Podcast interview – The Journey of Work

Larry Cornett on The Manila Folder podcast

I was recently interviewed for The Manila Folder podcast. You can listen to the 30 min interview here. On this episode I sat down with Larry Cornett, Ph.D. and we talked about his work journey. Larry started his career at IBM and then moved over to Apple, while finishing his dissertation for a Ph.D. in…

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Think about where you place your job loyalty

Frustrated young business man lost job

Losing your job From a recent post by Gretchen Kittelberger about losing her job (CrossFit athlete and prior Counsel at CrossFit, Inc.): “It really wouldn’t have mattered if my work, or my effort, or my output had been 10x or 100x better. At the end of the day I still would have ended up in…

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You're trying too hard

Rock leaf river

The stink of desperation is a turnoff. This is just as true with startups as it is with dating. We’ve all seen it. Startups that are struggling to find customer fit and traction. But, there is a fine line between being nimble, lean, and responsive; and tossing and turning like a leaf in the wind.…

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Tip for Startup Founders: It Isn't 1999

I lived through the infamous Dot-com Bubble. I was at a startup in 1998, that went through the usual ups and downs and up again. Then I founded a design consultancy (for some stability, believe it or not) and advised a number of small and medium-sized startups in Silicon Valley for several years (before eventually…

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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.
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