What Is Your Special Sizzle That Creates an Unfair Advantage?

Game pieces on a board

There is no level playing field in life, despite the popularity of schools, companies, and services jubilantly claiming, “We create a level playing field!” Please. Who are you kidding? You can’t go through life as if you are playing a board game by the rules. Making sure that everyone is playing fair, and that no…

Read More

Career interview with Mike Tschudy, Head of Design at Mint.com

I had the pleasure of talking with Mike Tschudy about his career path recently. Mike is the Head of Design for Mint.com. He shared a ton of good advice about intentionally planning your career, finding good sounding boards, and taking a step back occasionally to reevaluate your path. The full transcript of our discuss is below…

Read More

Hiring Engineers for a Funded Stealth Mobile Startup

iPhone 4s

We are hiring experienced Full-stack engineers to work with our growing team at a funded stealth mobile startup in Silicon Valley. You will be helping us build and deploy mobile apps for iOS and Android devices, using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. This could either be a contracting role or a full-time position, depending on your availability and desire to join an early-stage…

Read More

Hiring JavaScript Engineer for mobile web app (Client/Server)

JavaScript logo

We are looking for an experienced JavaScript engineer to work with our small, but growing, team. You will be helping us build and deploy mobile apps for iOS and Android devices, using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. This is a contracting role, but could transition into a full-time position. We need someone to work with another front-end engineer…

Read More

Designing for Love and Money

From a Design Talk at Airbnb on Nov 14, 2012. Larry Cornett explored the natural tension that exists between design and money as it applies to products, organizations, and even your own career.  

Read More

Investing in Your Leaders – The ROI of Leadership Coaching

I had the good fortune during my career to participate in leadership coaching for the first time when I was a VP at Yahoo. I had certainly heard about career coaching over the years but had never really considered trying it. My experience with companies in Silicon Valley has been that the majority used to…

Read More

Why Do Startups Fail? An Analysis of 3,200 High-growth Startups

I read a very interesting article on TechCrunch today about why startups fail. They shared data from research that Blackbox conducted for their Startup Genome project, which is trying to uncover what makes Silicon Valley startups succeed vs. fail. You can gain access to the free full report here. I highly recommend that you take the time to read through it. Pretty fascinating data.

My biggest takeaway from all of this? Startups absolutely need great mentors. Surprisingly, hands-on help from their investors did not have a significantly positive effect on their performance. I believe that most startup founders assume that they are going to get the guidance they need to be successful once they have secured the backing of a solid VC firm. This certainly does not appear to be the case. As I look through the key findings from the report, these points of failure seem to quite avoidable if a startup had a strong, smart team of mentors that they could turn to for advice on these issues. In particular, the most common reason for startup failure was “premature scaling” along one or more key dimensions (i.e., Customer, Product, Team, Financials, and Business model). Knowing how and when to scale a startup appropriately along these dimensions is something that an experienced mentor understands (e.g., someone who has learned from his or her own scaling successes and failures).

15 Key findings from their report

  1. Founders that learn are more successful. Startups that have helpful mentors, track performance metrics effectively, and learn from startup thought leaders raise 7x more money and have 3.5x better user growth.
  2. Startups that pivot once or twice raise 2.5x more money, have 3.6x better user growth, and are 52% less likely to scale prematurely than startups that pivot more than 2 times or not at all. A pivot is when a startup decides to change a major part of its business.
  3. Premature scaling is the most common reason for startups to perform worse. They tend to lose the battle early on by getting ahead of themselves. Startups can prematurely scale their team, their customer acquisition strategies or over build the product.
Read More