Anticipate Failure
The Entrepreneur's Guide to Navigating Uncertainty, Avoiding Disaster, and Building a Successful Business
Lak Ananth, CEO and Global Managing Partner, Next47
Category: Business Technology
Category: Business Technology
About Anticipate Failure
History is filled with products that were predicted to disrupt markets and change our lives forever. Until they didn’t. What if their creators could have anticipated their own flops? In this groundbreaking book, Lak Ananth, CEO of global venture capital firm Next47, reveals why often game-changing innovations still fizzle out. Anticipate Failure starts with the understanding that building a business based on innovation is a perilous endeavor, where big and small missteps are always around the corner. Taking you on a journey through a riveting collection of high-profile innovation failures, this book examines the root causes for why a brilliant idea is never enough. Through a series of never-before-heard stories and interviews with some of the most successful founders and executives in the world, Ananth takes the dual role of a coach and trusted companion to extract insightful lessons from high-profile failures and share them with the reader in an easy to digest format. Anticipate Failure is a brutally honest roadmap for any business founder, executive, or manager to conquer their toughest challenges, change how they innovate, and launch a product or business that actually succeeds.
About Lak
Lak is the founding CEO and Global Managing Partner of Next47. He has spent his career in service to the entrepreneurial pursuit, identifying industry changing disruptions and acting on them as an investor or acquirer. Lak’s investment focus is on applications of AI/ML, vertical SaaS, robotics, mobility, and other emerging areas of deep tech.
Prior to Next47, Lak founded and built Hewlett Packard Pathfinder, bringing together venture investing and revenue-generating business development for portfolio companies from HP customers. He was an investor in Adallom (acquired by Microsoft), HortonWorks (acquired by Cloudera), and Mesosphere. Lak also previously worked in strategy and corporate development at Cisco Systems, where he led the acquisitions of Meraki and Starent Networks, and invested in Control4.
After cutting his teeth as an engineer working with startups during the dot-com era, Lak has enormous respect for the passion, vision, and tenacity of entrepreneurs. As an investor, he believes in establishing mutual trust with founders, so when critical business decisions need to be made, he can support them in making the best choices for building world-class new businesses.
Lak is also the author of Anticipate Failure, a brutally honest roadmap for any business founder, executive, or manager to conquer their toughest challenges, change how they innovate, and launch a product or business that actually succeeds. Lak holds an MBA from INSEAD and The Wharton School of Business. He is also a Kauffman Fellow (Class 12).
Ideapress Publishing is an independent publisher of brilliant business and non-fiction books by some of the world’s leading minds.