Chapter 13. How to Reduce Risk
A startup is a human institution designed to deliver a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty.
Eric Ries
Being part of any startup business is inherently risky. The odds for success of any given venture-backed company are slim.
Unfortunately, there isn’t a linear path to success. The whole startup journey is an adventure full of many twists and turns, with no guarantees of fame and fortune. Every day you’re risking your own future on the power of your personal work ethic, market conditions, and other factors—some within your control, many outside of it—and hoping that your growth team will succeed in acquiring new customers and scaling up growth based on your success metrics.
I’m confident that fully embracing AI will lead to more rewarding outcomes than trying to drive growth without it. Embracing AI could help increase your probability for success because it accelerates your velocity of testing, learning, and making data-driven optimizations throughout the entire complex customer journey to better acquire, engage, retain, and monetize customers.
With great risk often comes great reward. There are failures, setbacks, and even complete reboots along the way, but if you don’t risk something, you’ll never gain anything. Great innovation comes from asking what could be and trying to mitigate the potential risks along the way.
In this chapter, we’ll discuss the key risks to beware of with AI and steps to take to help mitigate ...
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