An Update to “What REALLY Sank the Titanic?”

An Update to “What REALLY Sank the Titanic?”

Early in our blogging history, we had a post titled – Startup Story: What REALLY Sank the Titanic?. Believe it or not, it’s not only the most read post on our blog overall, but also every single month. That’s right. People are still very interested in knowing why something so big resulted in such catastrophic failure.

It’s the reverse of the underdog story. We want something so spectacular to be successful. We need to believe that when it fails, it was not some person’s fault but rather some uncontrollable force. There is even a management theory that explains this behavior, Attribution Theory. We tend to claim our successes as resulting from our actions. And, our failures come from actions outside our control.

The point of this blogpost is that recently a new theory for theTitanic’sfailure has come to life.

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How Venture Ecosystems Enable Startups To Succeed

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How Venture Ecosystems Enable Startups To Succeed

The focus on “ecosystems” as a contributor to startup community success has recently begun to receive additional attention from academic researchers. A healthy and vibrant entrepreneurial or venture ecosystem can provide a nurturing environment for startups and innovators. This boosts job creation, economic growth, and talent attraction. Innovation itself includes both de novo (i.e. brand new) startups as well as new undertakings by large and small organizations. As a result, we prefer the term “venture ecosystem.” Think of a venture ecosystem as being kind of like a marine reef. It is a home for a variety of life forms including coral, fish of various types, and a host of other life forms with often symbiotic relationships. So what makes up an “ecosystem?”

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Is Your Startup’s Measurement Just A Stick In The Sand?

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Is Your Startup’s Measurement Just A Stick In The Sand?

One of our family’s favorite museums in the world is the Royal Cabinet of Mathematical and Physical Instruments (en Deutsche, Mathematisch-Physikalischer Salon) in Dresden, Germany. The Museum sits in the impressive Dresdner Zwinger complex which houses a range of museums and performing arts facilities. A central theme of the museum is instrumentation—the collection of measuring instruments that have allowed us as humans to evolve and innovate over time. It is fascinating to think about how being able to measure things has enabled our progress as a society.

Entrepreneurial Hustle Makes Startups Come Alive

Entrepreneurial Hustle Makes Startups Come Alive

What do entrepreneurs do to navigate the uncertainty and difficulty of launching something new and novel with only a few resources on hand? This was the question that my co-authors (Regan Stevenson, Emily Neubert, Devin Burnell, and Don Kuratko) and I sought to answer when we began analyzing transcripts from the How I Built This podcast. We analyzed 48 such transcripts from interviews with well-known entrepreneurs such as Sara Blakley (Spanx), Perry Chen (Kickstarter), Alli Webb (Drybar) and Joe Gebbia (Airbnb) to uncover the nature of the action that they took in the early days of launching their venture. We call it entrepreneurial hustle…

Startups May Need To Partner With “Competitors” In Trying Times

When you are starting a company, you have challenges from so many different directions – competitors, customers, and even what we academics call the “macroenvironment” which is also known as the general climate for business. There are generally three types of environments:

1. Benevolent - everything is awesome and it’s easy to grow

2. Turbulent – there are a lot of changes going on, some good and some bad

3. Hostile – just like it sounds in that everything is hard and it seems like nothing is good

The macroenvironment occurs at multiple levels too – for all businesses, for specific industries, and even for specific companies. In the terminology of The Titanic Effect, it can also create hidden debts, or debtbergs, for the unsuspecting startup. Right now, the overall environment is pretty hostile for most businesses. The economic conditions combined with the pandemic create both turbulence and hostility. Now is a good time to look for coopetition opportunities.

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Technical Debt: Every Startup Needs to Know When to Cut its Losses

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Technical Debt: Every Startup Needs to Know When to Cut its Losses

We’ve mentioned before that we took the concept of “hidden debt,” or debtbergs, that is the main premise for our book, The Titanic Effect, from the idea of technical debt – work is done that has to later be re-done because it has too many internal flaws. We see these same expeditious decisions being made, not just in product design, but also in choices about who to hire, which investors to seek out, and what marketing activities to undertake. We want to share our own story of technical debt with the development of our audiobook.

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What Kind Of Experience Do Startup Founders And Founding Teams Need

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What Kind Of Experience Do Startup Founders And Founding Teams Need

We’ve shared the PEP model for founding teams before - Passion, Experience and Persistence. Since we’ve already covered the 2 Ps (click above to read about them), we thought it was time to talk about Experience.

There is a myth in startups that startup founders are young people, fresh from education, and looking to disrupt the world. We see icons like Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and Steve Jobs and think, “You have to be young to start a company.” There are notable startup founders who are young. But the average age of all startup founders is 42 years.

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Startup Founders Need to Be Both Passionate and Savvy About the Solution They are Creating

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Startup Founders Need to Be Both Passionate and Savvy About the Solution They are Creating

In The Titanic Effect, we talk about the PEP model for startup founders – Passion, Experience and Persistence. We’ve shared some ideas about Persistence and how to have it. But we’ve been doing research about the importance of passion for the last 5 years or so. So we thought it was time to share what research has shown.

The whole reason that researchers have looked at passion is that they’ve been tracking what leads to startup funding. In the 1980s and 1990s, the primary focus was on understanding what criteria venture capitalists and then angel investors said they used to evaluate venture pitches. One key finding from this time, was that the founder and management team rose above all other criteria. So, researchers looked into why the founder and his team were so important. Investors recognize that creating a scalable startup takes a lot of work, overcoming many challenges. So they wanted to make sure they bet on the right people.

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“Self Made”—What Can Startups Learn From Madam C.J. Walker

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“Self Made”—What Can Startups Learn From Madam C.J. Walker

We recently watched the Netflix original limited series “Self Made,” inspired by the life of Madam C.J. Walker. We do understand that elements of the story were adapted for entertainment value, but it was nevertheless an inspiring and educational story about a truly self-made millionaire. In fact, Madam Walker not only was the first self-made woman American millionaire, she also happens to have been the first self-made Black millionaire. We found it interesting to note that she moved her company to Indianapolis in 1910 while the Titanic was being built. There are several key takeaways we wanted to share from the series that we believe are important for entrepreneurs and startups everywhere. Oh and if you haven’t watched Self Made, we highly recommend it: 4 episodes of 45 minutes each are well-worth the time. It’s a good story, good character development, and very well acted.

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Let’s Talk About How to Persevere Through the Startup Grind

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Let’s admit that starting a company is really hard. It takes a lot of grinding. For those you who aren’t sure what the startup grind is, it is the epitome of the definition of grind: Dull, hard work; A crushing or grating sound or motion; or To wear down, polish or sharpen through friction. You see, creating a company from nothing takes hard work. It’s the kind of hard work that on the one hand is dull, but on the other hand is exciting because you know you are creating something from nothing. But it also encounters a lot of friction and it can be soul crushing. Doing the thousands of small, annoying tasks that move a company forward is just plain hard and painful. But, the best startups founders have to persevere through these struggles to move the ball forward. If they don’t, the ball just sits there. And of course, we all want to work smarter rather than harder. But, it takes PEP – Passion, Experience and Persistence. But, how do founders persist in the face of these challenges?