There’s a lot of over-promises and incorrect advice being given online on starting a successful enterprise. This wrong advice could cost someone their life savings and importantly ruin their life ambition and dream. Therefore, in partnership with the Erasmus University Rotterdam, we decided to pull together a practical how-to guide explaining the process successful start-ups go through The Start-up Puzzle. It explains in less than 75 pages the different steps by using real-life examples and has an academic section offering insights into the theory behind these steps, all augmented by interviews with experts in the field of start- and scale-ups. What makes this guide unique? Real-life examples and expert interviews augmented with a birds-eye overview of the academic theory create a practical guide that is both understandable, practical, and implementable, all within 75 pages, ie snackable content!
We have it as our Mission to make understanding of critical business challenges accessible for more people by decomposing and explaining the critical drivers by topic in less than 20k words / ie < 75 pages. This will end up in well-curated how-to practitioners’ guides on specific business challenges in which each edition will try to offer both a practical & academic framework that should reveal insights on the WHY, the WHAT and the HOW.
Our first edition is called: The Start-up Puzzle. Start-ups need a bit of extra love over the coming period. Although Start-up success has been low around 10% and stable across the past decades, in a low-interest world, access to capital was easy, thus no problems for new ventures to get funded. As interest rates are on the rise, we need to ensure we continue to invest in start-ups, by creating tools that can help improve success, and thus ensure investment appetite. If we don’t do that, and starve the start-up world, we pay a hefty bill later!
Why am I the right author? Having 30+ years of rich experience both as a business leader in FMCG, a leader of several acquisition and divestiture projects as well as being part of start-up journeys as founder, advisor, or angel investor allowed me to have seen many success stories and failures from up, close and personal. Adding the academic perspective allows specific challenges to be conceptualized and generalized in a framework that has likely relevance across industries, and should aid the understanding of the deeper drivers, that are showcased in the different practical examples.
#The-Start-up-Puzzle – The Easiest-to-Digest HOW-TO guide to creating a successful new business venture, based on in-market best practices, Interviews, and the latest academic research, in less than 75 pages!
