

Discover the Patterns Of Successful Internet Startups - bjoernlasseh
http://startupgenome.cc/discover-the-patterns-of-successful-internet

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asanwal
Great to see data being used to dissect entrepreneurship, but have to disagree
on a few fronts.

\-- "Steve Jobs isn’t doing anything radically different than other
entrepreneurs. He just knows the rules of the game and plays it extremely
well." I think that's nice in theory and may make folks feel good especially
as its impossible to prove/disprove but arguing his success is the result of
playing a game better seems wrong.

\-- There isn't any factor which suggests the importance of the market the
startup is going after. While management and momentum are alluded to in the 14
factors, market seems to be missing, no? And this seems to be a major gap.

\-- It's not clear how success is measured which would be critical to
dissecting patterns of success? It seems its measured in part by funding
received. But given an overwhelming majority of funded startups don't succeed,
not sure funding is an appropriate proxy for success. It may be necessary but
is certainly not sufficient to guarantee success.

\-- While large companies can use data to achieve better results, that's
driven by the fact that they are generally more in the "exploit" portion of
their maturity curve, i.e. eeking out another percent or two of market share,
margin, revenue growth, etc. Startups on the other hand are about
"exploration" (vs the exploit of the big cos) and while the practices of
Ries/Blank make that exploration more rational, well-conceived, it remains an
inherently uncertain thing.

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bjoernlasseh
\-- reg. Steve Jobs: whats your assumption?

\-- there is quite a lot of data about existing markets that are
differentiated into cheaper, better and niche and new markets. How do you
think is market significant. I am happy run a few tests for you :)

\-- We measure success based on the consistency of how someone moves through a
certain set of predefined milestones and thresholds. Funding, user growth,
employee growth, etc. are traditional indicators of success that we correlate
with our milestone based assessment in this report. We hope to become more
granular in how we can measure consistency.

\-- not sure how what you say contradicts anything we say. Thoughts?

~~~
asanwal
\- Jobs appears to have that certain je ne sais quoi. There are exceptional
folks and outliers and he is one of them IMO. I wish I was smart enough to
what it is about him so I could bottle that and become rich selling it, but
alas...

\- Market is significant because the size and growth of it matters. Picking a
niche market that is not growing is a fatal flaw even if you do everything
else right. Or when a market turns on you - just ask anyone involved in real
estate in 2008.

\- Success is profit or wealth-creating exit (not acq-hire or asset sale). By
the metrics of funding, user growth and employee growth, most dot-com startups
in 1999 were successes. I worked at one of them (Kozmo.com) - by those
measures, we were one of the most successful companies ever :) Again, funding,
users, employees may all be conditions which are necessary for success (not
sure that's the case to be honest) but definitely not sufficient.

Am a data junkie so see lots of value in what you're doing but worry about
efforts to distill entrepreneurship into a 'playbook'. There may be
correlations with what is being observed but causality is a whole different
world.

Look forward to seeing future updates.

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erikb
I never was successful in the startup area. But as far as I learned about
chess, go, poker and other strategy games, the idea of the great player always
are is, that they can think ahead of the pattern. And if they have a pattern
it can't be described or understood (if you think of zen or kungfu it
definitely takes more time for the student to really understand the real
concepts in a way that he can use them in practice). So I wonder, is it really
worth to look for a pattern, when there probably is none?

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gregsadetsky
The PDF of the Startup Genome report can be downloaded here:
[http://www.scribd.com/document_downloads/direct/56508265?ext...](http://www.scribd.com/document_downloads/direct/56508265?extension=pdf&ft=1306612678&lt=1306616288&uahk=a7E6FT5tN21rMHV/4aWfDRviod4)

Fascinating work!

~~~
michuk
"This link has expired." - wondering why :)

~~~
gregsadetsky
Crap, sorry about that. You can click the Download button on the right side of
this page:

[http://www.scribd.com/doc/56508265/?secret_password=20u3g2pa...](http://www.scribd.com/doc/56508265/?secret_password=20u3g2pa5vhzjmcyogll)

I didn't understand why, after filling out the form, I was given access to an
html version but told over e-mail that "We will send you the pdf manually
within 48 hours."

I wanted to read this offline, that's all..! :-)

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zdw
Is the data used to make this all self reported?

What steps taken to avoid survivor or confirmation bias?

~~~
bjoernlasseh
here is an entire post about the methodology
[http://www.systemmalfunction.com/2011/05/deciphering-
genome-...](http://www.systemmalfunction.com/2011/05/deciphering-genome-of-
startups.html)

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philippb
This has been one of the very interesting questions that probably a lot of
universities tried to tackle. Taking the approach of just analyzing over 600
startups and finding relevant pattern is remarkable and smart.

I truly believe that this work can have a huge impact on how we're going to
build high scalable companies in the future.

Taking a new approach is at it's time where business plan competitions are not
"the way" to go any more.

Great work!

~~~
bjoernlasseh
Thx Phil :) I hope so to :)

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bitpusher
While this is very much a nascent field, this is the best attempt I've seen so
far to do meaningful collection and analysis of actual data around startup
sucess.

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Allkelly
There's a typo on page 1: "a new framework fosr assessing startups ..." Best
fix that, looks bad!

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rafefurst
pretty awesome analysis, i've definitely had some misconceptions dispelled and
some suspicions confirmed. extremely helpful for an active angel investor like
myself. i particularly like knowing the optimal range for how many times a
startup should pivot.

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sliang
Great information! I'm sure a lot of startups can learn a lot from this
report.

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brunobowden
This is fascinating data and I'm very impressed with what they've gathered.

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kevin1393
Excited to read it front to back this weekend. Nice work!

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AdalbertoF
Awesome job guys, congrats!

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billehunt
Great job, Guys!

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nickfrost
Great work guys!

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pourasghar
awesome, great job! congrats guys

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wlf
very valuable information! let's see how to take advantage of the data to find
the right path to the golden treasure :)

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selluck
great work guys!!!

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meetzah
great resource: 67 pages of data crunching on how startups work!

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dalcaino2
very insightful!

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bearkittay
excellent work guys!

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mondras
Nice!

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zealoushacker
We filled out the survey a couple of months ago. Excited to see the results :)
Thanks Bjoern and Max.

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TomEDiffenbach
A quick guide to better knowing the "rules" of the SUCCESSFUL entrepreneurial
game.

