If you liked Jason Fried’s presentation on How to Make Big Things Happen with Small Teams and Blank’s ideas on how small is the new big, you’ll appreciate John T. Preston’s 2001 essay, Success Factors In Technology-Based Entrepreneurship,. The following are some excerpts from the article that explain how the various factors below can transform your dream into a reality.
Management Teams · “What we’ve found is that entrepreneurial behavior is more successful when performed by teams. Professor Ed Roberts of the Sloan School did a study of startup companies and their probability of success. What he found was that the probability of success increased dramatically with team size until you got up to four or five entrepreneurs founding the company. Teams of people with complementary skill sets perform better.”
Passionate Behavior · “Let me now say a few words about passionate behavior I believe what we can achieve in life is a function of a number of things: how hard we work, how smart we work, how much leverage we have on the work we do, and how much courage we have. Of course, how hard we work is going to be tied to how passionate we are.”
Culture · “It’s much more difficult in Japan to get the best and brightest people to agree to work in a small startup company. Clearly there’s a great stigma for failure in Japan, and therefore, severe reluctance to risk a career by taking a chance on a startup company. In Japan, the opportunities for the best and brightest might appear to be more attractive in large companies. The situation in the United States tends to be reversed.”
Investors · “Many people think indifferently about sources of investment. They think what’s important is how much money is raised for how many shares and they don’t differentiate between the sources of that money. But the quality of the source of money, and the rate at which that money comes in, are key to determining the success of the company. Investors can provide significant leverage.”
Speed of Innovation · “Innovations go through cycles. In the early stages following a discovery, there is typically a period of rapid discovery followed by incremental improvement when products reach maturity.”
Flexibility · “One of the things that inhibit large companies from developing innovative technologies is their lack of flexibility.”
