Most start-ups don’t succeed: More than two-thirds of them never deliver a positive return to investors. But why do so many end disappointingly? That question hit me with full force several years ago when I realized I couldn’t answer it.

多数初创企业以失败收场：超过三分之二的初创公司从未有过正向的投资者回报。为什么这么多公司结局惨淡，令人失望？本文作者采访调研了数百位创始人和投资人，撰写了关于失败创业公司的20多个案例研究。研究成果汇集成书并出版，书名为《创业公司缘何失败》，书中描写了造成大量初创公司惨淡收场，不断反复出现的模式。本文介绍了其中两种初创公司最容易避免的失败模式。

Good Idea, Bad Bedfellows

想法优秀，伙伴失败

As I’ve noted, VCs look for founders with the right stuff: resilience, passion, experience leading start-up teams, and so forth. But even when such rare talent captains a new venture, there are other parties whose contributions are crucial to it. A broad set of stakeholders, including employees, strategic partners, and investors, all can play a role in a venture’s downfall.

风投会审查创始人是否具备诸如韧性、激情和经验等领导创业团队的品质。但即便选出了领导新公司的人才，其他合作方的贡献也至关重要。包括雇员、战略伙伴和投资人在内的利益相关方都可能影响企业成败。

Indeed, a great jockey isn’t even necessary for start-up success. Other members of the senior management team can compensate for a founder’s shortcomings, and seasoned investors and advisers can likewise provide guidance and useful connections. A new venture pursuing an amazing opportunity will typically attract such contributors—even if its founder doesn’t walk on water. But if its idea is merely good, a start-up may not become a talent magnet.

伟大的创始人并不能确保创业公司的成功。高管团队的其他成员可以补足创始人的缺点，资深投资人和顾问也能提供指导和有用的社交网络。即便创始人不是万里挑一，创业想法绝佳的新企业一般也会吸引到这样的参与者，但如果创业想法只是凑合，一般就不会吸引这么多人才。

Consider the case of Quincy Apparel. In May 2011 two former students of mine, Alexandra Nelson and Christina Wallace, came to me for feedback on their start-up concept. I admired both of them and was impressed with their idea, which identified an unmet customer need: Young professional women had a hard time finding affordable and stylish work apparel that fit them well. Nelson and Wallace, who were close friends, devised a novel solution: a sizing scheme that allowed customers to specify four separate garment measurements (such as waist-to-hip ratio and bra size)—akin to the approach used for tailoring men’s suits.

以Quincy Apparel为例。2011年5月，我之前的两位学生亚历山德拉·尼尔森（Alexandra Nelson）和克里斯提娜·华莱士（Christina Wallace）希望我可以给她们的创业想法提点意见。我很钦佩两位，也欣赏她们的创业想法——满足了一个未被满足的客户需求：年轻职业女性很难找到合身且价格公道的职场穿搭。这两位好朋友想出了一种新颖的量体裁衣的方法：顾客可以定制四片布料的尺寸（例如腰臀比和胸围），和男士定制西装方法类似。

Following the lean start-up method, Nelson and Wallace then validated customer demand using a textbook-perfect minimum viable product, or MVP—that is, the simplest possible offering that yields reliable customer feedback. They held six trunk shows at which women could try on sample outfits and place orders. Of the 200 women who attended, 25% made purchases. Buoyed by these results, the cofounders quit their consulting jobs, raised $950,000 in venture capital, recruited a team, and launched Quincy Apparel. They employed a direct-to-consumer business model, selling online rather than through brick-and-mortar stores. 

在这种精益创业方式之后，尼尔森和华莱士使用教科书般的最简化可实行产品（MVP）来验证客户需求，即带来可信赖客户反馈的最简单服务。她们举办了六场非公开新时装展示会，女性顾客可试穿样衣并下单。200名来参加的女性中有25%下了单。两位创始人大受鼓舞，辞去咨询公司的工作，募集了95万美元风投资本，招兵买马成立了Quincy Apparel。她们采用了直面消费者的商业模式，通过电商而不是实体店出售。

At this point I became an early angel investor in the company. Initial orders were strong, as were reorders: An impressive 39% of customers who bought items from Quincy’s first seasonal collection made repeat purchases. However, robust demand required heavy investment in inventory. Meanwhile, production problems caused garments to fit poorly on some customers, resulting in higher-than-expected returns. Processing returns and correcting production problems put pressure on margins, rapidly depleting Quincy’s cash reserves. After Quincy tried and failed to raise more capital, the team trimmed the product line, aiming to simplify operations and realize efficiencies. However, the business lacked enough funding to prove out the pivot, and Quincy was forced to shut down less than a year after its launch.

彼时我也是公司初期的天使投资人之一。最初的订单和回购数量很大：购买首季系列服装的客户中有39%的复购率。但强劲需求需要大量库存。同时生产出现问题，导致部分客户衣服不合身，退货超出预期。处理退货并解决生产问题影响了利润，很快耗尽了Quincy的现金储备。公司尝试再次募资但失败了，团队决定减少产品线，简化运营提高效力，但缺乏足够资金完成转型，成立不到一年后被迫关门。

So why did Quincy fail?

Quincy为何失败？

Quincy’s founders had a good idea. Were Wallace and Nelson simply poor jockeys? Temperamentally, their fit with the founder role was good. They were sharp and resourceful and had complementary strengths. However, the founder team wobbled in two important ways. First, unwilling to strain their close friendship, Wallace and Nelson shared decision-making authority equally with respect to strategy, product design, and other key choices. This slowed their responses when action was required. Second, neither founder had experience with clothing design and manufacturing.

Quincy的创始人有绝佳的创业想法。那是因为华莱士和尼尔森是很差的创始人吗？两人的性情很适合创始人的角色。聪明且见多识广，优势互补。但是创始人团队在两个方面有不足之处。首先，两人不愿意破坏她们的友谊。华莱士和尼尔森在战略、产品设计等其他关键角色上有平等决策权。在需要决策时这种设计拖延了响应速度。第二，两人都没有成衣设计和制造经验。

Apparel production entails many specialized tasks, such as fabric sourcing, pattern making, and quality control. To compensate for their lack of industry know-how, the founders hired a few apparel company veterans, assuming that they’d fill multiple functions—as jack-of-all-trades team members do in most early-stage start-ups. However, accustomed to the high levels of specialization in mature apparel companies, Quincy’s employees weren’t flexible about tackling tasks outside their areas of expertise.

成衣生产制造涉及许多专业化任务，如面料采购、图样设计和质量控制。两人为弥补自身行业知识的欠缺，聘请了成衣公司的一些资深员工，以为可以一人多用，就像很多初创企业早期的万事通成员。但这些员工习惯了成熟成衣公司的高度专业化，在解决专业以外的任务时不够灵活。

Investors also played a role in Quincy’s demise. The founders had aimed to raise $1.5 million but managed to secure only $950,000. That was enough to fund operations for two seasonal collections. Before launching, the founders had correctly assumed that at least three seasons would be needed to fine-tune operations. Quincy had some traction after two seasons but not enough to lure new backers, and the venture capital firms that had provided most of its money were too small to commit more funds. Furthermore, the founders were disappointed with the guidance they got from those VCs, who pressured them to grow at full tilt—like the technology start-ups the investors were more familiar with. Doing so forced Quincy to build inventory, burning through cash before it had resolved its production problems.

投资人也要负上责任。创始人本来计划募集150万美元，但最终只拿到了95万。这些钱只够推出两季服装系列。创始人准确预计至少要三季才能调试好运营问题。两季之后Quincy赢得了一些声誉但不足以吸引新投资者。主要的投资公司规模太小无法继续投入更多钱。创始人对风投资本的指导也很失望，后者要求她们像技术类初创企业那样全速增长，结果导致Quincy在解决生产问题前就耗尽现金建立了库存。

In summary, Quincy had a good idea but bad bedfellows: Besides the founders, a range of resource providers were culpable in the venture’s collapse, including team members, manufacturing partners, and investors.

总之Quincy的创业想法很不错，但合作方不好：除了创始人，很多资源提供者对公司的失利都有责任，包括团队成员、制造工厂和投资人。

Could this outcome have been avoided? Perhaps. The founders’ lack of fashion industry experience was at the root of many problems. It took time for Wallace and Nelson to master the complexities of apparel design and production. Without industry connections, they couldn’t leverage their professional networks to recruit team members or count on past relationships with factory managers to ensure prompt delivery. And without an industry track record, they had difficulty finding investors willing to bet on first-time founders.

这一结果有可能避免吗？也许。创始人缺乏时装从业经验是很多问题的根源。华莱士和尼尔森花了很长时间才掌握了成衣设计和制造的复杂门道。两人缺乏业内关系网，无法利用职业关系招聘团队成员，也不能依赖过去和工厂管理者的关系确保即刻交付。由于没有行业成功经验，她们也很难找到愿意为初次创业者投资的投资人。

False Starts

错误的开始

I have long been an apostle of the lean start-up approach. But as I dug deeper into case studies of failure, I concluded that its practices were falling short of their promise. Many entrepreneurs who claim to embrace the lean start-up canon actually adopt only part of it. Specifically, they launch MVPs and iterate on them after getting feedback. By putting an MVP out there and testing how customers respond, founders are supposed to avoid squandering time and money building and marketing a product that no one wants.

我一直都是精益创业方法的信徒，但随着我愈加深入地研究关于失败的案例，我发现精益创业的实践知易行难。很多声称使用精益创业方法的创业者实际只应用了其中一部分。具体来说，创业者会推出最简化可实行产品（MVP），获得反馈后再迭代。通过这种方式测试顾客反应，目的是避免浪费时间和金钱打造宣传没有人需要的产品。

Yet by neglecting to research customer needs before commencing their engineering efforts, entrepreneurs end up wasting valuable time and capital on MVPs that are likely to miss their mark. These are false starts. The entrepreneurs are like sprinters who jump the gun: They’re too eager to get a product out there. The rhetoric of the lean start-up movement—for example, “launch early and often” and “fail fast”—actually encourages this “ready, fire, aim” behavior.

但在开始设计之前如果忽略了对客户需求的研究，创始人最终很可能会在失败的MVP上浪费宝贵的时间和金钱。这就是错误的开始。创业者像发令枪还没响就抢跑的人：太着急把产品投放市场了。例如，精益创业所宣扬的“多次、尽早推出产品”，“快速失败”实际上在鼓励“先开枪后瞄准”的行为。

The online dating start-up Triangulate experienced this syndrome in 2010. A clue about the cause of Triangulate’s failure lies in its three big pivots in less than two years. On one hand, pivots are foundational for lean start-ups. With each iteration, Nagaraj’s team had heeded the “fail fast” mantra. The team also followed the principle of launching early and often—putting a real product into the hands of real customers as fast as possible.

在线交友网站Triangulate在2010年就经历了这样的现象。关于它的失败，细节藏在不到两年的三次重大转型中。一方面，精益创业公司的基石就是转型。每次迭代创始人纳加拉杰的团队都注意到“快速失败”的咒语。团队遵循尽早且频繁地推出产品的原则，尽快将真正的产品放到真实消费者手中。

But there’s more to the lean start-up approach than those practices. Before entrepreneurs begin to build a product, lean start-up guru Steve Blank insists, they must complete a phase called “customer discovery”—a round of interviews with prospective customers. Those interviews probe for strong, unmet customer needs—problems worth pursuing. In Nagaraj’s postmortem analysis of Triangulate’s failure, he acknowledged skipping this crucial step. He and his team failed to conduct up-front research to validate the demand for a matching engine or the appeal of the wingman concept. Nor did they conduct MVP tests akin to Quincy’s trunk shows. Instead they rushed to launch Wings as a fully functional product.

但精益创业的内容不止这些。精益创业大师史蒂夫·布朗克（Steve Blank）认为在创业者打造产品之前，必须做好“顾客探索”，即对潜在顾客的全面访谈和了解。这些访谈可以帮助企业了解客户未被满足的强烈需求以及值得继续追寻的问题。在纳加拉杰对公司失败的事后分析中，他承认自己跳过了这一关键步骤。他和团队未能进行事先研究，证实产品概念存在需求。他们也没有进行Quincy的非公开新时装展示会那样的MVP测试，而是仓促推出并认定它能被市场接受。

By giving short shrift to customer discovery and MVPs, Triangulate’s team fell victim to a false start—and turned the “fail fast” mantra into a self-fulfilling prophecy. If the team members had spoken to customers at the outset or tested a true MVP, they could have designed their first product in ways that conformed more closely to market needs. By failing with their first product, they wasted a feedback cycle, and time is an early-stage entrepreneur’s most precious resource. With the clock ticking, one wasted cycle means one less opportunity to pivot before money runs out.

Triangulate的团队由于没有做顾客探索和MVP，刚开始就犯了错误，将“快速失败”魔咒变成一个自我实现的预言。如果团队在刚开始就和顾客交流过或测试过真正的MVP， 他们的最初产品设计可能会更接近市场需求。首个产品的失败导致他们浪费了反馈循环，而对早期创业公司来说，最宝贵的资源就是时间。随着时间越来越紧迫，浪费一个循环意味着在现金用尽前少了一个转型机会。

Maintaining Balance

保持平衡

It’s important for an entrepreneur to maintain balance. Guidance based on conventional wisdom is good—most of the time—but it shouldn’t be followed blindly. Consider the following advice given to many first-time founders and how it can backfire:

创业者要学会保持平衡。传统智慧的指导多数情况下是好的，但不要盲目追随。我们来看看以下这些针对初次创业者的建议，如何造成适得其反的效果：

Just do it!

想做就做！

Great entrepreneurs make things happen and move fast to capture opportunity. But a bias for action can tempt an entrepreneur to truncate exploration and leap too soon into building and selling a product, as I’ve explained. When that happens, founders may find themselves locked prematurely into a flawed solution.

优秀创业者都是实干家，能迅速行动抓住机会。但对行动的偏执可能会诱使创业者跳过探索阶段，过早开始打造产品并出售，这点前文我已做过解释。出现这种情况时，创始人可能会发现自己过早下结论，解决方案其实还存在许多问题。

Be persistent!

坚持不懈！

Entrepreneurs encounter setbacks over and over. True entrepreneurs dust themselves off and go back at it; they must be determined and resilient. However, if persistence turns into stubbornness, founders may have difficulty recognizing a false start for what it is. They likewise may be reluctant to pivot when it should be clear that their solution isn’t working. Delaying a pivot eats up scarce capital, shortening a venture’s runway.

创业者总是会不断遇到挫折。真正的创业者会拍拍灰尘，立刻重返战场。他们必须有决心和韧性。但如果毅力变成固执，创业者也许会无法分辨错误的开始，在他们的解决方案并不奏效时坚持不转型。延迟转型会消耗稀缺的资金，缩短企业的跑道。

Bring passion!

怀抱激情！

A burning desire to have a world-changing impact can power entrepreneurs through the most daunting challenges. It can also attract employees, investors, and partners who’ll help make their dreams a reality. But in the extreme, passion can translate into overconfidence—and a penchant to skip critical up-front research. Likewise, passion can blind entrepreneurs to the fact that their product isn’t meeting customer needs.

创业者希望改变世界的强烈欲望能帮助他们度过最令人生畏的挑战，也能吸引帮助他们实现梦想的雇员、投资人和合伙人。但在极端情况下，激情可以演变为过度自信，并因此跳过前期研究。同样地，激情也能蒙蔽创业者的双眼，让他们看不到自身产品无法满足顾客需求。  

Bootstrap!

省钱！

Because resources are limited, entrepreneurs must conserve them by being frugal and figuring out clever ways to make do with less. True enough, but if a start-up cannot consistently deliver on its value proposition because its team lacks crucial skills, its founders must decide whether to hire employees with those skills. If those candidates demand high compensation, a scrappy, frugal founder might say, “We’ll just have to do without them”—and risk being stuck with bad bedfellows.

由于资源有限，创业者必须节俭，动脑筋用更少的钱办更多的事。但如果创业公司由于缺乏具备关键技能的员工，无法持续提供价值定位，创始人必须决定是否要雇用具有这些技能的员工。如果这些人要求高工资，好斗且节俭的创始人也许会说“我们只能在没有这些人的情况下凑合了”，这样就有可能遭遇前文提到的伙伴糟糕的问题。

Grow!

增长！

Rapid growth attracts investors and talent and gives a team a great morale boost. This may tempt founders to curtail customer research and prematurely launch their product. Also, fast growth can put heavy demands on team members and partners. If a team has bad bedfellows, growth may exacerbate quality problems and depress profit margins.

快速增长能够吸引投资人和人才，也能提振团队士气。这也许会诱使创始人缩减顾客研究，过早推出产品。快速增长会面临巨大需求，会给团队成员和合伙人压力。如果团队有糟糕的伙伴，增长也许会加剧质量问题，降低利润空间。

It’s fashionable in start-up circles to speak glibly about failure as a badge of honor or a rite of passage—just another phase of an entrepreneur’s journey. Failure also takes a toll on the economy and society. A doomed venture ties up resources that could be put to better use. And it acts as a deterrent to would-be entrepreneurs who are more risk-averse, have financial obligations that make it hard to forgo a paycheck, or face barriers when raising capital—which is to say, many women and minorities.

创业圈很流行对失败侃侃而谈，就像失败是一种荣誉勋章或通关仪式，是创业之路的另一个阶段。失败也会给经济和社会带来损失。失败的企业浪费了本可用于其他地方的资源。失败也对很多潜在的创业者起到了震慑作用，包括更加厌恶风险的潜在创业者，有财务负担无法放弃工作的创业者，以及女性和少数族裔等募集资本障碍重重的创业者。

To be sure, failure will (and should) always be a reality for many entrepreneurs. Doing something new with limited resources is inherently risky. But by recognizing that many failures are avoidable and follow the same trajectory, we can reduce their number and frequency. The payoff will be a more productive, more diverse, and less bruising entrepreneurial economy.

失败的确将会（也应该）一直是很多创业者的现实。利用有限资源做一些创新的事本身就存在风险。但是，如果我们承认很多失败有同样的模式且可以避免，就可以减少失败的数量和频率，并获得更富生产力、更多样化和更少痛苦的创业经济。

汤姆·艾森曼(Tom Eisenmann) | 文

汤姆·艾森曼是哈佛商学院工商管理系Howard H.Stevenson教席教授，哈佛创新实验室Peter O. Cris主席，著有《创业公司缘何失败：创业成功的新路线图》（Why Startups Fail: A New Roadmap for Entrepreneurial Success）（2021年Currency出版社出版），文章改编自本书。

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本文有删节，原文参见《哈佛商业评论》中文版2021年5月刊。