Synopses & Reviews
Review
“Peter Cohan has created a logic of competitive strategy that speaks to the real challenges of entrepreneurs trying to create new organizations that are more likely to succeed.”
—Leonard A. Schlesinger, President, Babson College
“I can say unequivocally that the Hungry Start-up Strategy tips work! Thank you, Peter, for guiding us to a business model that supports our social mission.”
—Carol Barash, PhD, founder and CEO, Story to College
“A guide that will help the entrepreneur sort the urgent from the important and navigate the choppy waters of an early-stage venture.”
—Howard Stevenson, Sarofim-Rock Professor of Business Administration, Emeritus, Harvard Business School
“Cohan distills his expertise into a stunningly helpful and immensely practical book filled with a variety of tools that any entrepreneur will find instantly illuminating and useful.”
—John Harthorne, founder and CEO, MassChallenge, Inc.
Review
Management consultant and venture capitalist Cohan (Export Now: Five Keys to Entering New Markets) tries to even the formidable odds facing fledgling entrepreneurs, advising readers to examine with a strategic eye their chosen field of competition and thus avoid the errors that can doom a business from the start. Not just preaching to the choir, he shows how this has been accomplished by such entrepreneurs as BrewDogs cofounder James Watt and T2 Biosystems CEO Joe McDonough. He also shares their accumulated expertise on such essentials as setting short-terms goals, picking the right field, raising funds, and building a team. While some figures and diagrams appear throughout the book, Cohans writing remains remarkably free of the consultant buzzwords and charts that can make works of this type not only challenging but unhelpful. Instead, Cohan delivers his advice in a no-nonsense, direct manner that readers will appreciate. He also explores the challenges of satisfying customers, remaining open to change, and meeting capital providers demands. Entrepreneurs hungry for success will welcome Cohans guidance on gaining the edge necessary to compete and thrive in business. (Nov.) Publishers Weekly
Review
“Peter Cohan has created a logic of competitive strategy that speaks to the real challenges of entrepreneurs trying to create new organizations that are more likely to succeed.”
—Leonard A. Schlesinger, President, Babson College
“I can say unequivocally that the Hungry Start-up Strategy tips work! Thank you, Peter, for guiding us to a business model that supports our social mission.”
—Carol Barash, PhD, founder and CEO, Story to College
“A guide that will help the entrepreneur sort the urgent from the important and navigate the choppy waters of an early-stage venture.”
—Howard Stevenson, Sarofim-Rock Professor of Business Administration, Emeritus, Harvard Business School
“Cohan distills his expertise into a stunningly helpful and immensely practical book filled with a variety of tools that any entrepreneur will find instantly illuminating and useful.”
—John Harthorne, founder and CEO, MassChallenge, Inc.
If the HBS strategy paradigm is of diminishing relevance to the new venture and therefore a growing share of the economy, what is the replacement? Peter Cohan provides his answer to this question in Hungry Start-up Strategy. While HBSs Porter advocates a highly structured, even dispassionate approach to an already established business, Mr. Cohan promotes personal passion and customer connection to creating the business. His focus is on the “six key start-up choices—setting goals, picking markets, raising capital, building teams, gaining market share, and adapting to change.” By my own research, advisory experience, and entrepreneurial involvements, I have gained first person insight into the veracity of the very premise of the Hungry Start-up Strategy. Congruent with the style he advocates, Peter Cohans book is pragmatic and personalized, more compressed than comprehensive, sufficiently succinct that the would-be entrepreneur can read and digest it in an afternoon, then pull an all nighter crafting the strategy to launch the hungry start-up. -- New York Journal of Books
Review
There is growing evidence that the intellectual leadership of the strategy discipline has migrated from Soldiers Field, the place of Harvard Business School (HBS), to other places. HBS promulgates certain “currently useful generalizations,” which are more useful to the large corporate enterprise than to the entrepreneurial, emerging companies that disrupt the status quo, drive economic growth, and create jobs.
If the HBS strategy paradigm is of diminishing relevance to the new venture and therefore a growing share of the economy, what is the replacement? Peter Cohan provides his answer to this question in Hungry Start-up Strategy.
While HSBs Porter advocates a highly structured, even dispassionate approach to an already established business, Mr. Cohan promotes personal passion and customer connection to creating the business. His focus is on the “six key start-up choices—setting goals, picking markets, raising capital, building teams, gaining market share, and adapting to change.”
Whereas in the Porter view of the world marketing, finance, and human resources are generic staff support functions, the entrepreneurial style that Peter Cohan chronicles recognizes these as critical, creative, and customized.
Goals should be important, relatable, and stimulate value creation. The author advocates a real options approach to goals, embracing defining the opportunity, proving business viability, and expanding business scope, with subsequent steps pursued only after the prior has been successfully completed.
His book is based on his own experience as a strategy consultant, including a stint working with the esteemed Michael Porters company, plus involvement as a venture investor, with a 50-50 track record: the successful ventures $2 billion market value creation offsetting the losses; research re factors causing some internet ventures to fail and others to succeed; and extensive field interviews with entrepreneurs and financiers.
His target is the individual drawn to do something personally fulfilling and intrinsically rewarding, as exemplified by the observation by James Watt, who after just two weeks at his first law firm job, quit and shortly thereafter cofounded BrewDog, because “The last thing I wanted to do with the next forty years of my life was to sit behind a desk, sorting out paperwork and other peoples problems, constrained by a nine-to-five and a smart casual wardrobe.”
By my own research, advisory experience, and entrepreneurial involvements, I have gained first person insight into the veracity of the very premise of the Hungry Start-up Strategy.
Indicative of the importance of the start-up to the economy, is that all new jobs are created by new and growing companies—500,000 are started each year in the US, while larger corporations added no new net jobs—those start-ups derive 97% to as much as 99% of their capital from sources other than venture capital.
In application, the capital-raising sequence involves bootstrap/friends and family sources to pay for the prototype; next, angel investors to finance building the customer base; and finally, venture capital to fund the expansion.
Considering the many facets of and factors influencing the capital raising process, the essential teaching is that the entrepreneur should “figure out which skills your start-up needs from a capital provider and pick the one that best delivers those skills.”
Exemplifying the advocated approach supports how the founders of Oyster, which “sends investigators out to hotels around the world, to evaluate and rate them so travelers can make informed decisions about where to stay,” supported their goal to build a billion dollar market value company by referencing the total market capitalization of online travel companies of $50 billion and reasoning that if Oyster could capture a small slice, say 2%, it could be worth a billion dollars.
This book aspires to equip its readers to optimize how to balance sleep and time, a topic not customarily addressed in business schools such as HBS: “For a hungry start-ups founders the most pressing daily tradeoff is between sleeping and getting stuff done. And if that start-up is bootstrapping itself, odds are good that theyre burning through their own cash.
“This means that unless these founders are spending their almost continuous awake-time getting the right stuff done, then their venture will never reach the point where it can raise the capital needed to hire help so the founders can get a bit more sleep.
“Simply put, the people sitting around the start-ups table must produce more than they consume, otherwise the start-up will perish. This means that an entrepreneur has an insatiable hunger to invite only the right people to the start-up table - and make sure that no wrong people slip in.”
Substitute place for start-up and you have in the authors words an eloquent expression of the essence of place excellence in a highly competitive environment: the value added imperative to be viable in the Darwinian survival-of-the-fittest 21st century times that compress economic species survival determinations from generations to what can seem to be nanoseconds.
While the hungry start-up mindset is the antithesis of the corporate mentality, the author includes a helpful discussion of guidelines for big companies that would engage in entrepreneurial endeavors—or at least might aspire to be more entrepreneurial in their mindset. Further, he provides counsel to individuals working in large organizations who might have wish to more creative in their work.
Especially informative is the straight talk from capital sources and a most useful compendium of resources, including key questions to guide decisions. In evaluating a founder, an investor wants an industry thought leader, will to win, high clock speed, risk manager, and A-team builder. Market potential is tested by unrelieved customer pain, viable business model, strong supporting trends, and passionate pioneers.
This is not a rigorous study, complemented by comprehensive literature review and data analytics intended to be statistically significant representations of the attributes of what is studied. Rather, is his personalized distillation of how the start-up world really works. Key points are reinforced by case studies of and extracts from interviews with start-up entrepreneurs.
Congruent with the style he advocates, Peter Cohans book is pragmatic and personalized, more compressed than comprehensive, sufficiently succinct that the would-be entrepreneur can read and digest it in an afternoon, then pull an all nighter crafting the strategy to launch the hungry start-up New York Journal of Books
Synopsis
After years of working with startups Peter Cohan discovered that, contrary to the conventional wisdom entrepreneurs start companies to feed their hunger to create the world they want to live in--not to maximize shareholder value or create a fortune for financiers. Based on first-hand work and research with hundreds of start-ups, Peter Cohan has created a strategy handbook to allow entrepreneurs to start small and finish big. He emphasizes that strategy for start-ups is always short-term strategy--often with a six-month window or less. By keeping focus on the short-term, entrepreneurs can keep their visions--and their companies--under their own control. The game is to postpone any need for outside finance for as long as possible.
Most existing strategy guides are geared to larger companies and are of limited use to small startups. Cohan's strategic model focuses on six decision points where the strategy for small companies is radically different than that for large compenies: 1. Setting Goals, 2. Picking Markets, 3. Raising Capital, 4. Building Teams, 5. Gaining Market Share, and 6, Adapting to Change.
Synopsis
Entrepreneurs are hungry. But it's not just because they're living on ramen and adrenaline. Peter Cohan has found they're driven by a hunger to create a working world in which they want to live--something they have to do without money or staff. No business strategy guide has addressed this unique combination of aspirations and challenges--until now.
Cohan focuses on six key start-up choices--setting goals, picking markets, raising capital, building teams, gaining market share, and adapting to change--explaining how and why start-ups must make very different choices than established companies. For each area, he provides a decision-making approach and lively case studies of what actual entrepreneurs have done to cook up a thriving business from scratch.
Synopsis
The Entrepreneur’s Meal Ticket
Entrepreneurs are hungry. But it’s not just because they’re living on ramen and adrenaline. Peter Cohan has found they’re driven by a hunger to create a working world in which they want to live—something they have to do without money or staff. No business strategy guide has addressed this unique combination of aspirations and challenges—until now.
Cohan focuses on six key start-up choices—setting goals, picking markets, raising capital, building teams, gaining market share, and adapting to change—explaining how and why start-ups must make very different choices than established companies. For each area, he provides a decision-making approach and lively case studies of what actual entrepreneurs have done to cook up a thriving business from scratch.
About the Author
Peter Cohan is principal of Peter S. Cohan & Associates, a management consulting and venture capital firm. Cohan teaches strategy to undergraduate and MBA students. Since May 2002, Cohan has served as an executive-in-residence at Babson, advising MBA teams in their consulting work with companies through the Babson Consulting Alliance Program (BCAP) and Management Consulting Field Experience (MCFE) programs. He has previously taught at Stanford University’s Industry Thought Leaders program, Columbia University’s Senior Executive Program, MIT, the University of Hong Kong, the National University of Singapore, and other universities in Europe and Asia. He has also conducted management development programs in the US and Asia sponsored by leading corporations, such as IBM, Intel, Hewlett Packard, Oracle, Fidelity Investments, and Procter & Gamble.
Cohan is a frequent commentator on developments in economics, technology, and finance. He has been a guest on ABC’s Good Morning America, CBS’s Evening News and Early Show, CNN, CNBC, PBS’s Wall $treet Week, and New England Cable News (NECN). He has been quoted in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, Barron’s, Red Herring, Time, BusinessWeek, Fortune, and Newsweek International. His own monthly investment newsletter is The Cohan Letter.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Ch. 1. Setting Goals
Ch. 2. Picking Markets
Ch. 3. Raising Capital
Ch. 4. Building Teams
Ch. 5. Gaining Share
Ch. 7. Adapting to Change
Ch. 8. Implications for Start-up CEOs
Ch. 9. Implications for Established Companies
Ch. 10. Implications for Start-up Investors
Appendix--Analysis of the Interviews