Lessons from Failure: Renting Hig-end Juwelry
by Diana Kander
At age 25, Laura Sanko was a founding member of a
startup that raised $3.5 Million from some world-famous investors and the
Founder’s Fund. The business model was simple: a website that rented
high-end jewelry for special occasions for a fraction of the retail value of
each piece. Three years later, the investment money was all gone and
while the site continued to operate, it had failed to meet the investors’
expectations. I sat down with Laura to figure out what went wrong.
Laura’s experience is not uncommon. Many
startups raise money before they’ve had an opportunity to test their
assumptions. As a result, they spend the money validating their ideas instead
of using it to execute a sound business model. Startups are all about
runway. Almost all startup failures are the result of founders running
out of resources to keep pursuing their ideas. The more runway you can give
your startup, the greater your chances of success. Laura’s experience could
have been a lot different if she and her team just had an extra year of capital
or – more specifically – if they had tested some of their assumptions before
spending their investors’ money.
For the last two years, Laura has been training as a
mixed martial artist full time. Today, she has an amateur record of 4-1
and is three months away from her first professional fight. She is also
launching a new company, Grassy Pants, a locally raised, grass fed, ground
steak company.
Copyright: Entrepreneurship.org 2013
