Next week, I start at a new employer, Gritd, to make startups more successful. But why do I think this organisation is ideally suited to grow startups? I’m happy to explain that to you in this blog post.
If startups succeeded more often, it would dramatically increase global economic growth. Startups may seem to mean little to the economy compared to large multinationals, but research shows that a large part of job growth is driven by technology startups.
It has never been easier nor cheaper to start a startup thanks to the latest technologies, think cloud hosting, automatic ad bidding, on-demand logistics and software as a service. As a result, the pace of change is accelerating. With the waves of disruption coming faster and faster, a company can only ensure continuity by regularly adapting itself to the environment. Hence, corporate startups are also becoming increasingly important.
The growing economic importance of startups, along with reduced barriers, has led to an explosion of interest in entrepreneurship and innovation worldwide. All over the world, new ecosystems are being built with a wide range of startup programmes. Even at the individual level, people worldwide appear to be increasingly choosing entrepreneurship as a career path.
But despite the growing economic importance of startups, and the numerous accelerators, we are yet to understand the patterns of successful startup creation. More than 90% of startups fail. For the less than 10% of startups that do succeed, most encounter multiple near-failure experiences along the way. Simply put, we are just not very good creating innovative, scalable companies.
For this reason, I am joining Gritd: an organisation whose main goal is to significantly grow more startups into scale-ups. This company does data analysis of startups to understand what they can improve. By using a scan, Gritd can help entrepreneurs make more conscious choices that substantially increase their chances of success.
Most entrepreneurs don’t know exactly which direction to take, resulting in a fragmented focus. They are bombarded with conflicting advice, which is paralysing. At the same time, startups are collecting much more quantitative and qualitative data than before.
Gritd has built an algorithm to interpret this data to help entrepreneurs make better decisions. There is often a lack of common language and tools in the startup landscape. At Gritd, they want to change that by offering a proven framework. Moreover, they offer training courses that help both entrepreneurs and startup advisers to apply insights from data in practice. How cool is that?
So not only does Gritd help startups grow consistently, but most importantly, they are data-driven. Because this appeals to me, I chose to work for Gijs and Stephan’s company. I start this new job next Monday. I am looking forward to it immensely! 😃
