This panel discussion was part of San Antonio Startup Week. It was recorded at the Alamo Brewery 2.10.16
The statistics for startups are rough. 9 out of 10 startups fail is a media trope you seen thrown around alot, but the stat seems to hold up when you talk to folks in the industry or professional observers of that arena.
A recent study from CB Insights charted the progress of more than a thousand startups that raised $500,000 from venture capital groups over 6 years. After that time period, 77 percent of these companies had failed.
- 60 percent were unable to raise money in a second funding round
- 22 percent were purchased or offered an IPO
- .9 percent achieved a valuation of $1 billion
Less than one percent would go on to unicorn status of a billion dollar valuation, the very thing that many of these startups are chasing. So its hard...but why do they fail.
According to a study late last year based on 146 startup postmortems - written by the companies founders - the big reasons were the following:
- Product/market fit....could have been that the product wasn't good or was an answer to a question no one asked, or was something much more simple like the color was wrong (42 %)
- Ran out of money too quickly... (29%)
- Wrong team (23%)
- Out-competed (19%)
We get it....its rough out there, so how do we avoid those mistakes? We talked with some leaders to figure that out.
Panel:
- Magaly Chocano, CEO of Sweb Development
- Lorenzo Gomez, CEO of Geekdom
- Jason Straughan, CEO and Engineer for Grok Interactive
- Melissa Unsell, Vice President and Founding Member of elumicor
