17 Startup Mistakes

John Osher is the epit­ome of the “ser­ial entre­pre­neur”. After sell­ing his toy com­pany — CAP Toys — to Has­bro in 1997 for more than $120 mil­lion this is what he did:

“I decided I’d make a list of every­thing I’d done wrong and [had] seen other entre­pre­neurs do wrong, I wanted to make a com­pany that didn’t make any of these mis­takes. I wanted to see if I could come up with the per­fect company.”

He then pro­duced 17 Mis­takes Start-Ups Make and per­son­ally used the list to cre­ate another com­pany he later sold to Proc­ter and Gam­ble for $475 million.