Startup Strategy

How startups strategy radically differs from typical companies. How they can adopt a challenger mindset, break the rules, move fast, hack business, get through the valley of death and across the chasm.

Startup Strategy

Why Startups Fail

Post author By Philippe Méda
Post date May 2, 2019

You might not remember ANKI Robotics, an hardware and AI startup featured onstage at an Apple event in 2013. Well, this company folded yesterday and had to fire 200 employees after burning through $200 million in capital funding (including Index Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz). And ANKI was not idle in the market, it was generating around $100 million in revenue since 2017. This is not small potatoes!

Anki demo at Apple WWDC 2013 Keynote.

So, why do I write about their failure? To point that even backed by smart money and having access to Apple as a key PR partner, your future as a startup is never guaranteed? Sure. But, I think that it’s a more simple story. The story of the usual cautionary tale on why startups fail.

Startup Strategy

Startup F#ck-Ups

Post author By Philippe Méda
Post date October 12, 2018

Just assessing every day how the narrative on startups has been reversed in Europe from « This is how we’re going to save the economy! » to « What is this mess? ». The message we’re not changing entrepreneurship a Startup Weekend at a time seems to be getting through. This also correlates with the growing number of tech clusters and incubators in Europe that get in touch with us.

October 2018 cover of the Dutch QUOTE magazine.

As always the swing of the pendulum will probably go too far back on startups. But as an optimist contrarian, I trust it’s time to get back in there even more actively.

As I wrote just days ago, there is really nothing new to learn about startups launch, growth and scaling up. But seriously, how we organize the support (as private or public entities) is to be redesigned all over Europe.

One key step would be to stop trying to nurture projects at a local scale. This leads to cities miles away from one another to compete together to nest more startups than the other. That they would want to do that is understandable (local jobs, etc) but that states and the EU promote it, is madness.

Innovation Strategy Startup Strategy

Are we still learning anything new about startups or are we just pretending from now on?

Post author By Philippe Méda
Post date October 5, 2018

After years of working with every kind of startup programs — read: incubators, accelerators, tech clusters, public tech transfer, universities, entrepreneurs’ networks, corporate platforms, and various EU initiatives — I keep asking myself: are we still learning anything new about startups?

For early stage startups there are basically only three things to remember:

If you’re a one-man startup you will fail;
Spend time working on tech and product, instead of seeing where the market has a problem and you fail;
Don’t start working in English and you will never scale (that one might be blunt and would deserve a full article, but yeah, essentially this is what is going to happen).

Tags startup programs, startup tools, Startups

Startup Strategy

What constitues a good startup problem

Post author By Philippe Méda
Post date August 30, 2017

Most of the startups participating in one of my trainings are initially shocked at the inordinate amount of time I spend working on ‘the problem’. I’m certainly not alone there. Everyone who is regularly dealing with startups gets eventually frustrated to see how they concentrate en masse on building a product and not focusing on what the market actually needs. And while anyone who ambitions to shake a market’s status quo shouldn’t be too pragmatic, as much rationality as possible should nevertheless prevail. But, very few are the startups committed from launch to tackle a clear-cut problem.

Tags startup problem

Startup Strategy

The fundamentals of opposable marketing

Post author By Philippe Méda
Post date February 26, 2017
1 Comment on The fundamentals of opposable marketing

I’ll be giving another Executive MBA class this week in Paris, which is an activity that I fairly enjoy — and if I may say so, my students too. Such three-day classes are usually very educative for me. They always keep me in touch with what most professionals still find difficult to grasp in the logic of launching innovative businesses and sustaining them later on.

Tags opposable marketing

Startup Strategy

25 Hints that you might be a startup

Post author By Philippe Méda
Post date February 14, 2017

In 2015, I was (poorly) rapping on how early stage ventures were systematically called “startups” because pretty much everyone has vested interests in labeling them as such. We’re now in 2017 and there is always a deeply rooted misconception about what is a startup.

Tags you might be a startup

Startup Strategy

The startup game and its metagame

Post author By Philippe Méda
Post date January 23, 2017

While startups are not failing more, they’re just more vocal about it. This is a good thing. Hopefully, it will hep dismiss the illusion that a) anyone can launch a successful startup and b) the next stage of economic growth for Western countries will come from under-staffed, ill-prepared tech entrepreneurs.

Tags startup game

Startup Strategy

Startups fail 3 times…

Post author By Philippe Méda
Post date January 20, 2017

Initially, 80% of startups fail at designing a workable solution to early adopters’ problem, from whom they can learn. Out of the remaining 20%, 80% fail at building on-going traction from a core market. Eventually, 80% of the few that survive fail at scaling this traction up, because they weren’t prepared from day one.

Tags startups fail

Startup Strategy

An unexpected summer reading list for innovators

Post author By Philippe Méda
Post date July 16, 2016

I was recently asked by too many people to produce a reading list for this summer to really be able to refuse gracefully. Now, this is not a simple matter. To some extent, my straightforward answer would be: read everything about innovation that has been published in these last 20 years, that is not purely redundant, and then… forget it all.

Tags Conrad Levinson, Gyles Lingwood, John Maeda, Leonard Koren, Matthew Frederick, Roger Horberry

Startup Strategy

Where to launch a startup in Europe after the Brexit

Post author By Philippe Méda
Post date June 27, 2016

Sure it’s been a shock, and in the few years, Cameron will probably enter history books as the guy that fumbled his country out of the European Community. While nothing is really done yet, and the actual Brexit could drag on and on if no actual leadership comes back to Britain, it may be the time to ask what Brexit changes for European startups.

Tags amsterdam, berlin, london, paris

Startup Strategy

Startups are Schrödinger’s cats

Post author By Philippe Méda
Post date December 11, 2015
2 Comments on Startups are Schrödinger’s cats

Among the fundamental misunderstandings that I try to tackle from time to time in these articles, many of them revolve around the fact that a startup is not « a smaller version of a larger company ». This single point is the source of the vast majority of all the problems encountered by startups when they have to do anything about their project. Whether they have to think strategically or react to an emergency, they activate neuronal pathways that have been formed whilst learning from — or working with — typical companies.

Tags schrödinger's cat, Startups

Startup Strategy

You’re not a startup…

You’re not a startup, you’re a buzz word for technology news.

You’re not a startup, you’re a logo for cities in pressing need for attractiveness credentials.

You’re not a startup, you’re a communication prop for corporations doing innovation-washing.

Tags David Heinemeier Hansson, you're not a startup