Ep. 962: Tom Eisenmann Interview with Michael Covel on Trend Following Radio

<p>If you want your startup to succeed, you need to understand why startups fail.</p> <p>Why do startups fail? That question caught Harvard Business School professor Tom Eisenmann by surprise when he realized he couldn’t answer it.</p> <p>So he launched a multiyear research project to find out. In Why Startups Fail, Eisenmann reveals his findings: six distinct patterns that account for the vast majority of startup failures.</p> <p>Bad Bedfellows. Startup success is thought to rest largely on the founder’s talents and instincts. But the wrong team, investors, or partners can sink a venture just as quickly.<br /> False Starts. In following the oft-cited advice to “fail fast” and to “launch before you’re ready,” founders risk wasting time and capital on the wrong solutions.<br /> False Promises. Success with early adopters can be misleading and give founders unwarranted confidence to expand.<br /> Speed Traps. Despite the pressure to “get big fast,” hypergrowth can spell disaster for even the most promising ventures.<br /> Help Wanted. Rapidly scaling startups need lots of capital and talent, but they can make mistakes that leave them suddenly in short supply of both.<br /> Cascading Miracles. Silicon Valley exhorts entrepreneurs to dream big. But the bigger the vision, the more things that can go wrong.</p> <p>Drawing on fascinating stories of ventures that failed to fulfill their early promise—from a home-furnishings retailer to a concierge dog-walking service, from a dating app to the inventor of a sophisticated social robot, from a fashion brand to a startup deploying a vast network of charging stations for electric vehicles-—Eisenmann offers frameworks for detecting when a venture is vulnerable to these patterns, along with a wealth of strategies and tactics for avoiding them.</p> <p>Eisenmann is a must for founders at any stage of their entrepreneurial journey.</p> <p>Bio: Tom Eisenmann is the Howard H. Stevenson Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School (HBS) and the faculty co-chair of