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The Avoidable Startup Failure

Name: The Avoidable Startup Failure
Brand: Growcraft AS
Price: 349 NOK
Availability: InStock
ISBN: 9788269490312

A book by Anjali Bhatnagar

My startup filed for bankruptcy on a Thursday morning. This is a book about how promising companies lock in failure long before the money runs out, and how founders, investors and boards can see it coming while the cost of being wrong is still small.

With a foreword by Alex M. H. Smith, author of No Bullsh*t Strategy.

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About the book

Technology startups are risky by nature. A handful become spectacular successes and shape how everyone thinks companies should be built. Most fail, and the industry has largely accepted that as the price of innovation.

Anjali Bhatnagar founded Tørn and led it through all five years of its life. It became one of Norway's fastest-growing marketplaces, with more than 500 vendors and more than 120 million kroner in transaction value across two countries, backed by 65 million kroner from corporate venture investors, family offices and angels. From the outside, it had never looked stronger. In its fifth year, it was gone.

After the bankruptcy, Anjali set out to understand what had actually happened. Drawing on her training as a physicist, she went back through Tørn, studied other startups, and read hundreds of post-mortems of failed companies. What she found surprised her. Most of these companies had not failed because the idea was bad or the market was missing. They failed because they had committed people, time and capital to assumptions that had never been properly tested. By the time the assumptions surfaced, changing course had become expensive.

This book offers a practical framework for finding the assumption that matters most at each stage of a company's life, and testing it cheaply, before capital, people and everything else get built on top of it. It helps founders, investors and boards tell the uncertainty that belongs to innovation apart from the failures that come from committing too early.

The goal is not to eliminate risk. It is to stop wasting years, talent and capital on questions that could have been answered while the cost of being wrong was still small, and to spend those resources where they belong: on the genuine uncertainty at the heart of building something new.

About the author

Anjali Bhatnagar holds a PhD in physics from the University of Oslo and spent more than twenty years across technology, product, design, R&D and leadership, ten of them at Telenor, before founding Tørn. Seeking to understand why Tørn failed led her back to the discipline she learned as a physicist, making assumptions explicit before building on them. That search became this book. Today she works with founders, investors, startup programmes and corporate ventures on the questions worth answering before raising and committing capital. She writes at anjali.no and lives in Oslo.

About Anjali Bhatnagar →

Foreword and early readers

What others said

Foreword

“This is a way to hedge against the risk that doesn't come with bad strategy, but great strategy.”
“The more you commit to an idea that is truly unique, meaningful, and impactful, the further you are pulling yourself into the realm of the unknown. The realm of danger. And so the more you need to heed what's in these pages. Will they remove the chance of failure? No. Nothing can do that. But will they remove the chance of avoidable failure? Stupid failure? Predictable failure? That's another matter.”

Alex M. H. SmithAuthor of No Bullsh*t Strategy

Matt LernerAuthor of *Growth Levers and How to Find Them*. Founder of SYSTM.

Karsten Duus WettelandFounder and CEO, Relentlessly.no

Anjali has written a must read for founders, for the people who work in startups, for their advisers, their boards and everyone who invests in them.
I have read my fair share of startup and build-a-company literature. What most of it has in common is that it describes patterns the author saw in companies that succeeded. This book starts from the opposite place. Why do companies not make it, and how do you avoid the same thing happening to you?
It is a more useful, more practical and more concrete manual than much of what I have read. It is also considerably better written, and I am picky about that.
What many failures have in common is that they are built on assumptions nobody tested thoroughly before large investments had already been made on top of them. By the time the assumptions turn out to be wrong, it can be too late to put them right.
Anjali starts from her own company, Tørn. She is honest about the assumptions they held and the ones they never tested, and about the point where they were about to launch in a third country when the capital disappeared and they saw that some of the assumptions the business was still running on did not hold.
I think this is one of the most important books you can read if you want to avoid walking into the same trap. Anjali has done all of us a favour by letting us learn from what she learned.
Merete NygaardBusiness lawyer. Founder of Lexolve, now Låvli.Translated from Norwegian.