Why I wrote a book about startup failure
A few months after my company went down, I went looking for what I had missed. I found a pattern.
I did not set out to write a book about startup failure. I set out to understand my own.
I built a company called Tørn. A marketplace for surplus building materials. Top VCs backed us. In four years we got to 120 million NOK in revenue across two countries. Strong team. Real market. Numbers moving in the right direction.
And we failed.
Not because we weren’t working hard. We were. Not because the market wasn’t real. It was. We failed because we had committed too much, too early, to things we had never actually confirmed. The signs were there long before the money ran out. Nobody asked the question that would have caught it. Not me. Not our investors. Not our board.
After Tørn closed, I kept asking myself one question. When did this actually start going wrong? The answer was not where I expected. Not the Sweden launch. Not the big round. Not any of the decisions that looked like the cause. It was earlier. Somewhere I had not been looking.
So I went looking. And once I started, I saw the same in companies all around me.
I came to Norway to do a PhD in Physics, and after finishing I worked across a range of tech and other fields. Even though I have not worked directly with physics for more than twenty years, a physicist way of thinking never really leaves you.
What physics teaches you, more than anything, is how to take a complex system apart in your head. You look at the parts, how they connect, where the load is concentrating. What looks like a one-off is usually a pattern in disguise.
I did not use that physicist’s lens while I was inside Tørn. I used it afterwards. And what I found was not a sequence of unique failures, which is what it looks like from the inside. I saw one pattern. Same shape across different companies, different industries, different amounts of money raised.
A pattern that almost always runs its course. And almost always could have been caught early.
Tørn went down exactly a year ago.
In the months after, a lot of people came to me. Founders, mostly. They thought my experience could help them. Some wanted to hire me full time. I told them, honestly, that they should be careful with the money they had just raised. I had built a programme that could get them growth ready in six to eight weeks. Cheaper. Faster. Easier to back out of if it wasn’t working.
The programme came out of work I had been doing with ideas from Alex M H Smith and Matt Lerner, applied to startups that were past MVP and trying to scale. I ran it. It worked. The results were really good.
So that programme turned out to be my own MVP. And like every other startup, I had to find a cost effective distribution of that product.
This is where it got interesting.
My first clients had come to me. They found me. When I went out to find more of them, I ran straight into the problem my book is about. I had a bit of traction. I was about to start building around it. And the underlying demand was not as solid as the first wave had made it look.
I had walked into my own meta pattern.
My potential clients, the founders who had just raised, felt great. Cash in the bank, story confirmed, time to execute. They felt no urgency for any help. The founders running short of cash felt only one thing was missing, and it was more cash. It was hard to convince them of the fact that failure starts when everything looks good, long before they run out of money or have to raise again on a declining valuation.
I thought investors would feel the problem more. I was wrong. Investors operate inside a portfolio logic that is counting on failure from the start. Help a single company avoid a preventable mistake and the maths of the fund does not change. State funds are getting tied more and more closely to those same VCs, even as the track record of deployed capital gets weaker every year.
The pattern I had seen in companies, I was now seeing in the system around them. Same shape. Different scale.
If you stop and look at it, it is genuinely strange. Maybe this is Norway in a nutshell. Despite having a lot, still want more. And not making what we already have work.
So that was my situation. A product that worked. A market that could not feel the problem the product solved. A system structured in a way that quietly rewards not asking.
My advice to others, usually, is this.
You cannot make people care about what you care about.
One option was to walk away. To take the consulting work I was being offered and let the bigger question go.
I decided otherwise.
There is another side of me that cringes at all kinds of waste. That side could not keep watching this much capital, talent and opportunity going to nothing.
So I decided to write a book instead.
The advisory practice is still there for the founders and investors who want to do the real work of creating successful companies. But the book had to come first. Otherwise the work I was being asked to do was always going to need convincing, over and over again, for a problem that should be obvious and plain in sight.
The book is called The Avoidable Startup Failure. It comes out in a few months. You can sign up to be told when it is ready at https://anjali.no/book
If you are a founder or investor who recognises something in this piece and wants to talk, you can reach me at www.anjali.no and contact@anjali.no.
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