I've been juggling several interesting books - and one of them is "Startups that Work - The 10 Critical Factors That will Make or Break a New Company"

It's an interesting book, written by Joel Kurtzman (with Glenn Rifkin) based on work by Joel and a research team from PricewaterhouseCoopers which studied 350 companies and interviewed hundreds of venture capitalists, CEOs, boards of directors, and angel investors over four years about the success path of technology oriented startups.

It's interesting work, but it does read like a "big consulting company" summary and I found it a little hard to figure out how to make it actionable!

However, they did a nice job of breaking it into 3 main sections: 

• Strategy
• Resources
• Performance

In each of these categories, they identified 3 Axes of Value and this is a nice summary of key elements the entrepreneur needs to contemplate:

• Strategy
• Market Size
• Competitive Position
• Business Model
• Resources
• Cash Flow
• Investor Value Contributed
• Strength of the Management Team
• Performance
• Product Development
• Channels/Alliances
• Customer Acquisition

One key insight the book did offer that the winning startups tend to be very successful at customer acquisition, product development, and having a strong management team.