Speaker 2
But the reason particularly excited is that he has a book out that is just superand w we're going to get into that just a moment. But did i get that a correctly? All of get all your titles right or to miss anything? Tom,
Speaker 1
no. Tom, thank you so much. Im, im, i know we've got some mayfield fellows listening. I'm proud of the harvard college check fellows. Im, it only took us 25 years to copy what you're doing so,
Speaker 2
and we've done that a few
Speaker 1
times, i'm happy to say. Stay in your slip stream in a lot of these things. Well,
Speaker 2
we've set some big, hairy, audacious goals, as jim collins used to say, for the forty five minutes. There'll be time for questions from our audience later on, but i have a few. And we're goingt arrange in a variety of topics. What's really interesting about our audience to day, tom is that we have everybody, from folks just getting introduced that you can actually learn hanchbenership, and they know, of all ages too, ar our colleagues around the who teach aucpinership, which we've learned you can. And so, ah, there's been a gap, though, and this is what makes me so excited about your book. And i want to hold it up, cause i get to do this, why start ups fail, a new road map for ancpenerial success, which i really think is a siminal event. And for those of us who teach auncpinership, and we're do my best to let you, ah, speak mostly during this and i think well convince most people who have a chance to listen to thisa episode eventually, because it is really, it's really something else. But let's start at the very beginning. Why do you want to, potentialty, be labelled the professor of failure? Why? Why does studying failure mean so much?
Speaker 1
It has scared off a few founders who might otherwise be looking for advice. Am a, so a, mean, there's two ways to answer this. Sus what wi should in aspiring on cpaner learn about failure? And a a, the fact is, a, the drivers of failure aren't simply the photo negatives of the drivers of success. Ther there's it's complicated, right? To succeed, as an ocbuner, youd probably have to grow. But boy a, if you want to find a leading cause of started failure, it's growing too fast. So so so studying failure is important. But personally, why i started it goes back to am a team that i worked with. They were students of mine, and a year after graduation, launched a venture. I was an investor after after they aduated, had a lot of confidence in the team, a and a. They raised a million dollars seed round. Wanted to raise a million and a half. That was part of the failure story. A and a got the business going, validated demand with the very best lean start uptechniques we can teach them. A and and sure enough, after they launched, the demand was there, and repeat purchases were there. Took em longer, a then they expected to get the operations under control. So they were burning through cash. And while they were making progress, they weren't making enough progress. And shut down after a year. And i could point to a lot of things that went wrong, but i couldn't pin point the cause or the causes of failure. And that was a little disconcerting. Here i was a supposed expert on antpaner ship. And in our field, an depending on what how you'd find a start up and how you'd find ure, two thirds, three quarters, 90 % of start ups fail. And so it's a really important phenomenon. And i was a failure at explaining failure. So this goes back eight years. And so i set out to read everything anybody had ever written about start up failure, practitioners and academics, and an interview lots and lots of failed founders and investors who back them and do the survey work and write the cases that formed the backbone of this book. So it only took eight years to pull it altogether. Things move a little more slowly in academia than they do and start a plan, we
Speaker 2
i'm so glad you did.