麦肯锡（McKinsey）：艰难抉择-欧洲增长最快的初创企业如何成为独角兽（2022）（英文版）（8页）.pdf

1、Technology,Media&Telecommunications PracticeHard choices:How Europes fastest-growing start-ups become unicornsJust one in ten start-ups valued at$100 million grows to$1 billion within four years.Here are five trade-offs they made to get there.November 2022 Jasmin Merdan/Getty Imagesby Kim Baroudy,Gi

2、acomo Dolci,Sid Ramtri,and Harry Schiff Earning a$100 million valuation is an exceptional achievement.In all of Europe,only about 850 start-ups reached this milestone between 2010 and 2017.Yet these“centaurs”have little time to celebrate.The venture capital(VC)firms that invest in them expect their

3、value to reach$1 billion or moreand to do so quickly(Exhibit 1).Less than one in ten of them manage this feat in under four years.Why is it so hard for already successful start-ups to maintain their rapid pace of growth?Earlier this year,we surveyed and interviewed dozens of founders,top executives,

4、and board members of 100 scale-stage European start-ups to understand the strategic decisions and best practices that differentiated the fastest growers from their peers(see sidebar“About our research”).What quickly became clear was that scale-up leaders struggle with making trade-offs.When we asked

5、 founders and executives to name their biggest mistakes,39 percent(the largest group)described a failure to focus attention and resources in the right placesor a failure to focus at all.In recent years,excess liquidity has allowed scale-ups to put off making such trade-offs,but fundamental value cre

6、ation has always required tough decisions among competing priorities.This is a universal lesson that applies across business types,economic cycles,and capital environments.Through our research,we have identified principles to guide leaders of European scale-ups through some of the critical trade-off