Your Experience with Unexpected Events

I’m in the process of finishing a book concerning the impact of unexpected events on new technical ventures, roughly 70-90% of which fail within 5 years. Not simply a catalogue of such events, the book discusses how my teams and I reacted, and what were the outcomes. These stories illustrate the practice of certain values and approaches that increase the likelihood of success when encountering such events. This is a memoir based on my own personal experience in business and in life, but I’m interested in hearing about yours. Whether you are a Founder, CEO, Investor, or an employee involved in any aspected of a startup or early stage technical venture, I’d like to hear from you.

Many who have worked with me have heard me warn of the “inevitable unexpected event.” I can’t tell you exactly what it will be, or when it will occur, but I can almost guarantee it will. To be clear, these are not all negative events. Some manifest in the form of challenges, and others in the form of opportunities. What’s common is that they were never in your plans, never anticipated, and how you respond when they occur will likely determine success or failure of your business.  However, I want to be clear that these are relatively frequent occurrences, and thus different from the rare outlier events with outsized impacts described by Nassim Taleb in his book “The Black Swan.”

One example involves scaling up a manufacturing process only to find that you no longer are getting the same results, and you don’t know why. If you don’t figure out the source of the problem and rectify it then your business will go under. Another example involves negotiating a key partnership for your company for six months, with only one term remaining to be resolved, only to find out that the lead negotiator on the other side has quit their job and the entire deal is now in jeopardy. I’ll save my many other examples for my upcoming book, or for one of my seminars on this topic.

If you have such a story to share, and you’d like to have it considered for inclusion in a new book (with credit, of course, and a free copy of the book), please email a short synopsis to me at info@roseventures.net, with the subject line RE: new book. 

All you need to include is a sentence each describing 1) the unexpected event (challenge or opportunity that presented itself), 2) how you responded, and 3) what was the outcome. If selected then we can flush out a short story together that might be a few paragraphs to a page long.

Looking forward to hearing your experiences with the unknown and unexpected!