Startup Decision Making

A frequent question that confounds private companies is whether they should go public or remain open to only select investors; however, in recent years, entrepreneurs and aspiring businessmen have started shifting their focus from the traditional foundation these kinds of companies are built on.

In many industries, younger generations are now gravitating towards the prospect of founding a startup company; this recent trend doesn’t provide fewer problems, just different ones. Some decisions involve broad, overarching issues, such as whether a startup should keep its options open or whether scaling up a company is best done rapidly or consistently. Other choices are more specific to a startup; for example, a Forbes article from
2018 on startup decision-making mentions basic principles like understanding the causes behind the profit their product makes. However, the article delves a little deeper into specific traps a startup might fall into, such as calculating risk and basing their probability of success on what other, different startup companies have previously accomplished, as well as not becoming overdependent on data, and completely comprehending the correlation in the variables a company finds.

What places a startup under more pressure than other companies when making decisions is the fact that a startup company is designed to, ideally, grow exponentially and eventually beyond the founder into a much larger company. This search for a business model that can be scaled up enforces a “go big or go home” mentality among startup founders, and buying into that too much is what can bury a startup before it even gets off the ground. Because resources are usually relatively few and far between in a startup’s
genesis, one wrong decision has the devastating potential to take founders back to square one, or even worse, completely tank the idea for good.

Consequently, everyone is now racing to find the best template to build a successful startup on; research from Wharton and NY found that startups with a single founder, as opposed to multiple founders, are more successful in the long run, and articles are frequently trying to come up with a magic formula to consistently manufacture success for any potential startup, yours truly included.

The simple fact is that it’s already unlikely for different companies, whether private or public, to have the same decision-making process, and when startups are consistently trying to fill a new market and find innovation in business, it certainly more than stands to reason that the thought process behind each startup will never be the same. However, the key to any template for a startup’s success is to not get overwhelmed by the pressure of expectations, and to not panic when growth is not as pronounced as founders would like. With the right decisions, startups will consistently fulfill their potential for growth, no matter how small they start.