What matters most to Startup success?

I think the best way to understand a problem and arrive at a solution is to try and put the problem in quantitative terms. This means you should find a way to assign a value to the problem’s most important influencers and essentially “do the math” to find the best answer.

Let’s take Startups as an example. There are so many reasons why Startups succeed and fail but if you were to generalize the top 5 factors, as Idealab’s Bill Gross did in his research, you would likely conclude that the 5 most important factors attributing to a startups success are good timing, good idea, good team, good funding, and a good business model.

So, if we assign a number value (from 1–10) for each of these 5 elements- we can evaluate Startups side by side to find out which metric matters the most when it comes to success. Bill Gross did exactly this and after judging his scores I determined that I would put mine at about the same. That is to say- I agree with him. The following chart outlines the successful and unsuccessful companies he evaluated and how he scored them in each category:

Screen shot from Bill’s TED talk: The Single Biggest Reason Why Startups succeed

Results