Approaches to scaling small software companies without investors

Approaches to scaling small software companies without investors PDF Author: Carolin Nothof
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3346198871
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 98

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Book Description
Master's Thesis from the year 2020 in the subject Business economics - Information Management, grade: 1,3, University of Applied Sciences Kaiserslautern, language: English, abstract: Venture capital funded companies are far more present in the media than organically grown companies. This makes us erroneously assume that there is only one way to building a successful company: by raising VC (venture capital). The truth is, however, that only a tiny fraction of all small businesses obtains VC in the course of their life span. In fact, from all the companies aspiring to receive funding through VC, 99% will never achieve this objective. Among the 1% that does achieve funding, there are companies that have to go out of business because they get overfunded and lose their focus. Others recognize that entrepreneurs and investors have fundamentally different motivations, especially regarding the exit. Therefore, growth-oriented founders of tech companies wonder whether it is possible for them to scale without investors, and how they can approach to do so. This thesis aims to provide answers to these two questions, primarily by investigating companies that have already scaled successfully and by extracting the main lessons from their growth journey.

Approaches to scaling small software companies without investors

Approaches to scaling small software companies without investors PDF Author: Carolin Nothof
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
ISBN: 3346198871
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 98

Get Book

Book Description
Master's Thesis from the year 2020 in the subject Business economics - Information Management, grade: 1,3, University of Applied Sciences Kaiserslautern, language: English, abstract: Venture capital funded companies are far more present in the media than organically grown companies. This makes us erroneously assume that there is only one way to building a successful company: by raising VC (venture capital). The truth is, however, that only a tiny fraction of all small businesses obtains VC in the course of their life span. In fact, from all the companies aspiring to receive funding through VC, 99% will never achieve this objective. Among the 1% that does achieve funding, there are companies that have to go out of business because they get overfunded and lose their focus. Others recognize that entrepreneurs and investors have fundamentally different motivations, especially regarding the exit. Therefore, growth-oriented founders of tech companies wonder whether it is possible for them to scale without investors, and how they can approach to do so. This thesis aims to provide answers to these two questions, primarily by investigating companies that have already scaled successfully and by extracting the main lessons from their growth journey.

Why Startups Fail

Why Startups Fail PDF Author: Tom Eisenmann
Publisher: Currency
ISBN: 0593137027
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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Book Description
If you want your startup to succeed, you need to understand why startups fail. “Whether you’re a first-time founder or looking to bring innovation into a corporate environment, Why Startups Fail is essential reading.”—Eric Ries, founder and CEO, LTSE, and New York Times bestselling author of The Lean Startup and The Startup Way Why do startups fail? That question caught Harvard Business School professor Tom Eisenmann by surprise when he realized he couldn’t answer it. So he launched a multiyear research project to find out. In Why Startups Fail, Eisenmann reveals his findings: six distinct patterns that account for the vast majority of startup failures. • Bad Bedfellows. Startup success is thought to rest largely on the founder’s talents and instincts. But the wrong team, investors, or partners can sink a venture just as quickly. • False Starts. In following the oft-cited advice to “fail fast” and to “launch before you’re ready,” founders risk wasting time and capital on the wrong solutions. • False Promises. Success with early adopters can be misleading and give founders unwarranted confidence to expand. • Speed Traps. Despite the pressure to “get big fast,” hypergrowth can spell disaster for even the most promising ventures. • Help Wanted. Rapidly scaling startups need lots of capital and talent, but they can make mistakes that leave them suddenly in short supply of both. • Cascading Miracles. Silicon Valley exhorts entrepreneurs to dream big. But the bigger the vision, the more things that can go wrong. Drawing on fascinating stories of ventures that failed to fulfill their early promise—from a home-furnishings retailer to a concierge dog-walking service, from a dating app to the inventor of a sophisticated social robot, from a fashion brand to a startup deploying a vast network of charging stations for electric vehicles—Eisenmann offers frameworks for detecting when a venture is vulnerable to these patterns, along with a wealth of strategies and tactics for avoiding them. A must-read for founders at any stage of their entrepreneurial journey, Why Startups Fail is not merely a guide to preventing failure but also a roadmap charting the path to startup success.

Super Founders

Super Founders PDF Author: Ali Tamaseb
Publisher: PublicAffairs
ISBN: 1541768418
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
Super Founders uses a data-driven approach to understand what really differentiates billion-dollar startups from the rest—revealing that nearly everything we thought was true about them is false! Ali Tamaseb has spent thousands of hours manually amassing what may be the largest dataset ever collected on startups, comparing billion-dollar startups with those that failed to become one—30,000 data points on nearly every factor: number of competitors, market size, the founder’s age, his or her university’s ranking, quality of investors, fundraising time, and many, many more. And what he found looked far different than expected. Just to mention a few: Most unicorn founders had no industry experience; There's no disadvantage to being a solo founder or to being a non-technical CEO; Less than 15% went through any kind of accelerator program; Over half had strong competitors when starting--being first to market with an idea does not actually matter. You will also hear the stories of the early days of billion-dollar startups first-hand. The book includes exclusive interviews with the founders/investors of Zoom, Instacart, PayPal, Nest, Github, Flatiron Health, Kite Pharma, Facebook, Stripe, Airbnb, YouTube, LinkedIn, Lyft, DoorDash, Coinbase, and Square, venture capital investors like Elad Gil, Peter Thiel, Alfred Lin from Sequoia Capital and Keith Rabois of Founders Fund, as well as previously untold stories about the early days of ByteDance (TikTok), WhatsApp, Dropbox, Discord, DiDi, Flipkart, Instagram, Careem, Peloton, and SpaceX. Packed with counterintuitive insights and inside stories from people who have built massively successful companies, Super Founders is a paradigm-shifting and actionable guide for entrepreneurs, investors, and anyone interested in what makes a startup successful.

Blitzscaling

Blitzscaling PDF Author: Reid Hoffman
Publisher: Currency
ISBN: 1524761419
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
Foreword by Bill Gates LinkedIn cofounder, legendary investor, and host of the award-winning Masters of Scale podcast reveals the secret to starting and scaling massively valuable companies. What entrepreneur or founder doesn’t aspire to build the next Amazon, Facebook, or Airbnb? Yet those who actually manage to do so are exceedingly rare. So what separates the startups that get disrupted and disappear from the ones who grow to become global giants? The secret is blitzscaling: a set of techniques for scaling up at a dizzying pace that blows competitors out of the water. The objective of Blitzscaling is not to go from zero to one, but from one to one billion –as quickly as possible. When growing at a breakneck pace, getting to next level requires very different strategies from those that got you to where you are today. In a book inspired by their popular class at Stanford Business School, Hoffman and Yeh reveal how to navigate the necessary shifts and weather the unique challenges that arise at each stage of a company’s life cycle, such as: how to design business models for igniting and sustaining relentless growth; strategies for hiring and managing; how the role of the founder and company culture must evolve as the business matures, and more. Whether your business has ten employees or ten thousand, Blitzscaling is the essential playbook for winning in a world where speed is the only competitive advantage that matters.

The Magic of Tiny Business

The Magic of Tiny Business PDF Author: Sharon Rowe
Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
ISBN: 152309480X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 160

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Book Description
“This is a powerful book—tiny is mighty. Sharon Rowe's simple shift in thinking is a profound idea, precisely what we need to hear.” —Seth Godin, author of Linchpin Too many of us feel trapped by work that keeps us from living our purpose. We fantasize about starting our own business, yet we're warned against falling into debt, working eighty hours a week, and coping with the pressure to grow. Eco-Bags Products founder Sharon Rowe says there's another way: go tiny. Like a tiny house, a tiny business is built on maintaining a laser focus on what is essential by living an intentional life. As an entrepreneur and mother, Rowe is most concerned with putting family first, maintaining financial security, and doing something that makes an impact in the world. Using the success story of Eco-Bags Products, Rowe distills the step-by-step process of building a profitable, right-scaled, sustainable venture that doesn't compromise your values. She shows you how to test your concept, manage your money and priorities, and more, while staying true to the "tiny" ethos.

The Founder's Dilemmas

The Founder's Dilemmas PDF Author: Noam Wasserman
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691158304
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 490

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Book Description
The Founder's Dilemmas examines how early decisions by entrepreneurs can make or break a startup and its team. Drawing on a decade of research, including quantitative data on almost ten thousand founders as well as inside stories of founders like Evan Williams of Twitter and Tim Westergren of Pandora, Noam Wasserman reveals the common pitfalls founders face and how to avoid them.

The Builder's Guide to the Tech Galaxy

The Builder's Guide to the Tech Galaxy PDF Author: Martin Schilling
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 111989042X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 371

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Book Description
Learn to scale your startup with a roadmap to the all-important part of the business lifecycle between launch and IPO In The Builder’s Guide to the Tech Galaxy: 99 Practices to Scale Startups into Unicorn Companies, a team of accomplished investors, entrepreneurs, and marketers deliver a practical collection of concrete strategies for scaling a small startup into a lean and formidable tech competitor. By focusing on the four key building blocks of a successful company – alignment, team, functional excellence, and capital—this book distills the wisdom found in countless books, podcasts, and the authors’ own extensive experience into a compact and accessible blueprint for success and growth. In the book, you’ll find: Organizational charts, sample objectives and key results (OKRs), as well as guidance for divisions including technology and product management, marketing, sales, people, and service operations Tools and benchmarks for strategically aligning your company’s divisions with one another, and with your organization’s “North Star” Templates and tips to attract and retain a triple-A team with the right scale-up mindset Checklists to help you attract growth capital and negotiate term sheets Perfect for companies with two, ten, or one hundred employees, The Builder’s Guide to the Tech Galaxy belongs on the bookshelves of founders, managers, entrepreneurs, and other business leaders exploring innovative and proven ways to scale their enterprise to new heights.

Scaling Up

Scaling Up PDF Author: Verne Harnish
Publisher: Forbesbooks
ISBN: 9780986019593
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
In this guide, Harnish and his co-authors share practical tools and techniques to help entrepreneurs grow an industry -- dominating business without it killing them -- and actually have fun. Many growth company leaders reach a point where they actually dread adding another customer, employee, or location. It feels like they are just adding more weight to an ever-heavier anchor they are dragging through the sand. To make matters worse, the increased revenues have not turned into more profitability, so at some point they wonder if the journey is worth the effort. This book focuses on the four major decisions every company must get right: People, Strategy, Execution and Cash. The book includes a series of One-Page tools including the One-Page Strategic Plan and the Rockefeller Habits Execution Checklist, which more than 40,000 firms around the globe have used to scale their companies successfully.

Entering StartUpLand

Entering StartUpLand PDF Author: Jeffrey Bussgang
Publisher: Harvard Business Press
ISBN: 1633693856
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
Many professionals aspire to work for startups. Executives from large companies view them as models to help them adapt to today's dynamic innovation economy, while freshly minted MBAs see magic in founding something new. Yes, startups look magical, but they can also be chaotic and inaccessible. Many books are written for those who aspire to be founders, but a company only has one or two of those. What's needed is something that deconstructs the typical startup organization for the thousands of employees who join a fledgling company and do the day-to-day work required to grow it into something of value. Entering StartUpLand is a practical, step-by-step guide that provides an insider's analysis of various startup roles and responsibilities--including product management, marketing, growth, and sales--to help you figure out if you want to join a startup and what to expect if you do. You'll gain insight into how successful startups operate and learn to assess which ones you might want to join--or emulate. Inside this book you'll find: A tour of typical startup roles to help you determine which one might be the best fit for you Profiles of startup executives across many different functions who share their stories and describe their responsibilities A methodology to identify and evaluate startups and position yourself to find the opportunity that's right for you Written by an experienced venture capitalist, entrepreneur, and Harvard Business School professor, Entering StartUpLand will guide you as you seek your ideal entry point into this popular, cutting-edge organizational paradigm.

Scaling Your Social Venture

Scaling Your Social Venture PDF Author: Paul N. Bloom
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0230377297
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
The field of social entrepreneurship continues to grow by leaps and bounds as innovative entrepreneurs find new ways to create a positive social impact on their community. More often than not these ventures find it difficult to expand their initial concepts into new environments. As funding for social programs on a government level tightens, the ability for social programs to broaden and deepen their impact while maintaining financial stability has never been more important. This goal is only achievable when good intentions are combined with comprehensive analysis and planning that takes all aspects of a venture's ecosystem into consideration. Paul N. Bloom, a professor of social entrepreneurship at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business, explores the key components that any social entrepreneur needs to consider when approaching the challenge of scaling. Here Bloom explains the SCALERS model, which stresses that successful scaling requires organizational capabilities in seven areas: staffing, communicating, alliance-building, lobbying, earningsgeneration, replicating, and stimulating market forces. Rich with numerous examples of social entities that have developed these capabilities, Scaling Your Social Venture provides the tools to help social entrepreneurs take their venture to the next level.