969 Posts Found

Product-market fit is one of the most important, yet elusive, concepts in company building. It’s not a clear metric you can measure or a milestone you can easily check off your to-do list. I think of product-market fit as the transition moment you feel as a founder when you go from “pushing” your product on people to them “pulling” it out of your hands. But … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Todd Jackson | Source: First Round Review | Subject: Entrepreneurship

In their work with more than 10,000 startup leaders across 70 countries, the authors identify three common management myths among startup leaders looking to grow their companies: the myth of scaling without hierarchy, the myth of structural harmony, and the myth of sustained heroics.

Content: Article | Authors: Josh Yellin, Martin Gonzalez | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Management, Organizational Behavior

One of the things that give startups an advantage is that they’re exploring in a way that established companies aren’t able to. Enterprises have an innovation problem. Startups are exploratory. But what we have to realize is that the very act of setting a goal makes you become more and more enterprise-like. You stop exploring other avenues, strategies, products, and motions that you could be … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Annie Duke | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Innovation

Entrepreneurship through Acquisition (ETA) is one of the hottest conversations at business schools across the country, particularly for MBAs not interested in more traditional MBA landing spots.

It entails finding, buying and operating established small- to medium-sized businesses, often family owned and providing needed services in their communities. Taught at Harvard and Stanford for decades, ETA courses and resources are now exploding at B-schools of all … [ Read more ]

Content: Prospective MBA Content | Author: Kristy Bleizeffer | Source: Poets & Quants | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Miscellaneous MBA-related Resources, Prospective

Most people describe finding product-market fit as an art, not a science. But when it comes to sales-led B2B startups, we’ve reverse engineered a method to increase the odds of unlocking it. We’ve worked with some of the world’s most iconic enterprise founders and distilled what they did in their first six months into a series of tactical sessions for taking a straighter path to … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Source: First Round Review | Subject: Entrepreneurship

New ventures often fail—but digital capabilities change the odds. By following a business-building playbook based on your company’s strategic assets, you can accelerate growth dramatically.

Content: Article | Authors: Austin Gispanski, Beth Viner, David Tang-Quan, James Tucker, Jürgen Eckel, Ketil Gjerstad, Sylvain Duranton, Yoichiro Hirai | Source: Boston Consulting Group (BCG) | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Innovation, Strategy

It takes more than intuition and expertise to assemble a team of directors who can help firms stay profitable and healthy.

Content: Article | Authors: Stanislav Shekshnia, Vip Vyas | Source: INSEAD Knowledge | Subjects: Corporate Governance, Entrepreneurship

Early growth at startups comes down to a few insanely successful tactics. If you look back at the early days of any great startup, you’ll see that 90% of their early growth came from 10% of the stuff they tried.

This phenomenon is no coincidence — it’s physics. Big companies can grow by deploying heaps of cash and armies of people, using every channel, hoping one … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Matt Lerner | Source: First Round Review | Subject: Entrepreneurship

Don’t start with the most important partners that you could potentially work with, but at the fourth or fifth down on your list. That way you can learn exactly what the objections from a big partner might be and start solving them. If you pitch that big company five or six months from now, you’ll be in a much stronger position.

Content: Quotation | Author: Cristina Cordova | Source: First Round Review | Subject: Entrepreneurship

A big mistake early-stage companies make around launch is focusing too much on sign-ups. It’s great to have 10,000 sign-ups in one day — but are they paying you? Are they actively using your product? Are they adopting new features? Those are the things that you really need to care about.

Content: Quotation | Author: Cristina Cordova | Source: First Round Review | Subject: Entrepreneurship

Five lessons for incumbents on how to build and scale new digital ventures—and increase their odds of success.

Content: Article | Authors: Nimal Manuel, Ralf Dreischmeier, Tomas Beerthuis, Tomas Laboutka | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Innovation, Management

The difference between an idea and a product is that you’ve solved the problems. When someone says to me, “Well, you can’t do this for these reasons,” all it means is that there are problems to be solved. If they can be solved, the idea transitions into becoming a thing. If they can’t, it remains an idea.

Content: Quotation | Author: Jony Ive | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Innovation

Since the 1970s, venture capitalists have backed about one-third of all large publicly traded companies started in the U.S. That’s one of the remarkable findings from Ilya Strebulaev, a finance professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business who studies the inner workings of the VC industry.

Content: Multimedia Content | Author: Ilya Strebulaev | Source: Stanford University | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Venture Capital

When a market is up for grabs, the risk isn’t inefficiency — the risk is playing it too safe. If you win, efficiency isn’t that important; if you lose, efficiency is completely irrelevant.

Content: Quotation | Authors: Chris Yeh, Reid Hoffman | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Innovation

When I hear that founders are looking to “educate the market,” I get nervous. In order to educate somebody, you need to fully capture their attention and get them to suspend their current beliefs and consider, adopt and master a new way of operating. I run an education business, and I must say that is a herculean task.

Content: Quotation | Author: Matt Lerner | Source: First Round Review | Subject: Entrepreneurship

Language/market fit is the most under-appreciated concept for early-stage startups. For starters, most founders are focused on finding product/market fit, zeroing in on the right set of features to match their prospects’ needs. Moreover, fine-tuning language seems like “marketing,” which is usually seen as a later priority, not step zero. Lastly, people also don’t tend to like going out of their comfort zone — and … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Matt Lerner | Source: First Round Review | Subject: Entrepreneurship

Marketplace businesses can be messy, and every gain is hard earned. After all, you’re dealing with an ecosystem of participants — buyers and sellers — that’s constantly in flux, their needs and desires changing over time. Unfolding in both online transactions and offline interactions, marketplaces are organic and dynamic.

Marketplace leaders need to be experts in the dynamics of their platforms. Identify those dynamics in … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Jonathan Golden | Source: Medium | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Strategy

I’ve learned that there are two kinds of mistakes in venture capital. There’s the mistake of commission, in which you invest in or go work for a company that fails. And then there’s the mistake of omission, in which you don’t invest in Google or don’t go to work at Facebook in 2005.

The longer you’re in this industry, the more you learn that the mistakes … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Marc Andreessen | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Venture Capital

Succeeding as a start-up is as hard as it’s ever been, because the same fundamental dynamic is in play. You’ve got some idea of why the world should change, but the world doesn’t want to. People are too busy to hear another pitch from another start-up. People are happy in their jobs and don’t want to leave for your start-up. People are happy with the … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Marc Andreessen | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subject: Entrepreneurship

Crunchbase data offers some insights into how a degree from a particular institution correlates with one’s likelihood of becoming a funded founder. It turns out, your likelihood of raising funds for a startup has a pretty strong correlation with where you attended school.

Content: Prospective MBA Content | Author: Joanna Glasner | Source: Crunchbase | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, MBA Program Rankings, MBA Related, Prospective