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The avoidable startup failure: How promising companies lock in failure long before the money runs out, and what to do instead
Paperback
ISBN13: 9788269490312
Publisher: Growcraft
Published: Aug 28 2026
Pages: 180
Weight: 0.55
Height: 0.41 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
My startup had never looked stronger. The following year it went bankrupt.
Technology startups are risky by nature. A few become spectacular successes and shape how we think companies should be built. Most fail, and the industry has largely accepted that as the price of innovation.
Anjali Bhatnagar founded T rn and led it to become one of Norway's fastest-growing marketplaces. It generated more than NOK 120 million in transaction value across two countries in four years, backed by leading venture investors. In the fifth year it was hit by what looked from the outside like a perfect storm, and the company was gone.
After the bankruptcy, Anjali set out to understand what had really happened. Drawing on her training as a physicist, she retraced T rn's journey, studied other startups and analysed hundreds of post-mortems. She found that most companies had not failed because the idea was bad or the market was missing. They failed because they committed people, time and capital to assumptions that had never been properly tested.
This book offers a practical framework for finding the assumptions that matter most at each stage of a company's life, and testing them cheaply, before changing course becomes too costly. It helps founders, investors and boards separate the uncertainty inherent to innovation from the failures that come from committing too early.
The goal is not to eliminate risk. It is to stop spending years, talent and capital on questions that could have been answered while being wrong was still cheap.
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