Start-ups make so many mistakes that the challenge to identify the root cause of a failure is tough. But believing in your own plan is probably the worst.
The United States is locked in a new arms race for that most precious resource – the future entrepreneurs upon whom economic growth depends. Substantial research shows that immigrants play a key role in American job creation.
Most start-up companies fail and it is smart public policy to help entrepreneurs increase their odds of succeeding. But, the biggest loss to our economy is not all the start-ups that didn’t make it: It’s the ones that might have been created but weren’t.
You know how people always talk about how vision is the key to entrepreneurship and perseverance and really seeing what other people don’t see? We can actually redeem a fair amount of that folk wisdom.
The biggest start-up successes – from Henry Ford to Bill Gates to Mark Zuckerberg – were pioneered by people from solidly middle-class backgrounds. These founders were not wealthy when they began. They were hungry for success, but knew they had a solid support system to fall back on if they failed.
Learning is the essential unit of progress for startups.
Customers don’t care how much time something takes to build. They care only if it serves their needs.
What if we found ourselves building something that nobody wanted? In that case what did it matter if we did it on time and on budget?
Reading is good, action is better.
Progress in manufacturing is measured by the production of high quality goods. The unit of progress for Lean Startups is validated learning-a rigorous method for demonstrating progress when one is embedded in the soil of extreme uncertainty.
The only person who can put you out of business, in the early days, is yourself.
By the time that product is ready to be distributed widely, it will already have established customers.
Better to have bad news that’s true than good news we made up.
The hardest part is the grueling work of constantly being wrong.
This is one of the most important lessons of the scientific method: if you cannot fail, you cannot learn.
Entrepreneurs always pitch their idea as ‘the X of Y,’ so this is going to be ‘the Microsoft of food.’ And yet disruptive innovations usually don’t have that character. Most of the time, if something seems like a good idea, it probably isn’t.
If you can’t out iterate someone who is trying to copy you, you’re toast anyway.
A pivot is a change in strategy without a change in vision.
Our educational system is not preparing people for the 21st Century. Failure is an essential part of entrepreneurship. If you work hard, you can get an ‘A’ pretty much guaranteed, but in entrepreneurship, that’s not how it works.
Except in very narrow cases, where there’s breakthrough science that needs patent production, worrying about competitors is a waste of time. If you can’t out iterate someone who is trying to copy you, you’re toast anyway.