Do Accelerators Improve Startup Success Rates?
Accelerator programs boost startup performance across the board, but maximizing that success depends on program design, Wharton research shows.
Content: Article | Authors: Raffi Amit, Seb Murray, Valentina Assenova | Source: Knowledge@Wharton | Subject: Entrepreneurship
3 Management Myths That Derail Startups
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
Levels of PMF: Product-Market Fit Isn’t a Black Box — A New Framework to Help B2B Founders Find It, Faster
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
How Companies Can Speed Up the Business of Business Building
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
Building Your First Board: Lessons for Founders
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
The Secret to Running Effective Growth Sprints — Follow This Process to Learn Faster
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
A practical guide to new-business building for incumbents
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
Four Questions Every Marketplace Startup Should Be Able to Answer
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
Pull, Don’t Push: How Catalysts Overcome Barriers and Drive Product Adoption
Trying to change someone’s mind often feels like a fruitless pursuit, almost as if it requires waving some sort of magic wand or casting an enchanting spell.
Trying to change someone’s mind often feels like a fruitless pursuit, almost as if it requires waving some sort of magic wand or casting an enchanting spell. On a smaller scale, you might think of a particularly sticky … [ Read more ]
Content: Article | Author: Jonah Berger | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Marketing / Sales
How to build a unicorn: Lessons from venture capitalists and start-ups
New data highlights five things incumbent businesses could learn from venture capitalists and unicorns.
Content: Article | Authors: Jerome Königsfeld, Kai Vollhardt, Leo Leypoldt, Markus Berger-de León | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Innovation, Venture Capital
The Tactical Guide to Making Better Decisions When Starting and Scaling Companies
For the past couple of years, Annie Duke has been sharing her advice with founders and angel investors in closed sessions for the First Round community, but given our focus on open-sourcing so others in the tech ecosystem can learn, we thought readers of The Review would be curious to see a few pages from her decision-making playbook, tailored specifically for the startup context.
In this … [ Read more ]
Content: Article | Author: Annie Duke | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Decision Making, Entrepreneurship, Organizational Behavior
Run This Diagnostic to Thoughtfully Build (and Evaluate) Your Startup’s Culture
Most founders tend to remain high-level when the topic of culture comes up. For starters, there are tons of reads on why culture matters, but strikingly few on how to actually architect it. We all understand what it means to some extent, but it’s rarely defined or broken down. There are frameworks for product/market fit or founder-led sales, but when it comes to culture, the … [ Read more ]
Content: Article | Author: Laura Del Beccaro | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Culture, Entrepreneurship, Organizational Behavior
When Pitching an Idea, Should You Focus on “Why” or “How”?
There are two camps on the most effective way to frame an innovative idea. One contends you should emphasize why the idea is desirable. The other says you should focus on how to implement the idea. Which one is right? A research project found that the answer depends on your audience. If you’re making a pitch to novices, focus on why. If you’re making it … [ Read more ]
Content: Article | Authors: Denise Falchetti, Gino Cattani, Simone Ferriani | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Communication, Entrepreneurship, Innovation, Organizational Behavior
Your Startup’s Management Training Probably Sucks — Here’s How to Make it Better
At early-stage companies, where you’re still wrestling with product/market fit and building up the company foundation, management often falls to the back burner, leaving folks to generally figure it all out for themselves. However, many of the cracks that emerge as startups scale can be traced back to those missing managerial cornerstones.
One root cause? Manager training, which is largely ignored by startups as a BigCo bucket … [ Read more ]
Content: Article | Authors: Johnathan Nightingale, Melissa Nightingale | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Human Resources, Management, Training & Development
Great Startups Deserve Great Brands — Build a Strong Foundation by Avoiding These Mistakes
Arielle Jackson has helped shape hundreds of startup brands. “Working with hundreds of brands has cemented the importance of focusing on the fundamentals of your purpose, positioning, and personality early on. These are the essential elements of a brand strategy. When you get this stuff right, everything flows from there. You don’t get distracted by the competition. Your website writes itself. Your messaging breaks through … [ Read more ]
Content: Article | Author: Arielle Jackson | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Marketing / Sales
The 30 Best Pieces of Advice for Entrepreneurs in 2021
Since 2013, First Round Review has committed itself to an annual ritual, one that serves as an opportunity to both take stock and remind ourselves of that early promise to stay tactical. Each time we turn the page to the new year, we comb through every article we published over the last one to concentrate the standout tactics into one actionable guide of advice. As … [ Read more ]
Content: Article | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Management
Finding Language/Market Fit: How to Make Customers Feel Like You’ve Read Their Minds
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: Article | Author: Matt Lerner | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Marketing / Sales
How good are you at business building? A new way to score your ability to scale new ventures
Why do so many great ideas just fail to take off? Executives have plenty of explanations for why their new businesses fail to scale, from poor operations to insufficient talent to simply bad luck. But in many cases, these explanations are based on gut feeling or frustration looking for an outlet, not on a deep understanding of the facts. So we have reviewed more than … [ Read more ]
Content: Article | Authors: Ari Libarikian, Eike Reus, Jerome Königsfeld, Markus Berger-de León, Ralf Dreischmeier | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Management
Falling Flat: Why Startups Need Hierarchical Structure
Wharton management professor Saerom (Ronnie) Lee has a word of warning for aspiring entrepreneurs who envision an egalitarian workplace where there are no bosses and every employee ranks the same.
According to his latest research, startups with flat organizational structures often fail.
Content: Article | Author: Saerom (Ronnie) Lee | Source: Knowledge@Wharton | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Organizational Behavior
20 Underrated Qualities to Look for in Candidates — And 50+ Interview Questions to Suss Them Out
If you’re a hiring manager, this is the perfect time to check in and rededicate yourself to running an even better process, whether that’s by doubling down on your existing approach or trying out new hiring tactics that break the mold. In particular, there’s an opportunity to reconsider the very qualities you’re hunting for.
Over the years, we’ve interviewed hundreds of startup leaders, collecting their go-to … [ Read more ]
Content: Article | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Hiring, Human Resources