The Startup Genome Project!

We believe an interdsciplinary approach is possible, where insights from a diverse set of fields and perspectives can be integrated into a personalized solution stack, that entrepreneurs can use on a daily basis to figure out what their goals should be, and recieve recommendations for resources they need to take the next step.

I believe we now have the foundations for this project to expand very rapidly. Similar to how Pandora broke music down into a few hundred attributes, we’ve created a taxonomy for startups, which allows us to classify them into different types. This approach helps us organize principles, tactics, and methodologies in relation to specific factors. When we define the factors these things depend on we can begin creating a system to manage the chaos and complexity of organizing the information about what makes startups successful. While the common wisdom seems to be that the number of factors is infinite or indefinable, our initial set of variables has brought a lot of clarity. 

The second foundational component of the Startup Genome was our realization that we could treat the startup as an organism and take many cues from the field of evo-devo biology. This approach allowed us to create developmental models of startups, where we can define the gating factors a startup needs to pass through in order to evolve. The developmental approach enables us to synthesize the models of many entrepreneurial thought leaders, such as Steve Blank, Eric Ries, Sean Ellis and Geoffrey Moore by making it possible to express at exactly what stage in the life cycle each method is relevant and how they relate to each other. 

Lastly, when we combine the classification system with the developmental approach we can create unique developmental models for every type of startup. This allows us to recommend the information, methodologies and contacts that are exactly relevant for what a startup is currently working on.