From the Garage to the Unicorn — Unfolding the startup lifecycle

Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in the mythical garage where Apple was born

UPDATE 2020: I have moved away from Medium! You can find this article and all the new ones >>> __HERE__ <<<

What is the typical journey of a successful startup? Four experts took a shot and tried to answer this question.

• Steve Blank — What do I do now
• Morgan Brown — 5 phases of the startup lifecycle
• Brian Balfour — Traction vs Growth
• Reid Hoffman — Blitzscaling

The illustration below sums up the startup lifecycle according to each of these authors.

After the obligatory “garage” phase, all models converge to a single common point: the PMF, or Product-Market Fit. Then the startup gradually expands into several channels, several countries and several products, and becomes a scale-up, or growth machine in the words of Brian Balfour. Eventually, the last stage is a stabilization of the startup, because of the growth slowing down (Morgan Brown) and/or because of a liquidity event (Steve Blank).

So a typical startup lifecycle consists in 3 major stages: the Garage, the Growth Machine, and the Unicorn.

This article was originally published in French on Medium.

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