Entrepreneurial

The No. 1 predictor of startup failure: Premature scaling

— Joanna Glasner is a contributor to PE Hub, a Thomson Reuters publication. This article originally appeared here. –

In the wake of Solyndra’s revelation of an impending bankruptcy filing, the latest report from The Startup Genome Project makes for a timely read.

The report, published this week, crunches data from a set of more than 3,200 companies, seeking to identify the qualities that make startups most likely to either succeed or fail.

Researchers found that certain factors – such age and gender of founders, location, and previous entrepreneurial experience – have little bearing on a startup’s likelihood of failure. The most consistent predictor of failure, rather, was a startup’s propensity to engage in premature scaling.

What is premature scaling? The authors define it as “focusing on one dimension of the business and advancing it out of sync with the rest of the operation.”

For example, a startup may overspend too early on customer acquisition, hire too many employees, or focus too much on engineering at the expense of customer development. It can also raise too much money too early, a problem that one of the researchers’ interviewees, venture investor Michael A. Jackson of Mangrove Capital Partners frames in automotive terms: “Getting venture money can be like putting a rocket engine on the back of a car,” he said. “Scaling comes down to making sure the machine is ready to handle the speed before hitting the accelerator.”

The report estimates that 70 percent of companies studied exhibited some form of premature scaling. They also estimate that 74 percent of high growth Internet startups fail due to premature scaling. A common mistake, they note, is confusing a few early adopters with a market.

5 things entrepreneurs need to know about valuation

– Tim Berry is the president and founder of Palo Alto Software. This post originally appeared on his blog, “Planning, Startups, Stories”. The views expressed are his own. –

Valuation is one of those four-syllable business buzzwords you’re going to have to deal with, eventually, if you either want to start a business or own a business. If it doesn’t come up when you start, it will come up later. Here is what I think you need to know, in five short points.

1. The word has vastly different meanings: don’t you hate it when the same words mean different things? Valuation means at least three different things:

• A. What a business is worth to accountants for legal purposes, such as divorce settlements, inheritance taxes, and gift taxes. A certified valuation professional, usually a CPA, makes a guess. Most of them use financial statements and analyze financial details.
• B. What a business is worth to a buyer. Small businesses go up for sale with business brokers. Hardware stores, for example, get about 40-50 percent of annual sales plus inventory, as a starting point. Plus a bonus for growth and special strengths, or a discount for lack of growth and special problems.
• C. The pivot point in an investment proposal: it’s simple math, but tough negotiations. If you say you want to get $1 million for 50 percent of your company, you just proposed a valuation of $2 million.

2. What’s anything worth? Like your car, your house, and a share of IBM stock, something’s worth what somebody will pay for it. The valuation in A is theoretical, hypothetical, but legal. With B and C, though, valuation is as real as agreeing to buy a house. It’s not what the seller says it is; it’s what the buyer is willing to pay. And this cold hard fact drives many entrepreneurs crazy.

3. For small businesses, there are guidelines and rules of thumb. If you do a good search, or work with a business broker, you can find general rules of thumb for what your long-standing small business is worth. For example, a hardware story is worth roughly half a year’s sales plus inventory, with bonuses for positive factors like recent growth, and discounts for negatives like lack of growth. You could read up on it in Bizbuysell.com, Bizequity.com, or Business Brokerage Press. Or do a Web search and check the ads for valuation experts.

4. For startups, it’s what founders and investors negotiate. Startups and investors and culture clash over valuation. Investors care about valuation. Founders often misunderstand valuation. And never the twain shall meet. I’ve seen these kinds of problems many times: founders walk into the valuation discussion full of folklore and fantasy like stories of Facebook and Twitter. They want lots of money for very little ownership. Investors see two or three people with no sales history thinking their dream startup is already worth $2 or $3 million.

Ex-Googlers seek traffic for how-to video startup

Jon Cook

Jul 1, 2009 08:00 EDT

The Web is full of user-generated video, but for Sanjay Raman’s tastes most of it is too bland and poorly produced to actually watch.

That’s why Raman launched Howcast (http://www.howcast.com) – a high-quality, how-to video-sharing website – last year with former Google colleagues Jason Liebman and Dan Blackman.

While at Google the three Howcast co-founders noticed how popular do-it-yourself content was, but how little of it was in video format.

“How-to content is something that is really popular in terms of user search queries,” said Raman, who left his job as product manager for Google Apps to launch their startup nearly 18 months ago. “As video was really exploding online we saw the opportunity to marry those two concepts together.”

Unlike other DIY sites that predominate search engines, such as About, eHow, Expert Village, Videojug and 5min, Howcast utilizes a more entertaining and humorous approach. Some of its most-popular videos are less practical and more tongue-in-cheek in nature, such as “How to find out a girl’s name after you’ve slept with her” and “How to grow grass in someone’s keyboard.”

“We try to take the format of a how-to and make it more exciting and engaging than it would normally be,” said Raman.

In order to boost its video content, Howcast pays filmmakers, mostly students, between $50-100 to produce videos for them.