in chief and host Sonal Chokshi -- is a16z crypto research partner Scott Duke Kominers, who is also a professor at Harvard Business School; a faculty affiliate in Harvard's Department of Economics; and advises several companies on marketplace development, incentive design, and more; as well as advises, and is directly involved, in several NFT communities. Scott also teaches on these topics -- both at Harvard and also recently at our Crypto Startup School -- so be sure to subscribe to our playlist for those talks on the a16z crypto YouTube channel to get the latest updates as we release more videos from the 2023 cohort. related links // see also:Can web3 bring back competition to digital platforms? by Christian Catalini and Scott Duke KominersWhy build in web3 by Jad Esber and Scott Duke KominersVampire attacks: A theory (and thread) on 'blood sucking' platform competition by John William Hatfield and Scott Duke KominersWhy NFT creators are going cc0 by Flashrekt and Scott Duke KominersDecentralized identity: Your reputation travels with you by Scott Duke Kominers and Jad EsberIncreasing returns and the new world of business (1996) by W. Brian ArthurNetwork effects, origin Stories, and the evolution of tech with W. Brian Arthur, Marc Andreeessen, and Sonal ChokshiThe five competitive forces that shape strategy (2008 reformulation of 1979 paper) by Michael PorterStrategies for two-sided markets (2006) by Tom Eisenmann, Geoffrey Parker, and Marshall Van Alstyne---As a reminder: none of the following is investment, business, legal, or tax advice; please see a16z.com/disclosures for more important information -- including a link to a list of our investments.
The Harvard Business Professor and Author's Take on Entrepreneurial Failure (Recorded Live on Clubhouse April 7th, 2023) This week, we spoke with Tom Eisenmann of Harvard Business School and author of Why Startups Fail: A New Roadmap for Entrepreneurial Success about identifying and avoiding common pitfalls and mistakes. Tom discovered 6 patterns of failure in early- and late-stage startups, and shared his strategies to manage and overcome common business failures. Speakers: Colin C. Campbell, Michele Van Tilborg Guest: Tom Eisenmann Get Tom's book here!
In this interview, author Tom Eisenmann explains the six distinct patterns that account for the vast majority of startup failures. He details the data that demonstrates these patterns and provides examples from his case studies at HBS. His book is the result of a multiyear research project on this topic and takes an analytic approach to the data he collected. We invite your feedback and suggestions at ventureinthesouth.com or email david@ventureinthesouth.com. If you like our show, it reallly helps us if you rate, review and please subscribe. To learn more about The RollingSouth Funds that we operate, go to rollingsouth.vc or email david@rollingsouth.vc. Thanks for listening and remember: Our mission is to MAKE MONEY, HAVE FUN, AND DO GOOD.David@ventureinthesouth.com The RollingSouth FundVentureCarolina
Some philosophers of science would say that, if you can't fail, you can't learn. If you've got a theory of how the world's going to work, and the world works that way, you haven't learned anything new. And this idea of emphasizing and embracing failure is important in the business world as well. Tom Eisenmann is the Howard H. Stevenson Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School.Here, Tom heads up many entrepreneurial initiatives, teaches the MBA elective Entrepreneurial Failure, and the MS/MBA core courses Technology Venture Immersion and Launch Lab. In recent years, he has also served as Chair of Harvard's MBA Elective Curriculum, and as course head of The Entrepreneurial Manager. His latest book is “Why Startups Fail: A New Roadmap for Entrepreneurial Success.”This episode covers entrepreneurship and startups and what failure can teach us about success.Greg and Tom discuss false starts, Dropbox, scaling too fast and balancing confidence with humility.Episode Quotes:What happens after failureSo you want to find that middle where you can actually, understand the failure, your role in it, and that just takes some emotional distance. It usually takes a matter of weeks or months of - when you're alternating between rumination and distraction. If it's a hundred percent rumination, you're going to make yourself crazy, perhaps clinically depressed.And no one wants that. If it's a hundred percent distraction, so to go side projects or do yoga, whatever it is, you never going to make sense of what happened. So you have to alternate between the two and let the emotions subside, find your role in the failure, and crucially be able to explain it to people.Helping students find jobsPick the one that most lights you up at this point, because basically this is a long game. And if you're going to succeed as an entrepreneur, you need to master management challenges at every step. And they're very different at every step and in no single job where you're going to learn everything you need to know.Entrepreneurship & management[Entrepreneurship] It's a way of managing when resources are constrained and when you're doing something fundamentally new. And that's a pretty good description of a challenge that almost any manager in any kind of organization is going to face at some stage, whether it be a government agency, a not-for-profit, a big corporation.Show Links:Guest Profile:Faculty Profile at Harvard Business SchoolProfessional Profile at Harvard Innovation LabsTom Eisenmann on LinkedInTom Eisenmann on TwitterHis Work:Tom Eisenmann on Google ScholarWhy Startups Fail WebsiteWhy Startups Fail
Sal's Investment Syndicate: Click to Join Harvard's Tom Eisenmann is the author of Why Startups Fail: A New Roadmap for Entrepreneurial Success. We discussed valuable lessons from the book and how they might apply to biotech startups. Highlights: Sal Daher Introduces Prof. Tom Eisenmann of the Harvard Business School, Author of Why Startups Fail Howard Stevenson's 400X Return Contrasting Brad Feld's Book with Prof. Tom Eisenmann's Book Sal Daher's Favorite Part of the Book: Failing “[failed] founders probably cycle through those. ...the Kubler Ross stages...” “...basically, half of failed founders come back and get back on the horse and do it again.” Shutting Down the Failed Venture, Gracefully The Number One Killer of Startups: False Starts “...engineers are particularly vulnerable to this because they want to build.” Sal Daher Discusses SQZ Biotech's False Start and Brilliant Pivot The Origin Story of Why Startups Fail “...the factories that actually make this stuff actually generate enough cash to invest in new apparel companies...” Silver Linings of the Pandemic Tom Eisenmann on Harvard's School of Engineering and the MS/MBA Program Tom Eisenmann on Tough Tech: Technical Uncertainty + Market Uncertainty Creating Supports for Life Science Academics to Become Founders Creative Destruction Labs Sal Daher's Focus on Biotech Angel Formation Software Startup Funding vs. Biotech Startup Funding Maybe Successful Angel-Backed Founders Such as Todd Zion and Armon Sharei Could be a Resource for Training Angels The Dynamics of Venture Capital in the Last Decade – Many New Shoots Tom Eisenmann's Parting Thoughts Sponsored by: Purdue University entrepreneurship, and Peter Fasse, patent attorney at Fish & Richardson Topics: biotech, management, co-founders, Mass Challenge, raising money, scholar, venture capital
Tom Eisenmann author of "Why Startups Fail: A New Roadmap for Entrepreneurial Success" by The Best Business Minds
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Welcome to an episode with the Howard Stevenson Professor of Business Administration of Harvard Business School, Tom Eisenmann. Get Tom's new book here: https://amzn.to/3Dmxqkl Tom Eisenmann, as a Harvard Business School professor for the past 24 years, has guided over a thousand Harvard Business students and alumni as they launch new ventures up to their success. But not every startup story is like this. In this episode, Tom talked about a glimpse of his new book where he carried out numerous case studies about failed startups. And from these, he found 6 patterns why a lot of startups fail. For those founders, at any stage of their entrepreneurial journey, this is for you. WHY STARTUPS FAIL: A New Roadmap for Entrepreneurial Success. Tom Eisenmann: https://amzn.to/3Dmxqkl Enjoying our podcast? Get access to sample advanced training episodes here: www.firmsconsulting.com/promo We use affiliate links whenever possible (if you purchase items listed above using our affiliate links, we will get a bonus).
Tom Eisenmann, Harvard Business School professor and author of The Fail-Safe Startup, says only 10% of high-tech, high-potential startups are successful. In that success, the CFO has a critical role that includes managing cash and working out when to raise more and monitoring key metrics. He warns the new entrepreneur against rushing in without proper customer research and product evaluation and explains why “trusting your gut” can lead to flawed decisions.
This is a follow-up to last week's podcast where we interviewed Tom Eisenmann from the Harvard Business School. In this conclusion of our two-part series, we now turn to Martin Bitzinger. Martin is Group Vice President Product Management at Canadian Telecom Giant Mitel. He is also a TUM Alumni 2001 whose personal story you simply have to hear. Yes, Entrepreneurship is hard and even the best entrepreneurs have failures and multiple starts, but the real Entrepreneurs learn and restart.
This is a follow-up to last week's podcast where we interviewed Tom Eisenmann from the Harvard Business School. In this conclusion of our two-part series, we now turn to Martin Bitzinger. Martin is Group Vice President Product Management at Canadian Telecom Giant Mitel. He is also a TUM Alumni 2001 whose personal story you simply have to hear. Yes, Entrepreneurship is hard and even the best entrepreneurs have failures and multiple starts, but the real Entrepreneurs learn and restart.
We now embark on a two-part series about the challenges of entrepreneurship. Professor Tom Eisenmann is co-Chair of the Harvard Business School Center of Entrepreneurship. He recently wrote an important book called Why Startups Fail: A New Roadmap for Entrepreneurial Success, which is an essential complement to the “Lean Startup”. It looks at ventures which followed this approach and yet failed. It is a fabulous book that reminds us that failure can happen even if you are a hard-working entrepreneur. It helps identify some patterns and also explains how to "fail well" and to restart. Entrepreneurship is hard, and studying successes and failures is a source of learning and inspiration. This will be the object of next week's podcast so stay tuned.
We now embark on a two-part series about the challenges of entrepreneurship. Professor Tom Eisenmann is co-Chair of the Harvard Business School Center of Entrepreneurship. He recently wrote an important book called Why Startups Fail: A New Roadmap for Entrepreneurial Success, which is an essential complement to the “Lean Startup”. It looks at ventures which followed this approach and yet failed. It is a fabulous book that reminds us that failure can happen even if you are a hard-working entrepreneur. It helps identify some patterns and also explains how to "fail well" and to restart. Entrepreneurship is hard, and studying successes and failures is a source of learning and inspiration. This will be the object of next week's podcast so stay tuned.
In this conversation, Thomas Eisenmann discussed the complicated world of startup failures. Tom discussed various failures and what are some ways businesses could have done right. This is a great conversation for anyone seeking to understand failures and how to avoid them. Bio: Tom Eisenmann is the Howard H. Stevenson Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School (HBS) and the faculty co-chair of the Arthur Rock Center for Entrepreneurship. Since joining the HBS faculty in 1997, he's led The Entrepreneurial Manager, an introductory course taught to all first-year MBAs, and launched fourteen electives on all aspects of entrepreneurship, including one on startup failure. Eisenmann has authored more than one hundred HBS case studies and his writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, and Forbes. He is the author of the new book Why Startups Fail. Thomas's Book: Why Startups Fail: A New Roadmap for Entrepreneurial Success https://amzn.to/2SeCCEa Discussion Timeline: TIMELINE Stage 1: Lead-in 1. Starter: Give your starter pitch 1 point that this book points to: 2. Vishal briefly introduce guest Stage 2: Subject Matter Expertise 3. What is the state of startups today? 4. What are some common pitfalls you find in the world of startups? 5. What is the state of innovation today? 6. What are some common patterns you are seeing when it comes to startups that are coming up today? 7. How has corporate innovation stifled over the last year? Stage 3: Introduction as an author 8. Why study startup failures? 9. What are some surprises you found in studying startup failures? 10. What are the most common patterns of failure? 11. Why is it important to normalize and accept failure? 12. Is there such a thing as failing well? 13. What was one of most of the unexpected failures you learned about when writing this book? 14. How you should embrace failure if you are a founder? 15. Are failures something you avoid or something you should embrace? 16. Naseem Taleb suggests being anti-fragile, can startup be anti-fragile Stage 4: Rapid Fire [Say what comes to your mind] 17 a. #Startups 17 b. #Entrepreneurship 17 c. #Failures 17 d. #Growth 17 e. #Culture 17 f. #Founder 17 g. #Disruption 17 h. #JobsOfFuture 17 i. #FutureofStartup 17 j. #FutureofOrganization Stage 5: Closing 18. What are 1-3 best practices that you think are the key to success in your journey? 19. Do you have any favorite read? 20. As a closing remark, what would you like to tell our audience? About TAO.ai[Sponsor]: TAO is building the World's largest and AI-powered Skills Universe and Community powering career development platform empowering some of the World's largest communities/organizations. Learn more at https://TAO.ai About WorkPod: Work Pod takes you on the journey with leaders, experts, academics, authors, and change-makers designing the future of work, workers, and the workplace. About Work2.org WorkPod is managed by Work2.org, a #FutureOfWork community for HR and Organization architects and leaders. Sponsorship / Guest Request should be directed to info@tao.ai Keywords: #FutureofWork #Work2.0 #Work2dot0 #Leadership #Growth #Org2dot0 #Work2 #Org2
One could argue that entrepreneurship is the purest form of business: Building the idea, team and strategy from the ground up, all while having the freedom of being your own boss and setting your own expectations. But this freedom doesn't come without major roadblocks. The odds of a start up getting past the early stages is slim, and maneuvering around all the unforeseen tribulations makes the odds of a long-term success story slimmer. That's why today's guest, Tom Eisenmann, is a much needed voice on this topic. In his new book, "Why Startups Fail: A New Roadmap for Entrepreneurial Success", Eisenmann goes through his six patterns of failure that startup's make throughout their course, and when to take the leap and when to call it quits. Eisenmann is the Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School. He teaches the MBA elective Entrepreneurial Failure and the MS/MBA core courses Technology Venture Immersion and Launch Lab. With colleagues, he launched the MBA electives Making Markets, in which students specify and supervise development of a software application. He also created the January Term Startup Bootcamp for first-year MBAs and the MBA electives Launching Technology Ventures and Managing Networked Business, which surveyed strategies for platform-based businesses that leverage network effects. Professor Eisenmann received his Doctorate in Business Administration, MBA, and BA from Harvard University. Prior to entering the HBS Doctoral Program, Eisenmann spent eleven years as a management consultant at McKinsey & Company, where he was co-head of the Media and Entertainment Practice. He currently serves as a director on the board of Harvard Business Publishing.
Welcome to Strategy Skills episode 169, an episode with the Howard Stevenson Professor of Business Administration of Harvard Business School, Tom Eisenmann. Get Tom's new book here: https://amzn.to/3Dmxqkl Tom Eisenmann, as a Harvard Business School professor for the past 24 years, has guided over a thousand Harvard Business students and alumni as they launch new ventures up to their success. But not every startup story is like this. In this episode, Tom talked about a glimpse of his new book where he carried out numerous case studies about failed startups. And from these, he found 6 patterns why a lot of startups fail. For those founders, at any stage of their entrepreneurial journey, this is for you. WHY STARTUPS FAIL: A New Roadmap for Entrepreneurial Success. Tom Eisenmann: https://amzn.to/3Dmxqkl Enjoying our podcast? Get access to sample advanced training episodes here: www.firmsconsulting.com/promo We use affiliate links whenever possible (if you purchase items listed above using our affiliate links, we will get a bonus).
90% of startups fail. For early-stage founders, this can come from both false positives or negatives. Two factors include: bias towards early adopters vs. mainstream customers, that are mostly necessary to scale, or giving up too early on a project that turns out to be a billion-dollar business idea a couple of months later. Tom Eisenmann, Professor at Harvard Business School, discusses this and much more in his recently published book '*The Fail-Safe Startup'*. In this episode of This Much I Know, our hosts Kate McGinn and Carlos Espinal have a chat with Tom to cover topics at the heart of founder journeys. This includes a few key factors to keep in mind for early-stage founders, such as MVP testing or upfront customer discovery work. Tune in to hear more about what Tom observes in academia around patterns both founder and investors tend to follow! Show notes: Tom Eisenmann: twitter.com/teisenmann Tom's book: penguin.co.uk/books/315/315444/the-fail-safe-startup/9780241420171.html Kate McGinn: twitter.com/ktmcgn Carlos Espinal - twitter.com/cee Seedcamp - seedcamp.com
Tom Eisenmann, Harvard Business School entrepreneurship professor and author of 'Why Startups Fail' joined the programme to discuss the subject of why startups fail.
Tom Eisenmann is the Howard H. Stevenson Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School; Peter O. Crisp Chair of Harvard Innovation Labs; and faculty co-chair of the HBS Rock Center for Entrepreneurship, the Harvard MS/MBA Program, and the Harvard College Technology Innovation Fellows Program. In this conversation with Stanford professor Tom Byers, he shares insights from his book “Why Startups Fail: A New Roadmap for Entrepreneurial Success” (Currency, March 2021), which analyzes common patterns that sink both early- and late-stage startups, and also proposes a road map for deciding when to pull the plug and how to fail better.
Tom Eisenmann is the Howard H. Stevenson Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School; Peter O. Crisp Chair of Harvard Innovation Labs; and faculty co-chair of the HBS Rock Center for Entrepreneurship, the Harvard MS/MBA Program, and the Harvard College Technology Innovation Fellows Program. In this conversation with Stanford professor Tom Byers, he shares insights from his book “Why Startups Fail: A New Roadmap for Entrepreneurial Success” (Currency, March 2021), which analyzes common patterns that sink both early- and late-stage startups, and also proposes a road map for deciding when to pull the plug and how to fail better.
Overview: Today, we're going to talk about Chipper Cash - African Fintech payments & remittances player. We'll explore the Chipper story across 6 areas: Intra-Africa remittances context Global remittances (Outside Africa to Africa) context Chipper Cash's launch, early history, growth & fundraising Chipper Cash's Product & monetization strategy Its' competitive positioning, potential exit options End with our overall outlook. This episode was recorded on July 11 & Aug 1, 2021. Companies discussed: Chipper Cash, Venmo, PayPal, Square, Flutterwave, EcoBank, Safaricom, Sendwave, MTN, Airtel, Deciens Capital & Liquid2 Ventures Business concepts discussed: Consumer FinTech (Personal Finance OS) monetization strategy, FinTech exit strategy, Intra-African Remittances, International remittances, Cryptocurrency, Decentralized Finance, Stock trading & closed-loop payment networks Conversation highlights: (01:07) - Why we're talking about Chipper Cash (06:20) - Intra-African trade context (13:12) - Intra- African remittances context (21:40) - Global remittances context (36:50) - Founder backgrounds - Ham Serunjogi and Majid Moujaled (46:06) - Chipper Cash founding and early history (52:30) - Fundraising and Growth - Angel, Series A, B & C (1:07:25) - Product strategy (1:08:25) - Monetization strategy (1:35:24) - Competition - horizontal and vertical (1:45:55) - Potential exit scenarios (1:54:12) - Bankole's overall thoughts and outlook (2:01:32) - Olumide's overall thoughts and outlook (2:08:40) - Recommendations and small wins Olumide's recommendations, small wins & open questions: Recommendation: Nailing Capital vs Scaling Capital (by Sajith Pai) , Essentialism (by Greg McKeown) & Owning Chinese Companies Is Complicated (by Matt Levine from Bloomberg) Small win: American Express Platinum new benefits: Clear! & Audible! Bankole's recommendations, small wins & open questions: Recommendation: Why startups fail by Tom Eisenmann & How to build an engine to find product market fit by Rahul Vohra Small win: Dinner with friends on a rooftop in Seattle Other content: Chipper Cash pitch at 500 Startups & A columnist Makes Sense of Wall Street Like None Other - The New York Times We'd love to hear from you. Please email info@afrobility.com to share feedback or propose topics you'd like to hear. Join our insider mailing list where we get feedback on new episodes & find all episodes at Afrobility.com
Host: Ken Valledy (Partner/Co-founder at Progressive)Progressive helps organisations unlock and commercialise new growth opportunities more rapidly than their competition and more effectively than traditional innovation programmes.The Catalysts Podcast focuses on the key benefits of corporates and startups working together and how these partnerships can become a catalyst for change for the future. In each episode we will discuss a key topic area behind these partnerships with either a startup or a senior corporate stakeholder.In today's episode, we talk to Tom Eisenmann, Professor of Entrepreneurship at Harvard Business School. Over the past 23 years Tom has helped launch thousands of startups. An astonishing 13 of these have reached unicorn status. For a decade he has also explored the question of why startups fail and has now launched a great new book called The Fail-Safe Startup, which explains how as a founder, you can succeed against the odds. We discuss many topics in the interview, including the 6 main reasons behind early-stage and late-stage startup failures and how it is possible to analyse the failure of others to ensure your own success. A must read.Tom's contact details:LinkedIn page: https://www.linkedin.com/in/teisenmann/Tom's Book details:Amazon (UK) https://www.amazon.co.uk/Fail-Safe-Startup-Tom-Eisenmann/dp/0241420172/ref=sr_1_2?crid=LO6F0TJOZ0S7&dchild=1&keywords=tom+eisenmann&qid=1625217383&s=books&sprefix=tom+einsenmann%2Caps%2C197&sr=1-2Amazon (US): https://www.amazon.com/Why-Startups-Fail-Roadmap-Entrepreneurial/dp/0593137027/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=tom+eisenmann&qid=1625218645&sr=8-1To find out more about Progressive, please contact us on:Email: Ken@thisisprogressive.comWebsite: https://www.thisisprogressive.comLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/18066213/admin/Twitter: https://twitter.com/Progressive_HQ
Work 2.0 | Discussing Future of Work, Next at Job and Success in Future
In this conversation, Thomas Eisenmann discussed the complicated world of startup failures. Tom discussed various failures and what are some ways businesses could have done right. This is a great conversation for anyone seeking to understand failures and how to avoid them. Bio: Tom Eisenmann is the Howard H. Stevenson Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School (HBS) and the faculty co-chair of the Arthur Rock Center for Entrepreneurship. Since joining the HBS faculty in 1997, he's led The Entrepreneurial Manager, an introductory course taught to all first-year MBAs, and launched fourteen electives on all aspects of entrepreneurship, including one on startup failure. Eisenmann has authored more than one hundred HBS case studies and his writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, and Forbes. He is the author of the new book Why Startups Fail. Thomas's Book: Why Startups Fail: A New Roadmap for Entrepreneurial Success https://amzn.to/2SeCCEa Discussion Timeline: TIMELINE Stage 1: Lead-in 1. Starter: Give your starter pitch 1 point that this book points to: 2. Vishal briefly introduce guest Stage 2: Subject Matter Expertise 3. What is the state of startups today? 4. What are some common pitfalls you find in the world of startups? 5. What is the state of innovation today? 6. What are some common patterns you are seeing when it comes to startups that are coming up today? 7. How has corporate innovation stifled over the last year? Stage 3: Introduction as an author 8. Why study startup failures? 9. What are some surprises you found in studying startup failures? 10. What are the most common patterns of failure? 11. Why is it important to normalize and accept failure? 12. Is there such a thing as failing well? 13. What was one of most of the unexpected failures you learned about when writing this book? 14. How you should embrace failure if you are a founder? 15. Are failures something you avoid or something you should embrace? 16. Naseem Taleb suggests being anti-fragile, can startup be anti-fragile Stage 4: Rapid Fire [Say what comes to your mind] 17 a. #Startups 17 b. #Entrepreneurship 17 c. #Failures 17 d. #Growth 17 e. #Culture 17 f. #Founder 17 g. #Disruption 17 h. #JobsOfFuture 17 i. #FutureofStartup 17 j. #FutureofOrganization Stage 5: Closing 18. What are 1-3 best practices that you think are the key to success in your journey? 19. Do you have any favorite read? 20. As a closing remark, what would you like to tell our audience? About TAO.ai[Sponsor]: TAO is building the World's largest and AI-powered Skills Universe and Community powering career development platform empowering some of the World's largest communities/organizations. Learn more at https://TAO.ai About WorkPod: Work Pod takes you on the journey with leaders, experts, academics, authors, and change-makers designing the future of work, workers, and the workplace. About Work2.org WorkPod is managed by Work2.org, a #FutureOfWork community for HR and Organization architects and leaders. Sponsorship / Guest Request should be directed to info@tao.ai Keywords: #FutureofWork #Work2.0 #Work2dot0 #Leadership #Growth #Org2dot0 #Work2 #Org2
Today we are delighted to have Tom Eisenmann, Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and author of The Fail-Safe Startup. Interviewing him today is a friend and fellow from the Elevating Founders network and cohort, Sina Sadrzadeh. Tom and Sina discuss how important innovation is to drive economic growth post pandemic, why the hypergrowth that VCs push for isn't always sustainable and dispels the myth that listening to your gut is the right thing to do. Tom breaks down some key takeaways from the book including why startups fail, what defines failure and when you should break away from the herd. Resources: The Fail-Safe Startup (penguin.co.uk) Twitter: @teisenmann Learn more about Sina: https://wingcard.io/themillennialentrepreneur Tom Eisenmann is the Howard H. Stevenson Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and the faculty co-chair of the Arthur Rock Center for Entrepreneurship. Since joining the HBS faculty in 1997, he has launched eleven MBA courses on a range of topics related to entrepreneurship, including The Entrepreneurial Manager, an introductory course taught to all 900 first-year MBAs and Entrepreneurial Failure, an MBA elective. Eisenmann has written over one hundred Harvard Business School Case Studies and his writing appears regularly in the Wall Street Journal, The New Statesman and The New York Times.
Greg wraps up his discussion with Harvard Business School professor and author of the new book, Why Startups Fail, Tom Eisenmann. In part two, Tom shares some of the best traits of a successful entrepreneur, why success with early adopters can be misleading, and how investors can choose a good deal.
Tom Eisenmann is a professor at Harvard Business School teaching entrepreneurship and is the author of ‘The Fail-Safe Startup' He discusses his book and the stages a business goes through in its creation along with the potential challenges across the start-up period. Bringing together the value proposition, the go-to-market plan, the technology and operations along with a cash flow formula are all elements that need to work together dynamically and Tom and Nick discuss all things startup and share great examples in this informative episode that is a must-listen for any entrepreneur. KEY TAKEAWAYS Finding ideas and validating the concept is the first stage for any business followed by bringing together all the resources required An entrepreneur is someone who pursues an idea without all the resources initially Resource mobilisation and exploring the opportunity go side by side When you have a product-market then you can start to scale Big company people in start-ups can interrupt the rhythm Entrepreneurs can be so focused on getting ahead they skip the up-front market research. Customer discovery before you engineer the product is a better approach Your success with early adopters of your product may not be replicated with mainstream customers Every entrepreneur needs early adopters but mainstream customers will require marketing spend. If you are in an industry that requires expertise you need to make sure you or someone in your team has the expertise necessary. Make sure you do the upfront research and be aware that the success with early adopters may not be indicative of a mainstream customer. One of the hardest decisions as an entrepreneur is knowing when to shut down If the odds of turning it around are increasingly small and you aren't enjoying it then it's time to shut down gracefully. Having failed you can learn from the experience and move forward. BEST MOMENTS ‘For some people, an idea will just pop into their minds for those there is a search' ‘In a start-up, you have to make things happen' ‘Entrepreneurs are often like Peter Pan and don't want to grow up' VALUABLE RESOURCES Scale Up Your Business – scaleup.vip/podcast Join the free Scale Up Your Business community: scaleup.vip/community Take the Six Peaks of Value Creation Scorecard, to measure your current business performance and show you where to focus to get to where you want to be: https://scaleup.vip/sixpeaks The Fail-Safe Startup - Tom Eisenmann ABOUT THE HOST My name is Nick Bradley. I'm an entrepreneur, author, speaker and investor. My background is in growing and scaling VC and Private Equity backed businesses. Having successfully built, bought and sold a number of companies, and removed myself from day-to-day operations, my focus now is on helping entrepreneurs get to where they want to be, in business and in life. As well as investing in growth businesses and backing turnarounds - with the ultimate aim of creating value from significant capital events. I'm passionate about personal and professional development - showing up and being the best version of myself ... every day. My bigger vision is to help bring entrepreneurial skills, experience and mindset to people in developing nations - so they can follow their dreams, live life more on their terms - utilising entrepreneurship as a global force for good. CONTACT METHOD Nick's Facebook Page: https://scaleup.vip/FB Nick's LinkedIn: https://scaleup.vip/LI Nick's Instagram: https://scaleup.vip/IG Scale Up Your Business website: www.suyb.global See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
What are the factors that contribute to the failure of almost 90% of startup ventures? In this episode, Jerry sits down with author and Harvard Business School professor Tom Eisenmann to discuss the patterns that often precipitate the vast majority of startup failures. The pair take a closer look at how the advice to “fail fast” often leads founders to false start — risking capital and time on the wrong solutions. They shine a light on the pressure founders feel to grow the business rapidly, the lionization of venture capital, and the true human cost of failure. Leave us a review on Apple Podcasts! Follow our step by step guides: - How To: Leave a Review on Your Computer: - How To: Leave a Review on Your iPhone: Never miss an episode! Sign up for our newsletter to stay up to date on all our episode releases.
99% of business media stories on startups are essentially PR for the startup itself. This makes these stories a one-sided source of information on what it's like to operate and grow a startup. While there are more and more discussions of mistakes, basically no one at Inc or Entrepreneur or anywhere else really will ever green light a debate on this or that failed startup unless, like Theranos, it ended in some massive ethical scandal. Failure is depressing, they say. Not me. This month, I'm honored to bring you the first in a two-part interview with Professor Tom Eisenmann of the Harvard Business School (HBS). He and I chat about themes from his new book Why Startups Fail and how these patterns play out in the world of consumer packaged goods (CPG). In the second part of our interview, we discuss more advanced themes in failure: the Speed Trap, Help Wanted and the challenges staffing up quicklySince joining the HBS faculty in 1997, Tom has led The Entrepreneurial Manager, an introductory course taught to all first-year MBAs, and launched fourteen electives on all aspects of entrepreneurship, including one on startup failure. Eisenmann has authored more than one hundred HBS case studies, and his writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, and Forbes.
Greg has dedicated his life to improving the entrepreneurial failure rate and he's been asking the same question for years: Why do more than 75% of startups fail? This week's guest might have the answer. Tom Eisenmann is a Harvard Business School Professor and the author of the new book, Why Startups Fail: A New Roadmap for Entrepreneurial Success. In part one, Tom discusses why he decided to focus on entrepreneurship at Harvard, the importance of getting a management team aligned, and the patterns that account for the vast majority of startup failures.
Why do many startups fail? Tom Eisenmann, Professor of Entrepreneurship at Harvard Business School realised that even he didn't really know the answer, despite a lifetime teaching entrepreneurship, and decided to write a book to answer exactly that question. You can hear him go into detail on the NBN Entrepreneurship and Leadership Channel interviewed by experienced entrepreneurs Richard Lucas and Kimon Fountoukidis. Whether you want to start a business one day, or just have better conversations with people who are in business, don't miss this “book of the day” podcast. He draws attention to a critical gap in the Lean Startup methodology which can save both dollars and time if correctly applied. This idea alone makes the podcast worth listening to. The NBN Entrepreneurship and Leadership podcast aims to educate and entertain, sharing insights based on the personal story of our carefully selected guests aiming for the atmosphere of an informal conversation in a bar or over a cup of coffee. In this episode we do go a little further into Tom's background that normal, and give an entrepreneurial take on his ideas. He does a great job of explaining his ideas, and there is much for any entrepreneur to learn. If you want your startup to succeed, you need to understand why startups fail. That question caught Harvard Business School professor Tom Eisenmann by surprise when he realized he couldn't answer it. So he launched a multiyear research project to find out. In Why Startups Fail: A New Roadmap for Entrepreneurial Success (Currency, 2021), Eisenmann reveals his findings: six distinct patterns that account for the vast majority of startup failures. * Bad Bedfellows. Startup success is thought to rest largely on the founder's talents and instincts. But the wrong team, investors, or partners can sink a venture just as quickly. * False Starts. In following the oft-cited advice to "fail fast" and to "launch before you're ready," founders risk wasting time and capital on the wrong solutions. * False Promises. Success with early adopters can be misleading and give founders unwarranted confidence to expand. * Speed Traps. Despite the pressure to "get big fast," hypergrowth can spell disaster for even the most promising ventures. * Help Wanted. Rapidly scaling startups need lots of capital and talent, but they can make mistakes that leave them suddenly in short supply of both. * Cascading Miracles. Silicon Valley exhorts entrepreneurs to dream big. But the bigger the vision, the more things that can go wrong. About our guest Tom Eisenmann is the Howard H. Stevenson Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School (HBS) and the faculty co-chair of the Arthur Rock Center for Entrepreneurship. Since joining the HBS faculty in 1997, he's led The Entrepreneurial Manager, an introductory course taught to all first-year MBAs, and launched fourteen electives on all aspects of entrepreneurship, including one on startup failure. Eisenmann has authored more than one hundred HBS case studies and his writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, and Forbes. About Kimon Fountoukidis Twitter Linkedin Kimon is the founder of both Argos Multilingual and PMR. Both companies were founded in the mid 90s with zero capital and both have gone on to become market leaders in their respective sectors. Kimon was born in New York and moved to Krakow, Poland in 1993. Listen to his story here, About Richard Lucas Twitter Linkedin Richard is a business and social entrepreneur who founded or invested in more than 30 businesses, including investments in Argos Multilingual, PMR and, in 2020, the New Books Network. Richard has been a TEDx event organiser, supports the pro-entrepreneurship ecosystem, and leads entrepreneurship workshops at all levels: from pre- to business schools. Richard was born in Oxford and moved to Poland in 1991. Read more here. Listen to his story in an autobiographical TEDx talk here, Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/entrepreneurship-and-leadership
Why do many startups fail? Tom Eisenmann, Professor of Entrepreneurship at Harvard Business School realised that even he didn't really know the answer, despite a lifetime teaching entrepreneurship, and decided to write a book to answer exactly that question. You can hear him go into detail on the NBN Entrepreneurship and Leadership Channel interviewed by experienced entrepreneurs Richard Lucas and Kimon Fountoukidis. Whether you want to start a business one day, or just have better conversations with people who are in business, don't miss this “book of the day” podcast. He draws attention to a critical gap in the Lean Startup methodology which can save both dollars and time if correctly applied. This idea alone makes the podcast worth listening to. The NBN Entrepreneurship and Leadership podcast aims to educate and entertain, sharing insights based on the personal story of our carefully selected guests aiming for the atmosphere of an informal conversation in a bar or over a cup of coffee. In this episode we do go a little further into Tom's background that normal, and give an entrepreneurial take on his ideas. He does a great job of explaining his ideas, and there is much for any entrepreneur to learn. If you want your startup to succeed, you need to understand why startups fail. That question caught Harvard Business School professor Tom Eisenmann by surprise when he realized he couldn't answer it. So he launched a multiyear research project to find out. In Why Startups Fail: A New Roadmap for Entrepreneurial Success (Currency, 2021), Eisenmann reveals his findings: six distinct patterns that account for the vast majority of startup failures. * Bad Bedfellows. Startup success is thought to rest largely on the founder's talents and instincts. But the wrong team, investors, or partners can sink a venture just as quickly. * False Starts. In following the oft-cited advice to "fail fast" and to "launch before you're ready," founders risk wasting time and capital on the wrong solutions. * False Promises. Success with early adopters can be misleading and give founders unwarranted confidence to expand. * Speed Traps. Despite the pressure to "get big fast," hypergrowth can spell disaster for even the most promising ventures. * Help Wanted. Rapidly scaling startups need lots of capital and talent, but they can make mistakes that leave them suddenly in short supply of both. * Cascading Miracles. Silicon Valley exhorts entrepreneurs to dream big. But the bigger the vision, the more things that can go wrong. About our guest Tom Eisenmann is the Howard H. Stevenson Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School (HBS) and the faculty co-chair of the Arthur Rock Center for Entrepreneurship. Since joining the HBS faculty in 1997, he's led The Entrepreneurial Manager, an introductory course taught to all first-year MBAs, and launched fourteen electives on all aspects of entrepreneurship, including one on startup failure. Eisenmann has authored more than one hundred HBS case studies and his writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, and Forbes. About Kimon Fountoukidis Twitter Linkedin Kimon is the founder of both Argos Multilingual and PMR. Both companies were founded in the mid 90s with zero capital and both have gone on to become market leaders in their respective sectors. Kimon was born in New York and moved to Krakow, Poland in 1993. Listen to his story here, About Richard Lucas Twitter Linkedin Richard is a business and social entrepreneur who founded or invested in more than 30 businesses, including investments in Argos Multilingual, PMR and, in 2020, the New Books Network. Richard has been a TEDx event organiser, supports the pro-entrepreneurship ecosystem, and leads entrepreneurship workshops at all levels: from pre- to business schools. Richard was born in Oxford and moved to Poland in 1991. Read more here. Listen to his story in an autobiographical TEDx talk here, Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Why do many startups fail? Tom Eisenmann, Professor of Entrepreneurship at Harvard Business School realised that even he didn't really know the answer, despite a lifetime teaching entrepreneurship, and decided to write a book to answer exactly that question. You can hear him go into detail on the NBN Entrepreneurship and Leadership Channel interviewed by experienced entrepreneurs Richard Lucas and Kimon Fountoukidis. Whether you want to start a business one day, or just have better conversations with people who are in business, don't miss this “book of the day” podcast. He draws attention to a critical gap in the Lean Startup methodology which can save both dollars and time if correctly applied. This idea alone makes the podcast worth listening to. The NBN Entrepreneurship and Leadership podcast aims to educate and entertain, sharing insights based on the personal story of our carefully selected guests aiming for the atmosphere of an informal conversation in a bar or over a cup of coffee. In this episode we do go a little further into Tom's background that normal, and give an entrepreneurial take on his ideas. He does a great job of explaining his ideas, and there is much for any entrepreneur to learn. If you want your startup to succeed, you need to understand why startups fail. That question caught Harvard Business School professor Tom Eisenmann by surprise when he realized he couldn't answer it. So he launched a multiyear research project to find out. In Why Startups Fail: A New Roadmap for Entrepreneurial Success (Currency, 2021), Eisenmann reveals his findings: six distinct patterns that account for the vast majority of startup failures. * Bad Bedfellows. Startup success is thought to rest largely on the founder's talents and instincts. But the wrong team, investors, or partners can sink a venture just as quickly. * False Starts. In following the oft-cited advice to "fail fast" and to "launch before you're ready," founders risk wasting time and capital on the wrong solutions. * False Promises. Success with early adopters can be misleading and give founders unwarranted confidence to expand. * Speed Traps. Despite the pressure to "get big fast," hypergrowth can spell disaster for even the most promising ventures. * Help Wanted. Rapidly scaling startups need lots of capital and talent, but they can make mistakes that leave them suddenly in short supply of both. * Cascading Miracles. Silicon Valley exhorts entrepreneurs to dream big. But the bigger the vision, the more things that can go wrong. About our guest Tom Eisenmann is the Howard H. Stevenson Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School (HBS) and the faculty co-chair of the Arthur Rock Center for Entrepreneurship. Since joining the HBS faculty in 1997, he's led The Entrepreneurial Manager, an introductory course taught to all first-year MBAs, and launched fourteen electives on all aspects of entrepreneurship, including one on startup failure. Eisenmann has authored more than one hundred HBS case studies and his writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, and Forbes. About Kimon Fountoukidis Twitter Linkedin Kimon is the founder of both Argos Multilingual and PMR. Both companies were founded in the mid 90s with zero capital and both have gone on to become market leaders in their respective sectors. Kimon was born in New York and moved to Krakow, Poland in 1993. Listen to his story here, About Richard Lucas Twitter Linkedin Richard is a business and social entrepreneur who founded or invested in more than 30 businesses, including investments in Argos Multilingual, PMR and, in 2020, the New Books Network. Richard has been a TEDx event organiser, supports the pro-entrepreneurship ecosystem, and leads entrepreneurship workshops at all levels: from pre- to business schools. Richard was born in Oxford and moved to Poland in 1991. Read more here. Listen to his story in an autobiographical TEDx talk here, Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/finance
Why do many startups fail? Tom Eisenmann, Professor of Entrepreneurship at Harvard Business School realised that even he didn't really know the answer, despite a lifetime teaching entrepreneurship, and decided to write a book to answer exactly that question. You can hear him go into detail on the NBN Entrepreneurship and Leadership Channel interviewed by experienced entrepreneurs Richard Lucas and Kimon Fountoukidis. Whether you want to start a business one day, or just have better conversations with people who are in business, don't miss this “book of the day” podcast. He draws attention to a critical gap in the Lean Startup methodology which can save both dollars and time if correctly applied. This idea alone makes the podcast worth listening to. The NBN Entrepreneurship and Leadership podcast aims to educate and entertain, sharing insights based on the personal story of our carefully selected guests aiming for the atmosphere of an informal conversation in a bar or over a cup of coffee. In this episode we do go a little further into Tom's background that normal, and give an entrepreneurial take on his ideas. He does a great job of explaining his ideas, and there is much for any entrepreneur to learn. If you want your startup to succeed, you need to understand why startups fail. That question caught Harvard Business School professor Tom Eisenmann by surprise when he realized he couldn't answer it. So he launched a multiyear research project to find out. In Why Startups Fail: A New Roadmap for Entrepreneurial Success (Currency, 2021), Eisenmann reveals his findings: six distinct patterns that account for the vast majority of startup failures. * Bad Bedfellows. Startup success is thought to rest largely on the founder's talents and instincts. But the wrong team, investors, or partners can sink a venture just as quickly. * False Starts. In following the oft-cited advice to "fail fast" and to "launch before you're ready," founders risk wasting time and capital on the wrong solutions. * False Promises. Success with early adopters can be misleading and give founders unwarranted confidence to expand. * Speed Traps. Despite the pressure to "get big fast," hypergrowth can spell disaster for even the most promising ventures. * Help Wanted. Rapidly scaling startups need lots of capital and talent, but they can make mistakes that leave them suddenly in short supply of both. * Cascading Miracles. Silicon Valley exhorts entrepreneurs to dream big. But the bigger the vision, the more things that can go wrong. About our guest Tom Eisenmann is the Howard H. Stevenson Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School (HBS) and the faculty co-chair of the Arthur Rock Center for Entrepreneurship. Since joining the HBS faculty in 1997, he's led The Entrepreneurial Manager, an introductory course taught to all first-year MBAs, and launched fourteen electives on all aspects of entrepreneurship, including one on startup failure. Eisenmann has authored more than one hundred HBS case studies and his writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, and Forbes. About Kimon Fountoukidis Twitter Linkedin Kimon is the founder of both Argos Multilingual and PMR. Both companies were founded in the mid 90s with zero capital and both have gone on to become market leaders in their respective sectors. Kimon was born in New York and moved to Krakow, Poland in 1993. Listen to his story here, About Richard Lucas Twitter Linkedin Richard is a business and social entrepreneur who founded or invested in more than 30 businesses, including investments in Argos Multilingual, PMR and, in 2020, the New Books Network. Richard has been a TEDx event organiser, supports the pro-entrepreneurship ecosystem, and leads entrepreneurship workshops at all levels: from pre- to business schools. Richard was born in Oxford and moved to Poland in 1991. Read more here. Listen to his story in an autobiographical TEDx talk here, Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day
Why do many startups fail? Tom Eisenmann, Professor of Entrepreneurship at Harvard Business School realised that even he didn't really know the answer, despite a lifetime teaching entrepreneurship, and decided to write a book to answer exactly that question. You can hear him go into detail on the NBN Entrepreneurship and Leadership Channel interviewed by experienced entrepreneurs Richard Lucas and Kimon Fountoukidis. Whether you want to start a business one day, or just have better conversations with people who are in business, don't miss this “book of the day” podcast. He draws attention to a critical gap in the Lean Startup methodology which can save both dollars and time if correctly applied. This idea alone makes the podcast worth listening to. The NBN Entrepreneurship and Leadership podcast aims to educate and entertain, sharing insights based on the personal story of our carefully selected guests aiming for the atmosphere of an informal conversation in a bar or over a cup of coffee. In this episode we do go a little further into Tom's background that normal, and give an entrepreneurial take on his ideas. He does a great job of explaining his ideas, and there is much for any entrepreneur to learn. If you want your startup to succeed, you need to understand why startups fail. That question caught Harvard Business School professor Tom Eisenmann by surprise when he realized he couldn't answer it. So he launched a multiyear research project to find out. In Why Startups Fail: A New Roadmap for Entrepreneurial Success (Currency, 2021), Eisenmann reveals his findings: six distinct patterns that account for the vast majority of startup failures. * Bad Bedfellows. Startup success is thought to rest largely on the founder's talents and instincts. But the wrong team, investors, or partners can sink a venture just as quickly. * False Starts. In following the oft-cited advice to "fail fast" and to "launch before you're ready," founders risk wasting time and capital on the wrong solutions. * False Promises. Success with early adopters can be misleading and give founders unwarranted confidence to expand. * Speed Traps. Despite the pressure to "get big fast," hypergrowth can spell disaster for even the most promising ventures. * Help Wanted. Rapidly scaling startups need lots of capital and talent, but they can make mistakes that leave them suddenly in short supply of both. * Cascading Miracles. Silicon Valley exhorts entrepreneurs to dream big. But the bigger the vision, the more things that can go wrong. About our guest Tom Eisenmann is the Howard H. Stevenson Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School (HBS) and the faculty co-chair of the Arthur Rock Center for Entrepreneurship. Since joining the HBS faculty in 1997, he's led The Entrepreneurial Manager, an introductory course taught to all first-year MBAs, and launched fourteen electives on all aspects of entrepreneurship, including one on startup failure. Eisenmann has authored more than one hundred HBS case studies and his writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, and Forbes. About Kimon Fountoukidis Twitter Linkedin Kimon is the founder of both Argos Multilingual and PMR. Both companies were founded in the mid 90s with zero capital and both have gone on to become market leaders in their respective sectors. Kimon was born in New York and moved to Krakow, Poland in 1993. Listen to his story here, About Richard Lucas Twitter Linkedin Richard is a business and social entrepreneur who founded or invested in more than 30 businesses, including investments in Argos Multilingual, PMR and, in 2020, the New Books Network. Richard has been a TEDx event organiser, supports the pro-entrepreneurship ecosystem, and leads entrepreneurship workshops at all levels: from pre- to business schools. Richard was born in Oxford and moved to Poland in 1991. Read more here. Listen to his story in an autobiographical TEDx talk here, Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/economics
Why do many startups fail? Tom Eisenmann, Professor of Entrepreneurship at Harvard Business School realised that even he didn't really know the answer, despite a lifetime teaching entrepreneurship, and decided to write a book to answer exactly that question. You can hear him go into detail on the NBN Entrepreneurship and Leadership Channel interviewed by experienced entrepreneurs Richard Lucas and Kimon Fountoukidis. Whether you want to start a business one day, or just have better conversations with people who are in business, don't miss this “book of the day” podcast. He draws attention to a critical gap in the Lean Startup methodology which can save both dollars and time if correctly applied. This idea alone makes the podcast worth listening to. The NBN Entrepreneurship and Leadership podcast aims to educate and entertain, sharing insights based on the personal story of our carefully selected guests aiming for the atmosphere of an informal conversation in a bar or over a cup of coffee. In this episode we do go a little further into Tom's background that normal, and give an entrepreneurial take on his ideas. He does a great job of explaining his ideas, and there is much for any entrepreneur to learn. If you want your startup to succeed, you need to understand why startups fail. That question caught Harvard Business School professor Tom Eisenmann by surprise when he realized he couldn't answer it. So he launched a multiyear research project to find out. In Why Startups Fail: A New Roadmap for Entrepreneurial Success (Currency, 2021), Eisenmann reveals his findings: six distinct patterns that account for the vast majority of startup failures. * Bad Bedfellows. Startup success is thought to rest largely on the founder's talents and instincts. But the wrong team, investors, or partners can sink a venture just as quickly. * False Starts. In following the oft-cited advice to "fail fast" and to "launch before you're ready," founders risk wasting time and capital on the wrong solutions. * False Promises. Success with early adopters can be misleading and give founders unwarranted confidence to expand. * Speed Traps. Despite the pressure to "get big fast," hypergrowth can spell disaster for even the most promising ventures. * Help Wanted. Rapidly scaling startups need lots of capital and talent, but they can make mistakes that leave them suddenly in short supply of both. * Cascading Miracles. Silicon Valley exhorts entrepreneurs to dream big. But the bigger the vision, the more things that can go wrong. About our guest Tom Eisenmann is the Howard H. Stevenson Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School (HBS) and the faculty co-chair of the Arthur Rock Center for Entrepreneurship. Since joining the HBS faculty in 1997, he's led The Entrepreneurial Manager, an introductory course taught to all first-year MBAs, and launched fourteen electives on all aspects of entrepreneurship, including one on startup failure. Eisenmann has authored more than one hundred HBS case studies and his writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, and Forbes. About Kimon Fountoukidis Twitter Linkedin Kimon is the founder of both Argos Multilingual and PMR. Both companies were founded in the mid 90s with zero capital and both have gone on to become market leaders in their respective sectors. Kimon was born in New York and moved to Krakow, Poland in 1993. Listen to his story here, About Richard Lucas Twitter Linkedin Richard is a business and social entrepreneur who founded or invested in more than 30 businesses, including investments in Argos Multilingual, PMR and, in 2020, the New Books Network. Richard has been a TEDx event organiser, supports the pro-entrepreneurship ecosystem, and leads entrepreneurship workshops at all levels: from pre- to business schools. Richard was born in Oxford and moved to Poland in 1991. Read more here. Listen to his story in an autobiographical TEDx talk here, Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network
99% of business media stories on startups are essentially PR for the startup itself. This makes these stories a one-sided source of information on what it’s like to operate and grow a startup. While there are more and more discussions of mistakes, basically no one at Inc or Entrepreneur or anywhere else really will ever greenlight a debate on this or that failed startup unless, like Theranos, it ended in some massive ethical scandal. Failure is depressing, they say. Not me. This month, I’m honored to bring you the first in a two-part interview with Professor Tom Eisenmann of the Harvard Business School (HBS). He and I chat about themes from his new book Why Startups Fail and how these patterns play out in the world of consumer packaged goods (CPG). In this episode, we discuss what to do when you have little business training, how unit economics evolve differently in CPG vs. tech startups, and how to prevent False Positives by doing just the right pre-revenue research. Since joining the HBS faculty in 1997, Tom has led The Entrepreneurial Manager, an introductory course taught to all first-year MBAs, and launched fourteen electives on all aspects of entrepreneurship, including one on startup failure. Eisenmann has authored more than one hundred HBS case studies, and his writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, and Forbes.
Fail It Forward: Lessons for Life, Leadership, and Turning Failure Into Success
Why do startups fail? That question caught Harvard Business School professor Tom Eisenmann by surprise when he realized he couldn't answer it. So he launched a multiyear research project to find out. In his book "Why Startups Fail," Eisenmann reveals six distinct patterns that account for the vast majority of startup failures. In this episode we discuss some of those patterns so you know exactly what to avoid when starting your own business or launching a new entrepreneurial project within your organization.Whether you're a first-time founder or looking to bring innovation into a corporate environment, you'll find tremendous value from our conversation with Dr. Tom Eisenmann.
Today we've got Tom Eisenmann on the pod. He's an entrepreneurship teacher at HBS and the author of the white-hot startup book "Why Startups Fail." We had a blast talking through all the mistakes startups make and the best ways to avoid them. We also talk through how to validate when you've got big up front costs, when domain experts are important (and when they're not), and how to start the gig-economy version of the private chef. Why Startups FailTacklebox Cohort 28 (Apply)Validate Your Startup Idea in a Weekend (Webinar)The Mom TestFour Steps to the Epiphany
In this episode, we talk to Tom Eisenmann(American economist & current Howard H. Stevenson Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School) about his new book, why he loves teaching the case method at Harvard, and so much more. Purchase Why Startups Fail: A New Roadmap for Entrepreneurial Success **More On Tom** Tom Eisenmann is the Howard H. Stevenson Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School; the Peter O. Crisp Chair, Harvard Innovation Labs; and Faculty Co-Chair of the HBS Rock Center for Entrepreneurship, the Harvard MS/MBA Program, and the Harvard College Tech Fellows Program. In recent years, he has served as Chair of Harvard's MBA Elective Curriculum--the 2nd year of the MBA Program--and as course head of The Entrepreneurial Manager, taught to all 900 1st-year MBAs. With colleagues, he has launched 14 MBA electives, including Entrepreneurial Failure, MBA Startup Bootcamp, Launching Tech Ventures, Scaling Tech Ventures, Entrepreneurial Sales & Marketing, and Product Management 101. Professor Eisenmann received his Doctorate in Business Policy ('98), MBA ('83), and BA ('79) from Harvard University. Prior to entering the HBS Doctoral Program, Eisenmann spent eleven years at McKinsey & Company, where he was co-head of the Media and Entertainment Practice. He serves as a director on the board of Harvard Business Publishing. You can also donate to the show via CashApp: $TheStartupLifePod Follow us on Clubhouse to interact with the show when we create content there. Check out other great podcasts from The Binge Podcast Network. Written by: Dominic Lawson Executive Producers: Dominic Lawson and Kenda Lawson Music Credits: **Show Theme** Behind Closed Doors - Otis McDonald **Break Theme** Cielo - Huma-Huma www.funkymedia.agency/calnedar
Hosted by long time radio reporter, anchor, editor, producer, director, and host, Larry Matthews, "Matthews and Friends" brings you the best interviews with guests from whom you want to hear! Join Larry Matthews today to hear his work with Harvard Business School Professor, Tom Eisenmann, on his book, "Why Startups Fail"; Israeli-American scholar, Bar-Giora Goldberg, on his book, "The Mind is Mightier"; and investigative journalist Michael Blanding on his book, "North by Shakespeare". "Matthews and Friends" can be heard at 8:00 am and 10:00 pm ET, seven days a week on Impact Radio USA.
Tom Eisenmann from Harvard identifies six reasons why most startups fail and what you can do to avoid them. His new book "Why Startups Fail" provides a better roadmap to entrepreneurial success. Tom is a Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and the faculty co-chair of the Arthur Rock Center for Entrepreneurship. He has guided over 1,000 students and alumni on their new ventures—many, to massive success. Listen for three action items you can use today. Host, Kevin Craine Do you want to be a guest? Do you want to be a sponsor?
9 out of 10 startups fail. This is a gloomy number. However, it has never stopped entrepreneurs from hedging their bets to create successful companies. And I want to help entrepreneurs, whether they’re first, second, or third-time founders, increase their odds of success. So this week, I talked to Tom Eisenmann about his new book, Tom is the Howard H. Stevenson Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and holds the Peter O. Crisp Faculty Chair at Harvard Innovation Labs.
The failure rate for startups is 90%. That means 9 out of 10 businesses will fail! It doesn’t have to be this way though. If you know the patterns causing these failures and avoid them, your chances for success increase dramatically. This week's guest, Tom Eisenmann, Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and author of “How Startups Fail”, surveyed 470 entrepreneurs and investors about their failed businesses and discovered six distinct patterns leading to their failure. In this episode we discuss and unpack those patterns so you know exactly what to avoid when starting your own business or investing in someone else’s. -- Order Tom Eisenmann's "Why Startups Fail" now! If you want to become a Business Made Simple professional, sign up for pro access at BusinessMadeSimple.com and get all our online courses plus access to live coaching sessions with Donald Miller every month. Go pro at BusinessMadeSimple.com
In this episode Matt Crawford speaks with author Tom Eisenmann about his book Why Startups Fail. Eisenmann takes us through how some startups fail and how to avoid those same pitfalls. A professor of business at Harvard, Eisenmann takes us into his classroom and lets us benefit from the trust he has established with these entrepreneurs. A masterclass on honesty and learning from mistakes this is a must read for anyone who appreciates the process of learning.
Michelle Martin discusses the book The Fail-Safe Startup with author, Harvard Business School’s Tom Eisenmann. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
My guest today is Tom Eisenmann, the Howard H. Stevenson Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School (HBS) and the faculty co-chair of the Arthur Rock Center for Entrepreneurship. The topic is his book Why Startups Fail: A New Roadmap for Entrepreneurial Success. In this episode of Trend Following Radio we discuss: Harvard MBA Program MBA Students Definition of Failure Venture Capital Why Startups Fail Startup Entrepreneurs What is Scaling? Failure Patterns Jump in! --- I'm MICHAEL COVEL, the host of TREND FOLLOWING RADIO, and I'm proud to have delivered 10+ million podcast listens since 2012. Investments, economics, psychology, politics, decision-making, human behavior, entrepreneurship and trend following are all passionately explored and debated on my show. To start? I'd like to give you a great piece of advice you can use in your life and trading journey… cut your losses! You will find much more about that philosophy here: https://www.trendfollowing.com/trend/ You can watch a free video here: https://www.trendfollowing.com/video/ Can't get enough of this episode? You can choose from my thousand plus episodes here: https://www.trendfollowing.com/podcast My social media platforms: Twitter: @covel Facebook: @trendfollowing LinkedIn: @covel Instagram: @mikecovel Hope you enjoy my never-ending podcast conversation!
SEGMENT 1 with Tom Eisenmann, starting at 0:00: One of the eternal questions in entrepreneurship is why do so many startups fail? Professor at Harvard Business School, Tom Eisenmann, is here to reveal the key patterns that explain why startups fail.SEGMENT 2 with Tim Koegel, starting at 17:30: Presenting online is very different than presenting in person. What can we do to optimize these tools and make virtual meetings more effective? Presentation expert Tim Koegel is here to give us some very practical tips.SEGMENT 3 with Victoria Jones, starting at 36:15: One of the biggest issues facing any company that conducts business online is how to handle data privacy. Here to guide small businesses on the topic is Victoria Jones who shares key findings from Zoho's data privacy survey. Sponsored by AT&T Business
Michael Reidy and Sharon Confessore - This team beyond nuclear and healthcare has worked with hundreds of businesses to build a culture of emotional safety where the rigid top-down hierarchies of leadership decisions – where the one in charge calls all the shots – must come down in order for teams, safety standards and bottom lines to rise up.Tom Eisenmann is the Howard H. Stevenson Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School (HBS) and the faculty co-chair of the Arthur Rock Center for Entrepreneurship Why start ups fail
In this episode, we talk to Tom Eisenmann(American economist & current Howard H. Stevenson Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School) about his new book, why he loves teaching the case method at Harvard, and so much more. Purchase Why Startups Fail: A New Roadmap for Entrepreneurial Success **More On Tom** Tom Eisenmann is the Howard H. Stevenson Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School; the Peter O. Crisp Chair, Harvard Innovation Labs; and Faculty Co-Chair of the HBS Rock Center for Entrepreneurship, the Harvard MS/MBA Program, and the Harvard College Tech Fellows Program. In recent years, he has served as Chair of Harvard's MBA Elective Curriculum--the 2nd year of the MBA Program--and as course head of The Entrepreneurial Manager, taught to all 900 1st-year MBAs. With colleagues, he has launched 14 MBA electives, including Entrepreneurial Failure, MBA Startup Bootcamp, Launching Tech Ventures, Scaling Tech Ventures, Entrepreneurial Sales & Marketing, and Product Management 101. Professor Eisenmann received his Doctorate in Business Policy ('98), MBA ('83), and BA ('79) from Harvard University. Prior to entering the HBS Doctoral Program, Eisenmann spent eleven years at McKinsey & Company, where he was co-head of the Media and Entertainment Practice. He serves as a director on the board of Harvard Business Publishing. Follow The Startup Life On Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or LinkedIn Follow the StartupBlog or buy some gear from our website. Subscribe to our Patreon to listen to ad-free episodes, exclusive content, and digital products that we are beginning to offer. You can also donate to the show via CashApp: $TheStartupLifePod Follow us on Clubhouse to interact with the show when we create content there. Check out other great podcasts from The Binge Podcast Network. Written by: Dominic Lawson Executive Producers: Dominic Lawson and Kenda Lawson Music Credits: **Show Theme** Behind Closed Doors - Otis McDonald **Break Theme** Cielo - Huma-Huma
Three guests joined me LIVE on Clubhouse to discuss powerful business lessons and some listeners joined in as well. Tom Eisenmann, Harvard Business School Professor discusses why startups fail. Stephan Aarstol, CEO of Tower Paddle Boards discusses why his 5-hour workday failed. And Felena Hanson of Hera Hub created a coworking space for women? Join me live every Tuesday on Clubhouse at 11 am CT and check Twitter (@JustinBrady) or my website to see who my next guests are.
Dr. Tom Eisenmann is a Professor at Harvard. His focus is on Business Administration, and he is also a Faculty Co-Chair of the HBS Rock Center for Entrepreneurship. He has made significant research contributions to topics surrounding tech and entrepreneurship. His new book, Why Startups Fail: A New Roadmap for Entrepreneurial Success comes out on the 30th of March, 2020. Preorder today: https://www.amazon.com/Why-Startups-Fail-Roadmap-Entrepreneurial/dp/0593137027/ Tune in to this episode for to get a sneak peak on his findings. Learn why startups fail, and what you can do to avoid it.
Modern advancements in technology have impacted almost every industry, but there are still some areas that might not be modernized. As we discuss in this podcast, Matt and his co-founders found one of those industries that was ripe for disruption while at Harvard and that is the public safety sector. Based on the important role that first responder, law enforcement, and public safety professionals play in our lives, you would think they would be leveraging state of the art technology to make their jobs more efficient and effective. However, this wasn't the case and Mark43 is building a company to solve this issue with a modern, cloud-native platform for dispatch, records, evidence, and analytics. The company is backed by lots of notable investors such as Spark Capital, General Catalyst, Goldman Sachs, Lowercase Capital, Jeff Bezos, Ashton Kutcher, Tom Eisenmann, and many others. In this episode of our podcast, we cover: * Matt's background and how a class at Harvard led him and his co-founders down the path of starting a company. * All of the details on Mark43 and how the company is building a modern tech platform for public safety professionals. * How Mark43 was able to land a who's who list of notable investors. * The ways that Mark43 has been successful with PR initiatives. * And more! If you like the show, please remember to subscribe and review us on iTunes, Soundcloud, Spotify, Stitcher, or Google Play.
Welcome to Episode 72 of The VentureFizz Podcast, the flagship podcast from the leading authority for jobs & careers in the tech industry. For this episode of our podcast, I interviewed Tom Eisenmann, Professor at Harvard Business School. What do the companies Rent the Runway, Birchbox, ThredUp, Cloudflare, Evertrue, and InsightSquared all have in common? Well, they are all companies that you may have heard of… but did you know that they all participated in Harvard Business School's New Venture Competition? It's true and this is a small sampling of the amazing companies from this competition. Sure, careers in management consulting and investment banking are still commonly considered by b-school grads, but its the path of entrepreneurship that has been one of the fastest growing areas of interest for students. Thus, I was excited to interview Tom and get an inside look at entrepreneurship at HBS. Tom has over 20 years of experience as a faculty member and he is also the faculty Co-Chair of the HBS Rock Center for Entrepreneurship, which supports these students who are looking to transform their ideas into successful startups and even perhaps… change the world. In this episode of our podcast, we also cover lots of great topics like: -ABC's Shark Tank and how so many HBS affiliated companies have appeared on the show. -Tom's background and what led him down the path of academia. -How HBS has evolved over time as it relates to entrepreneurship and its curriculum, including their case method approach. -The common mistakes where entrepreneurs get tripped up. -Tom's thoughts on whether or not entrepreneurship is a trait someone is born with or is it something that can be taught. -Advice on how to get into Harvard Business School. -Plus, a lot more. Lastly, if you like the show, please remember to subscribe to and review us on iTunes, or your podcast player of choice!