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  • May–June 2021
  • Article
  • Harvard Business Review

Why Start-ups Fail

By: Thomas R. Eisenmann
  • Format:Print
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Abstract

If you’re launching a business, the odds are against you: Two-thirds of start-ups never show a positive return. Unnerved by that statistic, a professor of entrepreneurship at Harvard Business School set out to discover why. Based on interviews and surveys with hundreds of founders and investors and scores of accounts of entrepreneurial setbacks, his findings buck the conventional wisdom that the cause of start-up failure is either the founding team or the business idea. The author found six patterns that doomed ventures. Two were especially common: 1) Bad bedfellows. Other parties besides the founders—like employees, strategic partners, and investors—can play a major role in a firm’s demise. Quincy Apparel, for instance, was undone by weak support from its investors and factory partners and inflexible employees. 2) False starts. Many overlook a crucial step in the lean start-up process: researching customer needs before testing products. Like Triangulate, an online dating start-up, they keep rushing to launch fully functional offerings that don’t fit any market needs. The good news is, firms can avoid that pitfall by rigorously defining the problem they want to solve, getting one-on-one feedback from potential customers, and validating concepts with real customers in real-world settings.

Keywords

Entrepreneurship; Business Startups; Problems and Challenges; Failure

Citation

Eisenmann, Thomas R. "Why Start-ups Fail." Harvard Business Review 99, no. 3 (May–June 2021): 76–85.
  • Find it at Harvard

About The Author

Thomas R. Eisenmann

Entrepreneurial Management
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