OUR MISSION:
“We act as a co-founder to lower the failure rate of startups”
It’s a such a good feeling, the satisifaction when you manage to communicate everything you’re doing in a single sentence. It’s usually not done in a heartbeat, and it took us a long time to get it right.
You can find thousands of articles and blogs on why you need a mission and vision early on when building your company. Here‘s a good one: If I Read One More Platitude-Filled Mission Statement, I’ll Scream
“We act as a co-founder.”
So what makes us different from traditonal accelerators, incubators, venture builders or other kinds of startup support?
Venture builders with high failure rates, often hire a CEO or an Entrepreneur in Residence to execute their vision and end up micromanaging the startups. A few manage to pull this off, but we don’t believe it’s scalable unless loads of money is available to solve problems and people.
Our studio model turns it all upside down. Sometimes even hiring the co-founder before having a solution or product to work on. By working with them from idea stage and acting as a co-founder throughout the process, we’re investing in the founder first and foremost.
We’re also the Chief Supporting Officer, or firefighter, handing over the hose — or gasoline when that’s what’s needed.
That’s what we do, fight with our co-founders, or samurais as we call them. From time to time I’m sure we fight each other too, and sometimes that’s what co-founders are for, friction. As long as the real battles are fought together, increasing the chance of success.
You can read more about about our Startup Studio model in: What is a Startup Studio
One thing I really appreciate about our mission statement is that we start off adressing something negative, “The failure rate of startups”.
A lot of Mission Statments tend to be overly positive, like the lovechild of two MLM’ers that met at a Jesus-camp. Or even worse, constructed to please everyone — like some generic audience-tested-to-death Hollywood flick.
Being realistic is really hard when your runway keeps manifesting itself as Freddy Krueger in the middle of the night.
This manic optimism comes, ironically, from the fact that most startups fails. Humans are good at fooling ourself when things looks dark. We survived as a species that way.
Founders need to be optimistic, and maybe sometimes a little bit naive, but without realism it all becomes bullshit. Yes, we all want to change the world, but your mission statment doesn’t need to say it. Show how you’ll do it instead.
The common knowledge is that 9 out of 10 startups fail. Meaning the traditional model is broken. So why does the number stay this high? There has to be a way to fix it!
“To lower the failure rate of startups.”
We work systematically with our founders, making sure we can support and help them on the important and key elements we know typically cause failure:
-If X% of startups fail because of co-founder fall out — in theory we’ve solved a big part by being a supportive co-founder. We’ll still be there even if someone has a fall out.
-If X% of startups fail because there is no market — focus on early stage market validation and analytics. Locate the right metrics and and data from day one.
-If X% of startups fail because of lack of network and fundraising issues — we’ll be there with our connections and initial funds from day one.
-If X% of startups fail because their initial code could not scale — we’ll be there to help make the right technical business decisions from day one.
- If X… ok you get the point. Let the founder focus on building product, while we help with “the other stuff”.
If we keep on working with all our founders and startups this way, and then get better at it. How low can the failure rate get? Sounds simple. We know it’s not, there is not one way to do this, each startup and founder has it’s own unique set of challenges. But lets see how low we can get it. I think 10%.
Maybe it’s already time to revise our mission statment, and be bold enough to say: “We act as a co-founder to lower the failure rate of startups to 10%”
