Los 10 factores que llevan a la muerte de las startups

El Instituto del Fracaso presentó los resultados del primer estudio que revela por qué fracasan los emprendimientos de base tecnológica en México.

La semana pasada se celebró en Ciudad de México el cuarto aniversario de FuckUp Nights, el movimiento global que busca compartir historias de fracaso en los negocios.

Netflix shares how it grew to 81 million monthly subscribers: Secrets of a subscription model (webinar)

How did Netflix become a global, best-in-class monthly subscription service? Join our free, in-depth look at converting users into long-term members, optimizing payment solutions, and expanding into the growing global market.

With a record-breaking quarter — a gain of 6.74M new subscribers in the first quarter of 2016, for a total of 81.5 million subscribers worldwide — Netflix is arguably among the top dogs in the subscription model ecosystem, dominating the recurrent billing model market for almost twenty years.

Luis Vargas, head of payments at Netflix, says that there are two fundamental components for their success.

A CFO's Perspective on Scaling Startup Growth

By David Stack

As the chief financial officer of a startup, driving continual growth is a critical component of the job. In addition to managing accounting, finance and other areas, focusing on scale is just as important. One of my early mentors said it best when he asked, “If you don’t think about scale, who will?”

From optimizing your resources to figuring out how to grow revenue while keeping operating costs low, scale is something that any entrepreneur must carefully consider while launching and growing a startup. As a CFO, a big part of my role is helping to guide the constant questions that arise when thinking about scale. Here are five factors to keep in mind as you embark upon scaling your business into the best version it can be.

Entrepreneurs must build startups that address daily user needs

By Ravi Gururaj

IoT startups will disrupt several sectors in the next 4-5 years.
External funding alone cannot assure a startup’s rise.

While raising capital is important, entrepreneurs should not focus on getting money first to deliver consumer value later. From day one, the user has to be at the center of what you do. Running a successful venture is not just about burning cash and grabbing eyeballs. Even if one gets all these ingredients right, the issue of scaling up comes to the fore. That’s the way the cookie crumbles.

Two reasons companies fail — and how to avoid them

Is it possible to run a company and reinvent it at the same time? For business strategist Knut Haanaes, the ability to innovate after becoming successful is the mark of a great organization. He shares insights on how to strike a balance between perfecting what we already know and exploring totally new ideas — and lays out how to avoid two major strategy traps.

What happens when tech companies hit middle age?

As Apple turns 40, the company can celebrate its many successes, from the iPad to the MacBook. But it isn’t the only Silicon Valley giant reaching middle age – the question is, will these firms continue to be as exciting and innovative as ever, or opt for a safer, more comfortable existence?


Born on 1 April 1976, Apple’s birthday represents a remarkable milestone for a tech company operating in a highly competitive industry. "Tech" and "start-up" are almost synonymous, and as we enter the Fourth Industrial Revolution, technology firms are at the forefront of the rapid change society is undergoing.


Just days after Apple hits 40, Microsoft is turning 41, and even Google and Amazon are ready to fly the nest at 17 and 21.

Can Apple stay ahead of the curve?

How Any Business Can Develop a Big Data Mindset

Many business owners and managers make decisions based on gut feeling rather than hard facts. Sometimes this works out, and sometimes it doesn’t. The truth is that facts are far more likely to lead to consistently good business decisions – and that’s where data can help.

In an age when everything can be measured, quantified, and analyzed to gain new insights, it makes sense to use that process to improve your decision making. Basing decisions on what data tells you helps you to implement your business strategy faster and more efficiently, whether you want to increase staff retention, increase efficiency in your manufacturing process, or achieve some other meaningful objective.

How to start a business in an industry that doesn't exist

New technology is not just disrupting existing industries, it’s creating entirely new ones. Today we speak with Erik Fairbairn, the man behind POD Point, the UK’s leading provider of electric car charging points...

Fairbairn founded POD Point in 2009, two years before electric vehicles were even on the market. Since then it has shipped more than 20,000 chargepoints to over 15 counties – charging 10 million miles of electric vehicle driving in the process. In 2014, and then again in 2015, POD Point turned to crowdfunding, where it raised a total of £3.7 million and the company has recently been featured in the Tech Track 100.

Freshly created sectors such as this present CEOs, like Fairbairn, with handfuls of risk, opportunity and challenges. So what advice would he give to start-ups trying to make their mark in such unexplored territory?

This Danish Grocery Store Only Sells Food Other Supermarkets Are Throwing Away

This Danish Grocery Store Only Sells Food Other Supermarkets Are Throwing Away

Over the last five years, Denmark may have cut food waste faster than any other country. But hundreds of thousands of tons of food still end up in the trash each year. A new grocery store called Wefood is trying to help chip away at that number by selling only food that other supermarkets are throwing out.

"Wefood receives goods from supermarkets and shopkeepers who do not want to sell them anymore—mainly because they have passed the "best before" date," says Jutta Weinkouff from DanChurchAid, the nonprofit running the new store. "Best before" labels indicate when food might be tastiest, but don't mean that food isn't safe.

Think You Know What It Means to Be an Entrepreneur? Think Again.

Join us in a city near you at Entrepreneur’s Accelerate Your Business event series kicking off Feb 23. View cities and dates »

While coming up with the next billion-dollar entrepreneurial blockbuster is at the top of everybody’s to-do list in hopes of becoming filthy rich, the chances of actually doing so are slim. Really slim.

Not to burst anybody’s bubble here -- I’m all for hopes and dreams -- but when those hopes and dreams aren't grounded in reality, then winning the entrepreneurial lottery becomes a long shot.


The good news is that being an entrepreneur doesn’t have to necessarily mean starting a company with dollar signs as the target. Yes, it would be nice, but you can be rich without being wealthy. At its core, what being an entrepreneur really means is pursuing a purpose that delivers value -- with a little bit of risk, of course. That’s it.

Now, most entrepreneurs display their entrepreneurial spirit through innovation, which puts them at the top of the organizational -- and financial -- hierarchy if their company comes to fruition. However, this isn’t the only way to becoming personally rich.

Empresas unicornio: ¿Qué son y cuáles se conocen?

Si estás inmerso en el ecosistema emprendedor, seguramente has escuchado hablar de las llamadas empresas “unicornio”, si este no es el caso te lo explicamos.

En noviembre de 2013 Aileen Lee, fundadora de Cowboy Ventures, fue la primera en introducir el término. Se refería a una compañía tecnológica que alcanza un valor de mil millones de dólares en alguna de las etapas de su proceso de levantamiento de capital. Según Aileen, estos “unicornios” solían ser un mito o una fantasía. Pero ahora parecen ser real.

En 2013, Aileen nos hablaba del Club de los 39 unicornios –que representan el 0,07% de las B2C (Business to Consumer), B2B (Business to business) y startups de software–. Sin embargo, al día de hoy, la revista Fortune cuenta más de 80 compañías que han sido valuadas arriba de mil millones de dólares.

Las empresas unicornio que encabezan la lista son:

1.Facebook ($122 billones)
2.Xiaomi ($46 billones)
3.Uber ($41.2 billones)
4.Linkedin ($25 billones)
5.Palantir ($15 billones)
6.Airbnb ($13 billones)
7.Workday ($12 billones)
8.Flipkart ($10.6 billones)
9.Dropbox ($10.4)
10.Snapchat ($10 billones)
11.Twitter ($9 billones)

A continuación te traemos unos datos importantes de las empresas unicornio:

*Surgieron en la era de las redes sociales, y supieron aprovechar su auge para consolidarse y crecer.
*Son B2C, es decir, desarrollan una estrategia comercial para llegar directamente al cliente o consumidor final.
*En promedio, en la década pasada nacieron cuatro empresas unicornio por año. Facebook fue la “superunicornio” estrella, valuada en más de 100 mil millones de dólares.
*La edad promedio de los emprendedores que las fundan es 34 años.
*Sus equipos están conformados por tres emprendedores en promedio.
*El 90% de las compañías tiene fundadores que ya se conocían antes, en la escuela o el trabajo.

NOTE CREDIT: http://www.elemprendedor.ec/empresas-unicornio-que-son-y-cuales-se-conocen/

Reinventing the company

Entrepreneurs are redesigning the basic building block of capitalism

NOW that Uber is muscling in on their trade, London’s cabbies have become even surlier than usual. Meanwhile, the world’s hoteliers are grappling with Airbnb, and hardware-makers with cloud computing. Across industries, disrupters are reinventing how the business works. Less obvious, and just as important, they are also reinventing what it is to be a company.

To many managers, corporate life continues to involve dealing with largely anonymous owners, most of them represented by fund managers who buy and sell shares listed on a stock exchange. In insurgent companies, by contrast, the coupling between ownership and responsibility is tight (see article). Founders, staff and backers exert control directly. It is still early days but, if this innovation spreads, it could transform the way companies work.  

Listing badly

The appeal of the insurgents’ model is partly a result of the growing dissatisfaction with the public company. True, the best public companies are remarkable organisations. They strike a balance between quarterly results (which keep them sharp) and long-term investments (which keep them growing). They produce a stream of talented managers and innovative products. They can mobilise talent and capital.

But, after a century of utter dominance, the public company is showing signs of wear. One reason is that managers tend to put their own interests first. The shareholder-value revolution of the 1980s was supposed to solve this by incentivising managers to think like owners, but it backfired. Loaded up with stock options, managers acted like hired guns instead, massaging the share price so as to boost their incomes.

The rise of big financial institutions (that hold about 70% of the value of America’s stockmarkets) has further weakened the link between the people who nominally own companies and the companies themselves. Fund managers have to deal with an ever-growing group of intermediaries, from regulators to their own employees, and each layer has its own interests to serve and rents to extract. No wonder fund managers usually fail to monitor individual companies.

Lastly, a public listing has become onerous. Regulations have multiplied since the Enron scandal of 2001-02 and the financial crisis of 2007-08. Although markets sometimes look to the long term, many managers feel that their jobs depend upon producing good short-term results, quarter after quarter.

Conflicting interests, short-termism and regulation all impose costs. That is a problem at a time when public companies are struggling to squeeze profits out of their operations. In the past 30 years profits in the S&P 500 index of big American companies have grown by 8% a year. Now, for the second quarter in a row, they are expected to fall, by about 5% (see article). The number of companies listed on America’s stock exchanges has fallen by half since 1996, partly because of consolidation, but also because talented managers would sooner stay private.

It is no accident that other corporate organisations are on the rise. Family companies have a new lease of life. Business people are experimenting with “hybrids” that tap into public markets while remaining closely held. Astute investors like Jorge Paulo Lemann, of 3G Capital, specialise in buying public companies and running them like private ones, with lean staffing and a focus on the long term.

The new menagerie

But the most interesting alternative to public companies is a new breed of high-potential startups that go by exotic names such as unicorns and gazelles. In the same cities where Ford, Kraft and Heinz built empires a century ago, thousands of young people are creating new firms in temporary office spaces, fuelled by coffee and dreams. Their companies are pioneering a new organisational form.

The central difference lies in ownership: whereas nobody is sure who owns public companies, startups go to great lengths to define who owns what. Early in a company’s life, the founders and first recruits own a majority stake—and they incentivise people with ownership stakes or performance-related rewards. That has always been true for startups, but today the rights and responsibilities are meticulously defined in contracts drawn up by lawyers. This aligns interests and creates a culture of hard work and camaraderie. Because they are private rather than public, they measure how they are doing using performance indicators (such as how many products they have produced) rather than elaborate accounting standards.

New companies also exploit new technology, which enables them to go global without being big themselves. Startups used to face difficult choices about when to invest in large and lumpy assets such as property and computer systems. Today they can expand very fast by buying in services as and when they need them. They can incorporate online for a few hundred dollars, raise money from crowdsourcing sites such as Kickstarter, hire programmers from Upwork, rent computer-processing power from Amazon, find manufacturers on Alibaba, arrange payments systems at Square, and immediately set about conquering the world. Vizio was the bestselling brand of television in America in 2010 with just 200 employees. WhatsApp persuaded Facebook to buy it for $19 billion despite having fewer than 60 employees and revenues of $20m.

Three objections hang over the idea that this is a revolution in the making. The first is that it is confined to a corner of Silicon Valley. Yet the insurgent economy is going mainstream. Startups are in every business from spectacles (Warby Parker) to finance (Symphony). Airbnb put up nearly 17m guests over the summer and Uber drives millions of people every day. WeWork, an American outfit that provides accommodation for startups, has 8,000 companies with 30,000 workers in 56 locations in 17 cities.

The second is that the public company will have the last laugh, because most startups want eventually to list or sell themselves to a public company. In fact, a growing number choose to stay private—and are finding it ever easier to raise funds without resorting to public markets. Those technology companies that list in America now do so after 11 years compared with four in 1999. Even when they do go public, tech entrepreneurs keep control through “A” class shares.

The third objection is that ownership in these new companies is cut off from the rest of the economy. Public companies give ordinary people a stake in capitalism. The startup scene is dominated by a clique of venture capitalists with privileged access. That is true, yet ordinary people can invest in startups directly through platforms such as SeedInvest or indirectly through mainstream mutual funds such as T. Rowe Price, which buys into them during their infancy.

Today’s startups will not have it all their own way. Public companies have their place, especially for capital-intensive industries like oil and gas. Many startups will inevitably fail, including some of the most famous. But their approach to building a business will survive them and serve as a striking addition to the capitalist toolbox. Airbnb and Uber and the rest are better suited to virtual networks and fast-changing technologies. They are pioneering a new sort of company that can do a better job of turning dreams into businesses.

NOTE CREDIT: http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21676767-entrepreneurs-are-redesigning-basic-building-block-capitalism-reinventing-company?fsrc=scn/tw_ec/reinventing_the_company

6 Key Factors in Scoring a $1 Billion Valuation for Your Startup

At a fascinating session at last week's BostInno conference at the Westin Boston Waterfront Hotel, senior executives from a mix of local companies were candid in citing the most important factors in growing their startups to a valuation of at least $1 billion.

Before the conference, Mike Troiano, a marketing executive at data-appliance maker Actifio who led the session, had asked each panelist to rank in importance six factors (of his selection) by how they had helped their companies exceed that coveted $1 billion valuation mark. The panelists came from public companies (content-delivery network provider Akamai Technologies, personal robot maker iRobot and online travel company TripAdvisor) and private companies (online home-goods retailer Wayfair and Actifio).

Here are the factors that they ranked in order from the most important to the least:


1. A great team. The consensus of the panel seemed to be that having a great team is the most important ingredient for success. As Jit Saxena, a board member of Actifio, explained, "Companies almost always change their strategy from where they started. But if they have a stellar team, they will experiment with different strategies until they find one that works."

So what makes for a great team? As TripAdvisor's Barbara Messing noted, "A top engineer is six times more productive than a B player. We interview over 100 people to hire 10 engineers. We want people who are off the charts in brain power who will also fit well within our culture, which requires high energy and stamina to make frequent improvements to our service."


2. A big market. The panelists also agreed on the importance of trying to sell their products in large markets. Their reason? Most companies struggle to gain 10 percent of any market due to the high level of competition.

In a small market, 10 percent will not yield enough revenue to enable a company's investors to earn back the capital that they bet on the new product. Therefore if managers want to reach a valuation of least a billion for their companies, they must bet on markets worth tens of billions. For instance, Troiano said that Actifio is targeting a $35 billion market.


3. Execution. People in the business world tend to throw around the term execution without defining it clearly. But based on the panelists' comments, execution means the following: getting products into a market, listening to customer feedback, building and introducing an improved version fast and then going back to listening to customers.
Execution was admired more than strategy by these Boston area panelists. That's because strategy implies that a company does extensive research about customers, competitors and costs and comes up with a clearly defined positioning in the market that will not change. But execution involves trying solutions, gaining feedback from the market and then making improvements -- rather than spending months of study before taking action.


4. Product quality. Like strategy, product quality can be seen as an end in itself. And achieving high quality for a product can be very helpful if the engineer's vision  is the same as the customer's.
But the panelists expressed a common view that product quality should not be seen as static but rather as a constantly evolving effort to keep the company ahead of the competition by tapping new technology to create ever higher levels of value for customers.


5. Strategy. While Troiano, a graduate of Harvard Business School, was taught to believe that coming up with a strategy was the most important job of a CEO, he and the other panelists seemed to believe that strategy is not a very important factor in achieving a $1 billion valuation.
The panelists put more stock in the importance of companies' being smarter and faster than competitors in developing hypotheses about which solutions will work for customers, building prototypes fast, obtaining feedback and improving.


6. Luck. While luck has certainly played an important role in success and failure of companies, the panelists seemed to discount its importance in helping their firms achieve a $1 billion valuation.

NOTE CREDIT: http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/234826