Why would people who are starting up companies not bother with business plans?
There are several factors. Many, if not most, successful businesses get started in fields that are characterized by high turbulence or change, change that is not being generated by the entrepreneur. It’s exogenous change. And in those kinds of fields, first off, there’s very little information available with which to write a business plan. Take the classic case of Bill Gates and Paul Allen starting Microsoft in 1975. If they had tried to do a competitive analysis or a customer analysis, they wouldn’t have known who their competitors were or been able to do the classic comparison of strengths and weaknesses vis-à-vis their competition. And they wouldn’t have known who their customers were. When things are changing rapidly, there isn’t data.
