As a follow up to Startup Weekend, this evening I attended a casual networking event at Blackbox Mansion, hosted by Bjoern Lasse. Blackbox is one of the hottest seed accelerators in the valley and this evening’s event was a great continuation of conversations around the newest startups on the scene. Over the past few days I’ve also learned about the Startup Genome Project, which is a research based process for benchmarking startups and identifying which stage they are at to understand how best they should grow/move forward to be successful. While it’s potentially enlightening to have a classification system to help see patterns and trends (especially given the proliferation of startups over the past several years) it is also a bit controversial to use this labeling system. I see startups as living organizations, continuously evolving and adjusting to their environments, so I bet they move back and forth between different stages throughout their growth process.
Given that “More than 90% of startups fail, due primarily to self-destruction rather than competition,” my take is that more data is better to help determine and prevent those self-destructive tendencies. Overall, TONS of great information and cool infographics on their site- check it out and maybe you can learn more about your startup.
Bjoren Lasse also has an interesting blog post from Oct 2010 discussing some of his thoughts on traditional vs. disruptive technologies around education. He ends with a key point stating, “if you want to empower and accelerate this process then you need to anticipate a completely new education ecosystem and value chain.”
I’m anxious for us to discover this new education ecosystem…
edcrunch 