If You Want Your Startup to Succeed, You Need to Understand Why Startups Fail

Professor Tom Eisenmann discusses insights from his new book, “Why Startups Fail,” with two alumni founders whose startups failed: Christina Wallace (MBA 2010), co-founder of Quincy Apparel and now Senior Lecturer at HBS, and Lindsay Hyde (2014), co-founder of Baroo, now Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Moderne Ventures and soon to join HBS as a lecturer co-teaching with Eisenmann the MBA elective “Entrepreneurial Failure”. Eisenmann’s book describes six patterns that account for most startup failures. It also offers guidance on how to anticipate and avoid them, and how to learn and heal from failure, and figure out whether to pursue the entrepreneurial path again.