Every founder has a growth story, and it tends to have the same shape. A few early users who love the thing. Then word spreads. Then the early majority arrives, the curve bends upward, and it takes o... Read More

Every founder runs tests. They build a landing page and watch the signups. They show the demo and listen for the gasp. They ask ten customers if they would pay and count the yeses.Most of those tests... Read More

Every founder gets handed the same advice. Read the playbook. Study the frameworks. Watch the talks.The best founders did all of that. It is not where their judgment came from. Their judgment came fr... Read More

For most of the early history of high-tech marketing, the adoption of a new product was drawn as a smooth curve.The picture came from Everett Rogers, whose 1962 book Diffusion of Innovations synthesi... Read More

In 2000, two scholars published a short paper that told an entire field what it was for.The field was entrepreneurship research. The scholars were Scott Shane and Sankaran Venkataraman. The paper was... Read More

For most of the twentieth century, entrepreneurship research had a problem it could not name.It studied entrepreneurs. It studied opportunities. It studied outcomes. It produced a steady stream of fi... Read More

 Eleven essays in, the series has covered ten thinkers. (Schumpeter, Darwin, Kahneman, Ries, Drucker, Christensen, March, Blank, Dosi, Sarasvathy.)Each piece stood alone. That was the design. Each th... Read More

Herbert Simon did not set out to study entrepreneurs.He set out to understand how people actually make decisions, as opposed to how economists assumed they did. What he found changed the behavioral s... Read More

The Foundations of Innovation Series  A year-long series on the ideas that built the startup world and the one idea still missing from them all. For nearly a century, the greatest minds in economics,... Read More

In 1982, an Italian economist published a paper that changed how a generation of researchers thought about technological change.Giovanni Dosi was working through a problem that Schumpeter had named b... Read More