An interesting post from Steve Blank talks about how he met the guy who went on to found The Startup Genome Project and just released their first report on what makes a startup successful.
Key findings are:
- Founders that learn are more successful
- Startups that pivot once or twice times raise 2.5x more money
- Many investors invest 2-3x more capital than necessary in startups that haven’t reached problem solution fit yet
- Investors who provide hands-on help have little or no effect on the company’s operational performance
- Solo founders take 3.6x longer to reach scale stage
- Business-heavy founding teams are 6.2x more likely to successfully scale
- Technical-heavy founding teams are 3.3x more likely to successfully scale with product-centric startups with no network effects
- Balanced teams with one technical founder and one business founder raise 30% more money
- Most successful founders are driven by impact
- Founders overestimate the value of IP before product market fit by 255%
- Startups need 2-3 times longer to validate their market than mostfounders expect
- Startups that haven’t raised money over-estimate their market size by 100x
- Premature scaling is the most common reason for startups to performworse
- B2C vs. B2B is not a meaningful segmentation of Internet startupsanymore because the Internet has changed the rules of business
It’s worth checking out. Get the Startup Genome report here.
