Anticipate Failure

The Entrepreneur's Guide to Navigating Uncertainty, Avoiding Disaster, and Building a Successful Business

Lak Ananth, CEO and Global Managing Partner, Next47
2022 International Book Awards Winner

Category: Business Technology

2022 NIEA Book Award Finalist

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.

A critically important book that will go a long way to help any entrepreneur get their venture off the ground, find their way past failure points, and get to ultimate success. Mohit Aron Founder & CEO, Cohesity, Co-Founder & CTO, Nutanix
Business failure is painful. In his excellent and timely book, Anticipate Failure, Lak Anath teaches the tricks to turn risks into opportunities and mistakes into learning experiences. Mårten Mickos CEO, HackerOne
Lak Anath is one of INSEAD’s senior alumni in the VC space, and this book offers valuable advice that is rare to come by. Entrepreneurs and business builders will truly appreciate this book. Claudia Zeisberger Professor of Entrepreneurship at INSEAD, Author of Mastering Private Equity: Transformation via Venture Capital, Minority Investments & Buyouts
Anticipate Failure paints a comprehensive and well-illustrated picture of the kinds of failure that can harm a business and its journey to success. I know a lot of founders, including myself, will find Lak’s insights very useful for their own journey. David Nothacker Co-Founder & CEO, sennder
I’ve started five companies. I wish I had a book like this when I founded my own startups—it would have been a huge benefit to me, my customers, and my companies. Bill Trenchard Partner, First Round Capital
A well-organized and engagingly written book about learning from losses. Kirkus Reviews

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.

Media Inquiries and Interviews: media@next47.com Press Release