"Learn from the mistakes of others. You can never live long enough to make them all yourself" Startup ideas inspire hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs all over the world. On the flip side, the majority of entrepreneurial ventures fail. Have you ever wondered what the catalyst for such failure is? Startup failures are complex. Most of them are not caused by stupid or simple mistakes. So, be careful when you conclude: Startup X failed because of Y. Therefore I should avoid doing Y in my own startup. It is not that simple. Startups fail because of a combination of factors and causes, some of which are almost impossible to put a finger on. This book is aimed at identifying reasons that can lead even great ideas to complete failure. It also presents how you can make your way around them, earning everlasting growth and prosperity. ABOUT THE AUTHORS Omar Mohout is a Growth Engineer. He is an expert in building repeatable, scalable customer acquisition engines for born-on-the-web companies. Omar is an entrepreneur that turned startup advisor & mentor. Après un doctorat en informatique, Carine Lucas a travaillé plusieurs années comme consultante sur des projets d'innovation. Chez Agoria, elle conseille les entreprises sur leur stratégie digitale et leur business models.

If you want your startup to succeed, you need to understand why startups fail. “Whether you’re a first-time founder or looking to bring innovation into a corporate environment, Why Startups Fail is essential reading.”—Eric Ries, founder and CEO, LTSE, and New York Times bestselling author of The Lean Startup and The Startup Way Why do startups fail? That question caught Harvard Business School professor Tom Eisenmann by surprise when he realized he couldn’t answer it. 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. • 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. • 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. • False Promises. Success with early adopters can be misleading and give founders unwarranted confidence to expand. • Speed Traps. Despite the pressure to “get big fast,” hypergrowth can spell disaster for even the most promising ventures. • 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. • Cascading Miracles. Silicon Valley exhorts entrepreneurs to dream big. But the bigger the vision, the more things that can go wrong. 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. A must-read for founders at any stage of their entrepreneurial journey, Why Startups Fail is not merely a guide to preventing failure but also a roadmap charting the path to startup success.

For the want-to-be entrepreneur thinking about taking the leap, the boot-strapped entrepreneur trying to energize a business three or four years in, and the venture-backed entrepreneur trying to scale, Why Startups Fail shows you the key mistakes new ventures make—and how to avoid them. Nearly everyone has an idea for a product they could build or a company they could start. But eight out of 10 new businesses fail within the first three years. Even only one in ten venture-backed startups succeeds, and venture capitalists turn down some 99% of the business plans they see. The odds appear to be stacked against you! But entrepreneurs often make the same avoidable mistakes over and over. Why Startups Fail can help you beat the odds and avoid the pitfalls and traps that lead to early startup death. It’s easy to point to successes like Apple, Google, and Facebook. But the biggest lessons can come from failure. What decisions were made, and why? What would the founders have done differently? How did one company become a billion-dollar success while another—with a better product and in the same market—fail? Drawing on personal experience as well as the wisdom of the Silicon Valley startup community, serial entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and blogger Dave Feinleib analyzes companies that have come and gone. In short, powerful chapters, he reveals the keys to successful entrepreneurship: Excellent product/market fit, passion, superb execution, the ability to pivot, stellar team, good funding, and wise spending. In Why Startups Fail, you’ll learn from the mistakes Feinleib has seen made over and over and find out how to position your startup for success. Why Startups Fail: Shows venture-backed startups and boot-strappers alike how to succeed where others fail. Is equally valuable for companies still on the drawing board as well as young firms taking their first steps. Takes you through the key decisions and pitfalls that caused startups to fail and what you can learn from their failures. Covers the critical elements of entrepreneurial success.

This book is the disquisition of what I know and truly believe makes products a success and how you can replicate it within your company. What is this book about? Why should I read this book? Why did you write this book? These were the three questions I received from a good friend. So what is this book about my good friend asks? This book is like a cookbook with recipes for lean innovation, a collection of concrete techniques and strategies that are invaluable and lead to the same end: game-changing innovation. The book is a compilation of what I consider the fundamental models for lean innovation and some of my own complementary models for successful innovation1. A supplement to the existing international reference works on innovation (Alexander Osterwalder, Eric Ries, Ash Maurya, Clayton Christensen...) I will complement and adapt the existing tools and methods. Enhance their flavor “monter la sauce” as they say in France. The book is mainly a “how to” book and a “lessons learned” book, substantiated by good analysis and reflection. Like a chess book to improve your play this book will improve your innovation. The book provides an analysis of proven tactics and strategies on how to win the lean innovation game as well as a post mortem on why it is so often lost. Should you read this book? Here is some bad news, if you were hoping to improve on your innovation by spending more on R&D, it won’t work. The consulting giant PWC confirmed in its Global Innovation 1000 research that just increasing R&D resources will not solve the innovation problem ! The presented methodology can be quickly employed and implemented by the reader with the book as an instruction manual !

A complete and well-documented review of contract law in China. This in-depth introduction to the law of contracts of Mainland China was written for Western lawyers who have contacts with the People’s Republic of China, for scholars and students of comparative law or of Sinology. As stated above the book is merely an introduction, not a technical legal treatise for specialised private lawyers. It is therefore useful for businessmen too. Without using stale language, this work also places the law of contractual obligations in an historical and socio-political context. It sketches, besides the general theory of contractual obligations and the provisions on the several specific contracts, the Chinese case law on international sales contracts, as well as the law on the dispute resolution. It can be said that with regard to the private law the book opens a window on the continental Chinese legal culture, as Zweigert and Kötz would call it. An essential handbook for all lawyers who wish to be fully involved in international relationships ABOUT THE AUTHOR Jacques H. Herbots devoted his PhD thesis to African law. Thereafter, for many years he taught contracts, obligations and comparative law at the renowned university of Louvain. Besides his main tasks as a professor, he kept feeling the pulse of the living law as a deputy judge, as an assessor in the Belgian Council of State and as a member of the High Council for the Judiciary. He is currently still arbitrator in the Belgian Centre for Arbitration and Mediation, and he was appointed to the panel of the CIETAC in Beijing. Ever since a visit to the People’s Republic in 1974, one may safely say he has been fascinated by the Empire of the Middle.

The Founder's Dilemmas examines how early decisions by entrepreneurs can make or break a startup and its team. Drawing on a decade of research, including quantitative data on almost ten thousand founders as well as inside stories of founders like Evan Williams of Twitter and Tim Westergren of Pandora, Noam Wasserman reveals the common pitfalls founders face and how to avoid them.

If you want salient advice about your startup, you’ve hit the jackpot with this book. Harvard Business School Professor Tom Eisenmann annually compiles the best posts from many blogs on technology startup management, primarily for the benefit of his students. This book makes his latest collection available to the broader entrepreneur community. You’ll find 72 posts from successful entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, such as Fred Wilson, Steve Blank, Ash Maurya, Joel Spolsky, and Ben Yoskovitz. They cover a wide range of topics essential to your startup’s success, including: Management tasks: Engineering, product management, marketing, sales, and business development Organizational issues: Cofounder tensions, recruiting, and career planning Funding: The latest developments in capital markets that affect startups Divided into 13 areas of focus, the book’s contributors explore the metrics you need to run your startup, discuss lean prototyping techniques for hardware, identify costly outsourcing mistakes, provide practical tips on user acquisition, offer branding guidelines, and explain how a choir of angel investors often will sing different parts. And that’s just for starters.