Venture capitalist and Carnegie Mellon professor Sean Ammirati tackles the dos and don'ts of success-ful scaling, by looking at the startups that have won—and lost
The lean entrepreneurship movement has captivated Silicon Valley and entrepreneurs across the country. It has provided an agile framework to develop the right solution for a given target market, and is now used by almost every startup to do just that. The next challenge is growth—to achieve the financial returns and, more importantly, the impact entrepre-neurs dreamed of when starting off on their adventure. Why do some companies realize the VC's goal of a 10x return on investment, while others flounder? What differentiates a Facebook from a Friendster—a house-hold name from a footnote in corporate history? To find out, Ammirati looks at 10 pairs of companies where-in both achieved product-market fit at about the same point in history with the same general target custom-er, but only one of which has gone on to real scale, while the other languished. As his research reveals, just a handful of choices—such as who to partner with, how to finance growth, and how to use data—make all the difference in the world. In addition to the famous case, Ammirati uses such intriguing examples as LinkedIn vs. Spoke, and McDonald's vs. White Castle, to show the secret of "the science of growth" and how to culti-vate it in any organization.