AMA with Luke Lang, Crowdcube Co-founder and CMO

[engineer]

@LukeLang

• If we include the 2019 cohort of businesses our failure rate stays at 15%, just under to be precise. We have around 850 funded businesses and 126 which unfortunately are no longer trading. The reason we excluded 2019 from the success/failure rate data is because we didn’t want to skew the statistics with lots of freshly funded businesses, with very low failure rates. The failure rate may feel like it’s accelerating but I believe that’s more a product of sheer volume of businesses we now fund. Looking at our portfolio on a annual cohort basis the percentage of failed businesses has reduced year on year since 2013. Hopefully, that makes sense.
• We’re constantly frustrated by the level of (or lack of) post funding communication by some of our Funded Club. Although some are great, many do not cut the mustard. We do periodically nudge, poke and prod every business to do updates and extol the virtues of doing this for the company. However, it is difficult for us to contractually enforce businesses to do updates. Offering benefits to good actors is a good idea so I’ll take that away and see whether there is anything we can do on that front to help shape better behaviour.

Thanks for sharing @LukeLang.

2020 will be a year many startup founders will want to forget.

Covid-19: layoffs at startups, opportunities, adapt or die - "only the paranoid survive"

“Bad companies are destroyed by crisis, Good companies survive them, Great companies are improved by them.” – Andy Grove (Intel co-founder) “Only the paranoid survive.” – Andy Grove’s book Found this write-up on LinkedIn: As someone who has gone through a fair share of ups and downs, here are some of my thoughts for start-up entrepreneurs on how they can weather this unprecedented storm. … Cut burn and conserve cash A nimble start-up should have the capability to readjust to new …

Hope you’re staying indoors !