Obviously there are positives to working in the epicenter of innovation. But there are also disadvantages.

“Obviously there are positives to working in the epicenter of innovation. But there are also disadvantages. There is a groupthink mentality that goes on. Being based outside of Silicon Valley, you're not as subject to it.” - Peter Barris

One of the reasons I decided to take on what has now become a major project was that not only is a startup the best way to escape check-to-check living, but it brings to life new innovations, evolves our society and creates economic, social and educational expansion. There is perhaps no place more associated with entrepreneurship and society-changing innovation than Silicon Valley.?

Silicon Valley is a place where dreams can come true. Armed with little more than a bright idea and plenty of focus, drive, enthusiasm, discipline and optimism, it’s possible for those who live check-to-check, to change their future. I am proof it's possible to build a company and make your fortune,?without ever having to take orders or accept a paycheck from anyone else.?

Of course, there’s a catch. Silicon Valley might be a place where dreams come true, but it isn’t a place where everyone’s dreams come true. For every Google or Apple or Facebook, there are countless startups that fall by the wayside, and thousands of smart, hard-working entrepreneurs who wind up with more regrets than riches.

The Pulitzer Prize winning Alice Walker wisely said “Look closely at the present you are constructing: it should look like the future you are dreaming”

Silicon Valley’s definition of success is also narrow – unicorn, decacorn, hectocorn – or bust. That definition makes sense for investors: they’ll reap a bigger return from backing one unicorn than from a dozen smaller exits, so they’re happy to set sky-high goals even if it means some of the companies they back wind up failing as a result. However, when you position yourself as a unicorn, you’re locking yourself into a trajectory that requires raising large amounts of capital, growing incredibly rapidly, and satisfying an ever-growing array of benchmarks and metrics issued by investors who are only interested in your potential for delivering an enormous return on their investment. These businesses must always be in “hyper growth” which is equivalent to trying to ride a skateboard at 30 MPH – while you might make it on smooth asphalt, good luck if you hit a pebble! There is a high chance you will lose control of your company and your destiny through no fault of your own – no entrepreneurial journey occurs without hitting pebbles, let alone boulders, strewn across the road. As an entrepreneur, your goal isn’t to help your investors meet their quota of unicorns —?it’s to make your own company the best it can be, and to make smart decisions about the risk you’re taking on.?

The state of the ecosystem and what it promoted bothered me, so I went on a mission to understand more. The fact that startups are generally privately held and funded - meaning they have no obligation to disclose information about their successes and failures - meant I needed to do in-person interviews. Over the course of a 5-year study, I conducted over 1200 in-person interviews and correspondences with experts ranging from investors to entrepreneurs, accelerators, and virtually all of the early-stage ecosystem. In addition, my team and I studied articles and secondary media sources, data and stories. The research showed that about 40% of startups fail within two years of their launch, and nine out of 10 fail over the following 5 years with investors losing every cent.?

That’s a 90% overall failure rate for entrepreneurs and their startups in the first 5 years.?

Said another way, just one out of every 10/1 venture-backed startups delivers the projected growth used to justify their original investments.??

Investors understand and budget for that failure. They’re playing the long game, and know that not all of the entrepreneurs they back will ultimately succeed. Accelerators and early-stage angel investors often take a spray-and-pray approach to investing, accepting that just a few of the companies they back will ultimately take flight. Later-stage investors have less tolerance for risk, but still know that not all their portfolio companies will succeed.

But of course, if you’re a founder rather than an investor, you can’t afford to be quite so sanguine. It’s your company, your future, often your family and friends’ money and your dreams that are at stake, and this is your chance to make it work. If you’re going to take the plunge, you need to know exactly what you’re getting yourself into — and exactly what needs to be done in order to maximize your chances of survival and success. The simple truth on which StartupScience.io is grounded, is the fact that most businesses aren’t going to become unicorns and will be worse for wear if they try. For the far majority of entrepreneurs, it’s a smarter bet to stay focused on building a viable, valuable company, and to sell it at the peak of its worth for an amount that will fully justify all the time, money, and hard work put in along the way. However, prioritizing your exit doesn’t mean cutting corners or trying to build and flip a shoddy company. That’s a recipe for disaster, because acquirers aren’t na?ve and will not purchase a flawed startup. Instead, StartupScience.io is about staying laser-focused on efficiently building a viable company that is designed to attract investors and position you for a solid exit on a timetable that works for you.

I can’t promise you success. But StartupScience.io is the next best thing: it’s an instruction manual that can help you to realize the full value of your business, whether you are just starting out or are preparing your company for scale. If you absorb the information in the following pages, you’ll not only avoid becoming another dismal statistic by learning from the past but —?you’ll turn your company into something genuinely valuable, securing a strong exit (sale of your company) and giving you the freedom to pursue whatever opportunities come your way.

I’m a serial entrepreneur, and I’ve had a great deal of success, but I still get sweaty palms when I think back on my own startups. Starting a company is exhilarating and terrifying: even when you have a solid vision, at the end of the day, a moment will come when you have no choice but to step into the unknown, and commit yourself fully to the path you’ve chosen.

I’m writing this now because, thankfully, I figured out how to build a successful company. But like any first-time entrepreneur, I made plenty of mistakes along the way. In fact, I came perilously close to hitting the bottom. AffiliateTraction, my affiliate marketing technology enabled service, gained some momentum early on, and we signed up giants like Toy “R” Us and Forever 21 as our tentpole customers. But along the way, I took on too much risk, and underestimated the time to profitability. I made some bad hires. And when the market crashed in 2008, my company almost collapsed.?

In one of the hardest moments of my life, I had to lay off 65 employees during a recession. Watching their faces and knowing what this meant was a painful experience I will never forget. Then I had to look at my wife and move my 2-year-old and infant into an old moldy studio apartment, relocate the company HQ into a barn, and rally a handful of my remaining employees to rebuild my company from the ground up. I was only able to pay my bills by going to garage sales, buying items, cleaning them up, and selling them at the local market at 5 AM.?

While I was rebuilding AffiliateTraction, I became a student of the operating systems of the past. 6 Sigma, 4DX, Agile, Lean, OGSM, OKRs and everything I could find, testing, tweaking and applying components of each to AffiliateTraction, and things eventually got better. In fact, they got much better. We signed new customers, including Skechers, American Apparel, and Guess. We hired new employees, and brought back some of the old crew. Eventually, 17 years after we’d launched, my company was initially acquired by eBay Marketing Solutions; then moved to PepperJam, and most recently the combined company was acquired by PHG and is now one of the top 3 affiliate marketing providers in the world.

I’m incredibly proud of what we built. I still remember waking up at 3am on the morning of the acquisition, checking my bank account, and seeing commas — a truly life-changing amount of money. I knew that after all the ups and downs, I’d made it.?

But I also knew that with a bit more guidance and a better idea of what was required to succeed, I could have made it faster. And with fewer white-knuckle, incredibly stressful moments along the way.

The Silicon Valley paradigm (invest in many and see who survives) only helps a few.? But as entrepreneurs, we can design our own success, and BOSS provides a systematic way of achieving that success.