What Makes A Startup Successful? 14 of the most interesting trends identified by the Startup Genome Report

Every once in a while an article comes along that is just so awesome you want to quote it in its entirety.  I haven't read through the methodology so take all these findings with a grain of salt.  The most interesting finding for me was that "balanced" teams (one technical founder and one business founder) significantly out-perform business-heavy and technical heavy teams.  To often I think technical founders question the value of a business co-founder, to their detriment.  Build it and they will come only works in the movies and exceptional cases.

The below is quoted directly from the TechCrunch article "What Makes A Startup Successful? Blackbox Report Aims To Map The Startup Genome"  the Startup Genome blog (it looks like TechCrunch ripped this off as their own):

• Founders that learn are more successful: Startups that have helpful mentors, track metrics effectively, and learn from startup thought leaders raise 7x more money and have 3.5x better user growth.
• Startups that pivot once or twice times raise 2.5x more money, have 3.6x better user growth, and are 52% less likely to scale prematurely than startups that pivot more than 2 times or not at all.
• Many investors invest 2-3x more capital than necessary in startups that haven’t reached problem solution fit yet. They also over-invest in solo founders and founding teams without technical cofounders despite indicators that show that these teams have a much lower probability of success.
• Investors who provide hands-on help have little or no effect on the company’s operational performance. But the right mentors significantly influence a company’s performance and ability to raise money. (However, this does not mean that investors don’t have a significant effect on valuations and M&A)
• Solo founders take 3.6x longer to reach scale stage compared to a founding team of 2 and they are 2.3x less likely to pivot.
• Business-heavy founding teams are 6.2x more likely to successfully scale with sales driven startups than with product centric startups.
• Technical-heavy founding teams are 3.3x more likely to successfully scale with product-centric startups with no network effects than with product-centric startups that have network effects.
• Balanced teams with one technical founder and one business founder raise 30% more money, have 2.9x more user growth and are 19% less likely to scale prematurely than technical or business-heavy founding teams.
• Most successful founders are driven by impact rather than experience or money.
• Founders overestimate the value of IP before product market fit by 255%.
• Startups need 2-3 times longer to validate their market than most founders expect. This underestimation creates the pressure to scale prematurely.
• Startups that haven’t raised money over-estimate their market size by 100x and often misinterpret their market as new.
• Premature scaling is the most common reason for startups to perform worse. They tend to lose the battle early on by getting ahead of themselves.
• B2C vs. B2B is not a meaningful segmentation of Internet startups anymore because the Internet has changed the rules of business. We found 4 different major groups of startups that all have very different behavior regarding customer acquisition, time, product, market and team.

The full report is available here.