startup - Publications - Faculty & Research

Why Startups Fail

My book Why Startups Fail: A New Roadmap for Entrepreneurial Success is organized in three parts. Part I looks at three common failure patterns for early-stage... View Details

15 Feb 2024
News

By their count, Catalina Daniels and Jim Sherman (both MBA 1991) listened to approximately 300 startup pitches in 2016, the first year the HBS classmates worked side by side as angel investors in New York. “You meet a lot of very smart people, with what sound like good... View Details

Keywords: April White

13 Apr 2015
News

Startup Stars

5 PM – 6 PM EDT, 21 Apr 2021
Virtual Programming

Why Startups Fail

HBS Professor Tom Eisenmann will discuss insights from his book, Why Startups Fail, with two failed alumni founders: Christina Wallace (MBA 2010), cofounder of Quincy Apparel and now Senior Lecturer at HBS, and Lindsay Hyde (MBA 2014), cofounder of Baroo, now... View Details

Awards

Best paper, World Finance Conference

By: Ramana Nanda

Won 2012 World Finance Conference Best Paper for "Investment Cycles and Startup Innovation" with Matthew Rhodes-Kropf. View Details

23 Oct 2020
News

Two MBA Startups Cited as “Most Disruptive”

business born from the concept, recently made the list of Poets and Quants “Most Disruptive MBA Startups of 2020.” Now national, LeverEdge has 20,000 members and $2.5 million in investment. Classmate Tess Michaels (MBA 2020) also made the... View Details

Keywords: disruptive innovation; startups; student loans; entrepreneurship; i-Lab; entrepreneur in residence; Finance

03 Aug 2021
News

Why do startups fail?

Research Summary

Lean Startup Management Practices

By: Thomas R. Eisenmann

Many information technology startups have embraced "lean startup" management practices. Lean startups confront high levels of uncertainty about both customer problems and product solutions: the strength of demand for new... View Details

2023
Working Paper

Beefing IT Up for Your Investor? Open Sourcing and Startup Funding: Evidence from GitHub

By: Annamaria Conti, Christian Peukert and Maria Roche

We study the participation of nascent firms in open source communities and its implications for attracting funding. To do so, we link data on 160,065 U.S. startups from Crunchbase to their activities on the open source development platform GitHub. In a matched sample... View Details

Keywords: Startups; Technology Strategy; GitHub; Machine Learning; Business Startups; Venture Capital; Information Technology; Strategy

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2022
Working Paper

Flight to Safety: How Economic Downturns Affect Talent Flows to Startups

By: Shai Bernstein, Richard Townsend and Ting Xu

Using proprietary data from AngelList Talent, we study how individuals’ job search and application behavior changed during the COVID-19 downturn. We find that job seekers shifted their searches toward more established firms and away from early-stage startups, even... View Details

Keywords: Startup Labor Market; Flight To Safety; COVID-19; Recession; Business Startups; Human Capital; Business Cycles; Health Pandemics

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February 1998 (Revised June 1999)
Case

DigitalThink: Startup

By: William A. Sahlman, Michael J. Roberts and Christina L. Darwall

Describes a recent Berkeley MBA's attempts to start a business aimed at corporate training via the Internet. Describes the very early efforts at finding an attorney, accountant, and financing, and the interrelationships among these choices. View Details

Keywords: Internet and the Web; Entrepreneurship; Problems and Challenges; Business Startups; Service Industry

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December 2011 (Revised July 2013)
Background Note

Hypothesis-Driven Entrepreneurship: The Lean Startup

By: Thomas Eisenmann, Eric Ries and Sarah Dillard

Firms that follow a hypothesis-driven approach to evaluating entrepreneurial opportunity are called "lean startups." Entrepreneurs in these startups translate their vision into falsifiable business model hypotheses, then test the hypotheses using a series of "minimum... View Details

Keywords: Entrepreneurship; Business Startups

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2022
Working Paper

Do Startups Benefit from Their Investors' Reputation? Evidence from a Randomized Field Experiment

By: Shai Benjamin Bernstein, Kunal Mehta, Richard Townsend and Ting Xu

We analyze a field experiment conducted on AngelList Talent, a large online search platform for startup jobs. In the experiment, AngelList randomly informed job seekers of whether a startup was funded by a top-tier investor and/or was funded recently. We find that the... View Details

Keywords: Startup Labor Market; Investors; Randomized Field Experiment; Certification Effect; Venture Capital; Business Startups; Human Capital; Job Search; Reputation

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March 2024
Article

Flight to Safety: How Economic Downturns Affect Talent Flows to Startups

By: Shai Bernstein, Richard Townsend and Ting Xu

Using proprietary data from AngelList Talent, we study how individuals’ job search and application behavior changed during the COVID-19 downturn. We find that job seekers shifted their searches toward more established firms and away from early-stage startups, even... View Details

Keywords: Startup Labor Market; Flight To Safety; COVID-19; Recession; Job Search; Behavior

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01 Sep 2005
News

Upstart Startup

In 1999, Wall Street bankers Randy Altschuler (MBA ’98) and Joseph Sigelman (MBA ’97) founded OfficeTiger in Madras, India, to serve as an outsourcing shop to perform secretarial services for Wall Street financial firms. Today, the company has five Indian operations,... View Details

12 PM – 1 PM EST, 15 Nov 2016
Webinars: Career

Joining the Right Startup

Startups are like infants: brand new, exciting, bursting with hope and potential. Unfortunately, if you're thinking about joining a startup, that excitement doesn't help much. It often confuses the issues about which deals could succeed and which could fail or, more... View Details