Summary: Startups that Work

Review and Analysis of Kurtzman and Rifkin's Book

BusinessNews Publishing

• Publisher: Must Read Summaries
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9782511016442
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

The must-read summary of Joel Kurtzman and Glen Rifkin's book: `Startups that Work: The 10 Critical Factors That Will Make or Break a New Company`.

This complete summary of the ideas from Joel Kurtzman and Glen Rifkin's book `Startups that Work` reveals the results of a study into 350 different startup companies, showing that there are ten rules for increasing the chances of long-term success for a new company. In their book, the authors present these 10 critical factors and how you can use them to guide you towards success while your company is still a startup. This summary is a must-read for startup entrepreneurs who want to know the key to getting past the first stage and becoming successful.

Added-value of this summary:
• Save time
• Understand key concepts
• Expand your knowledge

To learn more, read `Startups that Work` and find out how you can put your startup on the path to success.

Summary of Startups that work (Joel Kurtzman and Glen Rifkin)

1. Start with a group of at least three or four founders.

The larger the group of founders you can put together, the better. This broadens your new company’s skill sets and access to capital. To further enhance your chances of success, put together a team of people who have already worked together on other projects and share power broadly.

In startup companies, nothing much happens at all unless you have great people involved in the management. Pure and simple great companies are built by great teams. A strong management team can turn an average idea into a genuine winner but an average management team can kill even great ideas. This is why venture capitalists evaluate the quality of the management team first and foremost and walk away from the deal if the team isn’t strong and first rate.

This means the more experienced your management team is, the greater your chances become of succeeding. You need a balanced team of founders, each of whom will contribute something worthwhile to the running of the startup company. Venture capital providers always bet on fantastic teams rather than on fantastic products. A founding team which has a diverse set of skills will always be a more attractive proposition than a founder working alone. If the members of the team have worked together previously either at another corporation or on a different project, then investor confidence will increase.

There is one other key point which deserves attention. Smart business leaders know when it’s time to bring in professional management. They know intuitively when it’s time to go against conventional wisdom and when it’s time to have in place the people who can add professionalism and systems expertise to the enterprise. If an investor can feel confident the founders are willing to step aside when the time is right, they will see that as a very positive endorsement.

“In the world today, there’s plenty of technology, plenty of entrepreneurs, plenty of money, plenty of venture capital. Your biggest challenge will be building a great team. There’s enormous change under way in every facet of the world. Some is technology driven, some is market driven. All that change creates unprecedented opportunities. But to take full advantage of those opportunities, focus on the teams. Teams win.”

– John Doerr, venture capitalist and partner, Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers

“Most startups start with an entrepreneur’s dream, a passionate evocation of a solution dying to be born. But in a business environment where information flies around unencumbered by previous bounds of convention or technology, it is very likely that many people have approached a specific problem with solutions that, while they are not identical, are similar enough and plausible enough to complicate even the most vivid dream. Yet many startup entrepreneurs, jealous of their dream, refuse to part with it, and risk being the big fish in a shrinking pond instead of sharing their dream with a team who can shape and guide it into open water.”

– Rohit Shukla, CEO, Los Angeles Regional Technology Alliance

“Gauging the strength of a management team is more art than science.”

– Joel Kurtzman and Glenn Rifkin

2. Get a marketing person on your founder’s team.

Technical people are obviously important but you need someone who will have their eye fixed squarely on the marketplace. And don’t worry if the technologists and the marketers argue – that’s normal and should generate some creative ideas.

To succeed over the long haul, someone on the management team needs to be consistently focusing on the key question: “Is there a market for this idea?” If everyone is completely fixated on product development and building a better mousetrap and nobody is focusing on identifying who will buy the product and how, problems lie ahead. Therefore, it always make good sense to have at least one experienced marketer on the senior management team and ideally as one of the founders.

Marketers focus well on what needs to be done to get the product sold. They think about all of the more mundane issues the technologists can’t be bothered with:

• The firm’s business model.
• The anticipated value proposition.
• The cost structure and sales cycle.
• The importance of patents on intellectual property.
• Sales partnerships and channels of distribution.
• Manufacturing volumes and product availability.
• The viability of the business plan.
• How to validate the market size and interest.
• Generating media awareness of the firm and its offerings.

Marketers also often have worthwhile ideas about competitive positioning. They can suggest how the firm should differentiate itself, make itself more attractive to investors and add value by carrying out test marketing. Investors in particular are always interested to know what factors will drive demand for the new product...

Table of contents

• Title page
• Book Presentation
• Summary of Startups that work (Joel Kurtzman and Glen Rifkin)
• About the Summary Publisher
• Copyright