I’ve pulled back on the use of infographics lately, but I spotted one over the weekend that warranted a second look. It visualizes data from the Startup Genome, a project that takes a scientific approach to cracking the “innovation code.”
Teaming up with educators from Berkeley and Stanford, they looked at more than 3000 companies, analyzing the customer, product, team, business model and financials.
One of the big findings amongst the data was that almost 7 out of 10 companies failed due to premature scaling or inconsistency. Peeling back the data, the lessons seem really simple: don’t act like a big company. In a recent post, the project team described what they deem the ‘inconsistency’ element.
“One driving factor for inconsistency is too much capital, teams that are too large, bad team compositions, too little testing, etc. – pretty much everything a large company does, anticipating high certainty in their planning.”
And If you’re wondering how your team stacks up, take a look at their benchmarking tool, the Compass.
This was a very intriguing post. I love when people begin to talk about numbers and begin to quantify things like this. There are so many things in this article that just have “The Lean Startup” model written all over it. Real planning, validating ideas, creating an MVP are just too easy to do that people just still tend to over think and ignore the little foxes. However, I am reminded of a saying that says “it’s the little foxes the spoil the vine.”