Innovation & Entrepreneurship

Only 9% of deals return 10x or above on invested capital.

Just 6% of startup pitches to VCs result in investment

45% of investments fail, or don’t achieve more than a 2x return on investment.

25% of investments make a 2-5x return.

Only 9% of deals return 10x or above on invested capital.

Top 11 tech trends to watch in 2023 (CB Insights)

'MVP stands for Minimum Viable Product. In the context of a startup, it refers to the earliest version of a product that is released to the market. This product is not fully developed, but it has enough features to attract early customers and gather valuable feedback that can be used to improve the product.

The goal of an MVP is to test the viability of the product and to gather feedback from potential customers as quickly and efficiently as possible so that the startup can make decisions about how to move forward with development.’

Europe’s startup hubs ranked (our study tour destinations are Berlin, Stockholm, and soon, Paris — so we’re doing pretty well!)

The five great questions everyone can ask in the early stages of user interviews: 

1. What is the hardest part about this [problem]? Dropbox, the problem was how to share files, what is the hardest part about working on a group project on a school computer? This begins an open-ending conversation, and you can learn specific pain points, such as file-sharing or access management. Just like this, it has to be a real pain point. 
2. Tell me about the last time when you encountered that problem… The goal is to extract context around the circumstances when the users have faced that problem. For the Dropbox example, which class was it? How many students were involved? You want to accurately picture the scenario. Remember real-life past problems. 
3. Why was this hard? Why was the file-sharing hard? You’ll hear many different things from different people and all of those can be improvements that can be made. Maybe emailing the files with each other created duplicates, how can we prevent them? In general, customers don’t buy the What, they buy the Why. 
4. What, if anything, have you done to try to solve the problem? If the customers are not exploring potential solutions to their problems, it’s possible the problem that you are trying to solve is not a severe problem for your customers. Is the person who has this problem, already trying to solve this? What tools did they use? And what other possible solutions were there? This will give you a reference to what your product will be compared against. 
5. What don’t you love about the solutions you’ve tried? This is the beginning of your understanding, of what the features are for your better solutions. But note the question is not what are the features you want? that is hypothetical. Again, by knowing this we can win that comparison.
   

Y Combinator Eric Migicovsky — How to Talk to Users