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Containing Growth Chaos: Five Things To Do When Your Company Is On The Upswing

YoungUpstarts

We see balance sheets go from being in the red to finally creeping into the black and, if we’re fortunate enough, beyond our wildest dreams. But entrepreneurs face other concerns that compete with this growth focus, including hiring, maintaining current revenue sources and distinguishing themselves from the competition.

Cofounder 100
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ESADE Business School Commencement Speech

Steve Blank

Companies horde cash and squeeze the most revenue and margin from the money they use. These Key Performance Indicators and processes are what make a company efficient —but they are also the root cause of its inability to be agile and innovative. Every time another execution process is added, corporate innovation dies a little more.

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Why Companies are Not Startups

Steve Blank

These groups are adapting or adopting the practices of startups and accelerators – disruption and innovation rather than direct competition, customer development versus more product features, agility and speed versus lowest cost. This is a big idea. These metrics stack the deck against a company that wants to invest in long-term innovation.).

IRR 335
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Intel Disrupted: Why large companies find it difficult to innovate, and what they can do about it

Steve Blank

It’s a lot easier to get these numbers to look great by outsourcing everything, getting assets off the balance sheet and only investing in things that pay off fast. Intel under their last two CEOs delivered more revenue and profit than any ever before. These resulting business models made them look incredibly profitable.

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Eureka! A New Era for Scientists and Engineers

Steve Blank

From the point of view of scientists and engineers in a university lab, too often entrepreneurship in all its VC-driven glory – income statements, balance sheets, business plans, revenue models, 5-year forecasts, etc. And they’ll do this using the business model / customer development / agile development solution stack.

Engineer 280
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Mistakes Entrepreneurs Make on Day 1

Up and Running

Here’s what they discovered: They found firms that quickly institute formal mechanisms such as operation budgets, cash budgets, and financial monitoring systems (tools that measure profitability, customer acquisition costs, variance from actual budget, and so forth) had higher growth rates in terms of revenues and headcount. Be compliant.

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Out of the Crisis #4: Carl Liebert, crisis veteran and radical optimist

Startup Lessons Learned

And I think how you think about that, whether you're a restaurant owner that didn't invest in curbside pickup, what can you do to, I'll call it, hack it or in an agile mindset, how do you think about bringing a way to be able to do curbside and do that well, and not just rely on the delivery folks to be able to support you? Let's go."