Startups are not scaled down versions of companies

A common mistake across founders is that practices that work in large corporate firm can be scaled down to match a startup's size. However, startups are not smaller versions of companies, but a completely different organization.

The five elements that make a business are missing, the role of the startup is to identify customers, meet their demands with a product and validate whether that can become a repetitive business in order to scale.

Therefore, metrics that are used by large companies may not be appropriate to understand a startup.

For example, the Business Model Canvas, does not assume any iteration, and gives no room to customer or product discovery. If we present to investors a roadmap on how we are going to create a 10X return, we may end up believing such roadmap exists and try to stick to it.