Black Founders at Work: Journeys to Innovation is a collection of firsthand insights and lived experiences of entrepreneurs and investors building high-growth technology companies. It recounts the stores of modern tech innovation directly from the Black founders and investors driving it. From military veterans to non-technical founders to chance encounters and multi-million dollar exists, Black Founders at Work: Journeys to Innovation captures the varied paths of Black excellence and innovation to, through and beyond Silicon Valley. By telling our own stories, we expand and inspire the next generation of invention.
Now available in paperback—with a new preface and interview with Jessica Livingston about Y Combinator! Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days is a collection of interviews with founders of famous technology companies about what happened in the very earliest days. These people are celebrities now. What was it like when they were just a couple friends with an idea? Founders like Steve Wozniak (Apple), Caterina Fake (Flickr), Mitch Kapor (Lotus), Max Levchin (PayPal), and Sabeer Bhatia (Hotmail) tell you in their own words about their surprising and often very funny discoveries as they learned how to build a company. Where did they get the ideas that made them rich? How did they convince investors to back them? What went wrong, and how did they recover? Nearly all technical people have thought of one day starting or working for a startup. For them, this book is the closest you can come to being a fly on the wall at a successful startup, to learn how it's done. But ultimately these interviews are required reading for anyone who wants to understand business, because startups are business reduced to its essence. The reason their founders become rich is that startups do what businesses do—create value—more intensively than almost any other part of the economy. How? What are the secrets that make successful startups so insanely productive? Read this book, and let the founders themselves tell you.
What does it take to successfully launch and scale a startup in Asia? While much of modern business literature covers Silicon Valley and its founders, building a company in Asia—a world center of technology and innovation—is a vastly different journey, and not nearly as widely covered. This book aims to change that. Asian Founders at Work is an essential compilation of in-depth, incisive interviews with over 20 top technopreneurs from the region. Authors Ezra Ferraz and Gracy Fernandez have gathered their exclusive conversations with business leaders: Min-Liang Tan (Razer), Maria Ressa (Rappler), Chatri Sityodtong (ONE Championship), Patrick Grove (iflix), and Khailee Ng (500 Startups) are just a few. Questions about early difficulties, fundraising, business pivots, strategic partnerships, exits via acquisition or IPO, and more are answered in great detail to shine a light on the founders' unique experiences. Learn directly from game-changers in their own voice. By documenting these stories, the authors have created the largest and most comprehensive record of successes to date. Whether you are an aspiring entrepreneur yourself, a business student wanting to become well-versed in international practices, or an owner looking to expand to the area, this book provides a thorough guide to the startup culture in Asia from the most knowledgeable sources possible. What You Will Learn Gain business knowledge of practices that are localized to AsiaBecome familiar with essential startup topics, including product development, user acquisition, recruiting, and fundraisingStudy individual companies and founders, and an overview of startup culture Who This Book Is For Those in the tech ecosystem in East, Southeast, and South Asia, including aspiring founders or current founders who have started their entrepreneurial journey. This book is also for people outside of Asia who have an interest in the region. Entrepreneurs or businesspeople can refer to this book as they consider expansion into the area. Researchers and readers can pick up this book if they are curious about the business landscape of Asia and want to hear directly from game-changing founders.
In European Founders at Work, several of the top European startup founders and venture capitalists are interviewed to explain their respective paths to building a successful company. It takes a similar approach to Venture Capitalists at Work and other books in Apress' elite At Work series but with a focus on the differences between building a successful company in Europe versus the U.S. These insightful interviews are presented in a way that will help readers understand the founders local or a global views, how they competed on the global scale, if and how they got funding and their main challenges and opportunities. The companies chosen to be interviewed are a mix of unique worldwide ventures: European-only ventures and even a few copycats of already-proven concepts. As such, it provides a balanced view on the European scene. This mix also includes companies that started in Europe and moved to the U.S., companies who went IPO in their country of origin, companies with European venture capital backing, and companies that bootstrapped their way to success. Foreword by Saul Klein, Founder of LOVEFiLM and The Accelerator Group. Other books in the Apress At Work Series: Coders at Work, Seibel, 978-1-4302-1948-4 Venture Capitalists at Work, Shah & Shah, 978-1-4302-3837-9 CIOs at Work, Yourdon, 978-1-4302-3554-5 CTOs at Work, Donaldson, Seigel, & Donaldson, 978-1-4302-3593-4 Founders at Work, Livingston, 978-1-4302-1078-8 Women Leaders at Work, Ghaffari, 978-1-4302-3729-7 Advertisers at Work, Tuten, 978-1-4302-3828-7 Gamers at Work, Ramsay. 978-1-4302-3351-0
Celebrates the lives and contributions of African-American leaders who played significant roles in colonial and Revolutionary War-era America, and includes over twenty related activities.
Literal and metaphorical excavations at Sweet Briar College reveal how African American labor enabled the transformation of Sweet Briar Plantation into a private women’s college in 1906. This volume tells the story of the invisible founders of a college founded by and for white women. Despite being built and maintained by African American families, the college did not integrate its student body for sixty years after it opened. In the process, Invisible Founders challenges our ideas of what a college “founder” is, restoring African American narratives to their deserved and central place in the story of a single institution — one that serves as a microcosm of the American South.
"A ... synthesis of African and African-American history that shows how slavery differed in different regions of the country, and how the Africans and their descendants influenced the culture, commerce, and laws of the early United States"--
“A hero’s tale of what’s possible when we unlock our potential, continue the search for knowledge, and draw on our lived experiences to guide us through the darkest moments.”—Stacey Abrams From a Black, gay woman who broke into the boys’ club of Silicon Valley comes an empowering guide to finding your voice, working your way into any room you want to be in, and achieving your own dreams. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY FORTUNE In 2015, Arlan Hamilton was on food stamps and sleeping on the floor of the San Francisco airport, with nothing but an old laptop and a dream of breaking into the venture capital business. She couldn’t understand why people starting companies all looked the same (White and male), and she wanted the chance to invest in the ideas and people who didn’t conform to this image of how a founder is supposed to look. Hamilton had no contacts or network in Silicon Valley, no background in finance—not even a college degree. What she did have was fierce determination and the will to succeed. As much as we wish it weren’t so, we still live in a world where being underrepresented often means being underestimated. But as someone who makes her living investing in high-potential founders who also happen to be female, LGBTQ, or people of color, Hamilton understands that being undervalued simply means that a big upside exists. Because even if you have to work twice as hard to get to the starting line, she says, once you are on a level playing field, you will sprint ahead. Despite what society would have you believe, Hamilton argues, a privileged background, an influential network, and a fancy college degree are not prerequisites for success. Here she shares the hard-won wisdom she’s picked up on her remarkable journey from food-stamp recipient to venture capitalist, with lessons like “The Best Music Comes from the Worst Breakups,” “Let Someone Shorter Stand in Front of You,” “The Dangers of Hustle Porn,” and “Don’t Let Anyone Drink Your Diet Coke.” Along the way, she inspires us all to defy other people’s expectations and to become the role models we’ve been looking for. Praise for It’s About Damn Time “Reading Arlan Hamilton’s It’s About Damn Time is like having a conversation with that frank, bawdy friend who somehow always manages to make you laugh, get a little emo, and, ultimately, think about the world in a different way. . . . The book is warm, witty, and unflinching in its critique of the fake meritocracy that permeates Silicon Valley.”—Shondaland
Rand Fishkin, the founder and former CEO of Moz, reveals how traditional Silicon Valley "wisdom" leads far too many startups astray, with the transparency and humor that his hundreds of thousands of blog readers have come to love. Everyone knows how a startup story is supposed to go: A young, brilliant entrepreneur has a cool idea, drops out of college, defies the doubters, overcomes all odds, makes billions, and becomes the envy of the technology world. This is not that story. It's not that things went badly for Rand Fishkin; they just weren't quite so Zuckerberg-esque. His company, Moz, maker of marketing software, is now a $45 million/year business, and he's one of the world's leading experts on SEO. But his business and reputation took fifteen years to grow, and his startup began not in a Harvard dorm room but as a mother-and-son family business that fell deeply into debt. Now Fishkin pulls back the curtain on tech startup mythology, exposing the ups and downs of startup life that most CEOs would rather keep secret. For instance: A minimally viable product can be destructive if you launch at the wrong moment. Growth hacking may be the buzzword du jour, but initiatives can fizzle quickly. Revenue and growth won't protect you from layoffs. And venture capital always comes with strings attached. Fishkin's hard-won lessons are applicable to any kind of business environment. Up or down the chain of command, at both early stage startups and mature companies, whether your trajectory is riding high or down in the dumps: this book can help solve your problems, and make you feel less alone for having them.
Super Founders uses a data-driven approach to understand what really differentiates billion-dollar startups from the rest—revealing that nearly everything we thought was true about them is false! Ali Tamaseb has spent thousands of hours manually amassing what may be the largest dataset ever collected on startups, comparing billion-dollar startups with those that failed to become one—30,000 data points on nearly every factor: number of competitors, market size, the founder’s age, his or her university’s ranking, quality of investors, fundraising time, and many, many more. And what he found looked far different than expected. Just to mention a few: Most unicorn founders had no industry experience; There's no disadvantage to being a solo founder or to being a non-technical CEO; Less than 15% went through any kind of accelerator program; Over half had strong competitors when starting--being first to market with an idea does not actually matter. You will also hear the stories of the early days of billion-dollar startups first-hand. The book includes exclusive interviews with the founders/investors of Zoom, Instacart, PayPal, Nest, Github, Flatiron Health, Kite Pharma, Facebook, Stripe, Airbnb, YouTube, LinkedIn, Lyft, DoorDash, Coinbase, and Square, venture capital investors like Elad Gil, Peter Thiel, Alfred Lin from Sequoia Capital and Keith Rabois of Founders Fund, as well as previously untold stories about the early days of ByteDance (TikTok), WhatsApp, Dropbox, Discord, DiDi, Flipkart, Instagram, Careem, Peloton, and SpaceX. Packed with counterintuitive insights and inside stories from people who have built massively successful companies, Super Founders is a paradigm-shifting and actionable guide for entrepreneurs, investors, and anyone interested in what makes a startup successful.
