Anticipate
Failure
The Entrepreneur's Guide to Navigating Uncertainty, Avoiding Disaster, and Building a Successful Business
Lak Ananth, CEO and 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 N47, 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
About Lak
Great products don't iterate on what exists. They make everything before them feel obsolete. I've spent my career seeking builders who understand this distinction and have the courage to reimagine entire categories when the right technology inflection arrives.
My journey started young, tinkering with electronics and building products just to see if I could make them work. In middle school, I built an electronic quiz game and programmed databases in BASIC to catalog components. That early builder instinct led me to Silicon Valley as an engineer during the dotcom era, where I learned firsthand what it takes to build internet-scale software.
Through years of investing in and acquiring technology companies, I've developed pattern recognition for that unmistakable moment when an early product captures genuine user love and hints at something transformational. I've witnessed this alongside builders at companies like Adallom, AuraSell, Meraki, Thoughtspot, VAST, and many others. Two investments exemplify what I seek: Verkada reimagined physical security by leveraging cloud and ML to create delightful products that incumbents simply couldn't match. Tractian transformed industrial maintenance through the convergence of low-cost sensors, ML models, and cloud connectivity.
What drives my investment approach is finding builders with exceptional taste, judgment, and execution ability. They see how technology shifts create openings in stagnant markets. They build products that don't just solve problems but fundamentally change how work gets done.
If you're building something that's already showing early user love in a huge category, especially leveraging AI's transformational potential, I'd love to connect. Let's explore how your product vision can reshape an entire industry.
Ideapress Publishing is an independent publisher of brilliant business and non-fiction books by some of the world’s leading minds.
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