Feb 3, 2026

Reaching the Chasm

How to Drive Your Early-Stage Start-Up to Scale

Edward Amoroso

Hosted by Alfred Marcus

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Summary

One of the greatest challenges facing any start-up is “crossing the chasm”: bridging the gap between early adopters and mass-market buyers. Yet many promising businesses struggle even to reach the chasm. Often, founders leap in with money and a dream, only to hit a wall. How can start-up founders diagnose and fix problems in order to arrive at this critical point?

In Reaching the Chasm: How to Drive Your Early-Stage Start-Up to Scale (Columbia Business School Publishing, 2025), Edward G. Amoroso provides an indispensable guide for start-ups looking to get off the ground and scale up to the next level. Getting to the chasm, as he illustrates through dozens of real-world case studies, requires long-term vision. Founders must focus on their core belief system―not simply what they do but why they are in business in the first place. Buyers connect with start-ups based on shared beliefs, and any founding team that does not understand this secret will struggle to build relationships with customers. Amoroso shares field-tested guidance for businesses in different spaces and stages on crafting a compelling message, understanding customers, benchmarking against competitors, and leveraging what makes a company irreplaceable. For founders, venture capital teams, private equity firms, investors, and readers with an interest in entrepreneurship, Reaching the Chasm is the road map for early-stage start-up success.

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Alfred Marcus

As the Edson Spencer Professor at the Carlson School, I’ve spent my career helping students, scholars, and executives understand how companies succeed, why they fail, and how they can rise again. I’ve authored over 20 books and numerous articles in leading journals. My writings span immigrant entrepreneurship, demography, corporate turnarounds, and sustainability among other topics. My latest book explores how firms like Dell and Best Buy reinvented themselves. It is called Comeback: Can Great Firms Rise Again? It is published by the University of Toronto Press and will be available at the end of March.

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