Submitted to the System Design and Management Program in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Science

In today's world startups are playing a key role to stimulate the economy, solve pressing problems and create fulfilling employment opportunities. However, the failure rate of startups in the US, one of the most prominent countries for encouraging startups, has been eight out of ten, a very high proportion. In this thesis, I explore this topic further with a hypothesis that company's sustained success depends not only on its financial growth, but also its dynamic ability to continuously fulfill its key stakeholders' needs and aspirations, and its ability to adapt to the specific conditions of its evolving ecosystem. This thesis provides a new holistic, system-driven conceptualization of a startup and its internal dynamics from human resources, product development, customers, and financials. I develop a System Dynamics model to represent these internal dynamics and simulate it over a period of five years to gain more insight about a startup behavior. In addition, I bring in the impact of exogenous factors from the entrepreneurial ecosystem as a "second layer" of variables in the entrepreneurial model. Through a process of validating and comparing the model to the literature, I identify five key internal leverage points for the sustained success of the modeled startup. Moreover, after performing a sensitivity analysis to the model, I identify the key exogenous leverage points in studied entrepreneurship ecosystems. I then compare and contrast the US and Egyptian case by embedding the modeled startup in the Egyptian ecosystem. A significant change of the behavior of the modeled startup with a much lower final Firm Valuation and Job Attractiveness is observed. I conclude with a discussion of the high leverage points in the Egyptian ecosystem based on this analysis, and recommendations for entrepreneurs and policy makers. Thesis Supervisor: Donald Lessard Title: Epoch Foundation Professor of International Management and Engineering Systems Thesis Supervisor: Oliver L. de Weck Title: Associate Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics and Engineering Systems