The document provides an overview of entrepreneurial management strategies and concepts across 15 pages. It discusses:
1) The 5 dimensions of success for startups including customer, product, team, business model, and financials. Failure in any dimension can cause startups to fail.
2) Key entrepreneurial frameworks and theories from thinkers like Blank, Osterwalder, Ries, Christensen and others.
3) The importance of customer development, testing hypotheses through minimum viable products, and pivoting based on customer feedback through a lean startup approach.
4) Segmenting customers and focusing on a single market initially for easier market positioning and potential cash flow.
3. A set of principles and frameworks that
helps startups identify a sustainable
business model with the least amount
of waste possible.
- Jon Worren, MaRS Entrepreneurship Programs
4. ‘A legendary hero is usually the founder of something – the
founder of a new age, the founder of a new religion, the
founder of a new city, the founder of a new way of life. In
order to found something new, one has to leave the old and
go on a quest of the seed idea, germinal idea that will have
the potential of bringing forth that new thing.’
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– Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces
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Pg 5!
5. You do not need to just solve a ‘pain’ or
‘problem’ to be an entrepreneur.!
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Pg 6!
7. Ask yourself.
What can I do well that I would love to do
for an extended period of time?
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Pg 8!
8. Where to start ‘digging’.
1. Knowledge: what was the focus of your education or career?!
2. Capability: what you most proficient at?!
3. Connections: who do you know that has expertise in different industries? !
4. Financial assets: do you have access to significant financial capital, or
will you be relying on a meager savings account to start out!
5. Name recognition: what are you or your partners well-known for?!
6. In previous jobs you’ve held, what inefficiencies or pain points existed?!
7. Passion for a particular market…!
8. Commitment: do you have the time and effort to devote?
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Read: Crush It! By Gary Vay-ner-chuck
Pg 9!
9. ‘Often you will find an idea or technology that
improves something for you personally, then realize
that idea or technology has the potential to help
many others.’ !
- Bill Aulet, Sr. Lecturer, MIT Entrepreneurship - Sloan School of Management !
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Pg 10!
10. It’s not a solo sport.
Your choice of co-founders is extremely important. The research at MIT
suggest that businesses with multiple founders are more successful than
those founded by an individual.!
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Read: ‘ The Founder’s Dilemmas’ – Noam Wasserman
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Pg 11!
15. Here’s what we know. !
1.
Startups with helpful mentors, track performance metrics effectively & learn from thought leaders
raise 7x more money & have 3.5x better user growth.!
2. Pivoting startups raise 2.5x more money, 3.6x better user growth, & are 52% less likely to scale
prematurely. Startups that haven’t raised money overestimate their market size by 100%. !
3. Premature scaling is common reason startups perform worse: scale team, customer acquisition
strategies, or over build the product.!
4.
Solo founders take 3.6x longer to reach scale stage.!
5.
Business-heavy founding teams are 3.3x more likely to successfully scale with sales-driven startups!
6.
Tech-heavy founding teams are 3.3x more likely to scale with a product-centric startup!
7. Balanced teams with one technical founder and one business founder raise 30% more money, have 2.9x
more user growth and are 19% less likely to scale prematurely than technical or business-heavy founding
teams!
8.
Founders that don’t work full-time have 4x less user growth and end up raising 24x less money from investors!
9. Most successful founders are driven by impact rather than experience or money.!
10. Startups need 2-3 times longer to validate their market than most founders expect. The underestimation
creates the pressure to scale prematurely. B2B and B2C isn’t a meaningful segmentation because of the way
the internet has changed customer dynamics. !
Source: Startup Genome Report: 3200+ high growth startups, co-authored by researchers at UC Berkeley & Stanford, supported by Steve Blank, the Sandbox Network & 10 global accelerators.
Pg 16
16. The art of ‘high-growth’ entrepreneurship
is to master the chaos of getting each of
these 5 dimensions to move in time and
concert with one another. !
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! !!- Startup Genome Report
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Pg 17!
17. 5-Dimensions Failure Causation!
Customer
Product
Team
No
segmenta+on
Acquisi+on
b4
PMF
Missing
PMF
Vanity
metrics
trap
Influencer
focus
Wrong
archetype
Invalidated
PSF
Inves+ng
scale
before
PMF
3.4x
more
lines
of
code
Execute
on
irrelevant
Poor
MVP
/
conversion
Outsourced
dev.
Hiring
too
much
too
early
Adop+ng
mul+-‐levels
Not
hiring
doers
No
accountability
Lack
of
Customer
Dvp.
Focus
on
features
No
‘search
&
learn’
Business
Model
Financials
Profit
max.
too
early
Over
planning
Not
adap+ng
to
market
Costs
>
revenue
Pivot
with
no
valida+on
No
learning
capture
Undisciplined
Raising
too
much
No
innova+on
accoun+ng
Picking
wrong
investors
Deploying
capital
wrong
No
KPI
or
understanding
Misnomer Attributes
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Emphasis on market size
Product release cycles
Education levels
Gender
Cofounder history
Entrepreneurial experience
Age
Number of products
Type of tools to track metrics
Source: Startup Genome Report: 3200+ high growth startups, co-authored by researchers at UC Berkeley & Stanford, supported by Steve Blank, the Sandbox Network & 10 global accelerators.
Pg 18
19. 6- Stage Life Cycle of a Startup!
STAGE
‘Marmer’
DISCOVERY
• Learning
• Valley
of
death
VALIDATION
• PMF
• PSF
EFFICIENCY
SCALE
CONSERVATI
ON
SUSTAIN
Valley of Death
i: $100k / month threshold / scaling, BMC ops. 60%
Search for problem space & fit (PSF-PMF)
STARTUP
ESTG
PMF
PSF
Extreme uncertainty
BEHAVIOURAL
&
ACTUAL
DIMENSIONS
CUSTOMER
Validation
PRODUCT
LSTG
BMC
Search 4 repeatable & scalable business model
TEAM
BUSINESS
MODEL
FINANCIALS
MaRS ICE Practice Startup Methodologies (‘insurance policy)’
High-risk of pre-mature scaling along all dimensions
Pg 20
24. What is an MVP?
(Minimum Viable Product)
• A tactic for cutting back on wasted engineering hours!
• A strategy to get the product into early evangelists hands as
soon as possible!
• A tool for generating maximum customer learning in the
shortest possible time.!
• Answers the question: “What is the smallest or least !
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Pg 25!
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31. Big idea…
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We no longer compete on a product
or service, but rather, a competitive,
repeatable and scalable business
model.!
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Pg 32!
32. Listening to customers.!
1.
•
•
Translate business
model hypotheses to
test with customers
Develop an MVP of
the solution to test
with customers
2.
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Continuous testing
of hypothesis.
Careful analysis of
customer
interactions
Pivot or proceed
3.
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Product is refined
enough to sell.
Build demand
through marketing
& sales.
4.
•
Business
transitions for
startup mode to
departments
operating in
functions
Pg 33!
33. THERE ARE NO FACTS
INSIDE THE BUILDING,
SO GET THE HECK
OUTSIDE.
41. The single necessary and sufficient
condition for a business is a paying
customer.
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Pg 42!
42. A target customer is a group of potential
customers who share many
characteristics and who would all have
similar reasons to buy a particular
product.
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Pg 43!
43. !
‘By choosing a single market to excel
in, your startup can more easily
establish a strong market position,
and hopefully a state of positive cash
flow, before it runs our of resources.’ !
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Pg 44!
55. Summary
• Be driven by impact
• Segment your customers
• It’s not a solo sport
• Test, test, test
• Understand failure
• Listen to customers
• Search and learn
• Lean dev is key
• Remember the 7 key
questions
• Build a business model
• Have fun
• Get out of the building
56. Summary
• Entrepreneurial Management offers a set of tools and processes that makes
the process of starting up more manageable:
• The philosophy brings clarity to the skillset required to succeed:
– Less persistence – more perception
– Stack the odds in your favour – rather than trying to win against all odds
– Commit to the process – not the idea
57. It’s not the beginning of the end, but it is
perhaps the end of the beginning. !
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!- Steve Blank, Startup Owner’s Manual
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Pg 58!