Entrepreneur Zed Haque's book chronicles the rise and fall of his brainchild, room33, during the mobile internet revolution. Zed's narrative offers insights into running a successful company, the balance between ownership and intervention, and resilience in the face of failure. The book's gripping drama and valuable insights make it a must-read for entrepreneurs and anyone navigating financial markets.
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.
Fund and Fuel Your Dreams! You're an entrepreneur with a great idea. But your business needs money. So, do you max out your credit cards, borrow from friends and family, and do everything yourself? Or do you make a devil's bargain with some venture capitalist who'll demand a tenfold return and could easily take your business out from under you? No and no! You don't have to bootstrap, and you don't have to sell out! Jenny Kassan says the landscape of investment capital is far larger and more diverse than most people realize. She illuminates the vast range of capital-raising strategies available to mission-driven entrepreneurs and provides a six-step process for finding and enlisting investors who are a match with your personal goals and aspirations. The plan you create will inspire you, excite you, and help you achieve your dreams!
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.
Over 70 in-depth interviews of Fintech Founders provide lessons from some of the most successful fintech entrepreneurs that will help you understand the challenges and opportunities of applying technology and collaboration to solve some key problems of the financial services industry. This book is for entrepreneurs, for people working inside of large organizations and everyone in between who is interested to learn the secrets of successful entrepreneurs. In this advice-filled resource, Rubini gathers advice that comes from a diverse range of financial services niches including financing, banking, payments, wealth management, insurance, and cryptocurrencies, to help you harness the insights of thought leaders. Those working inside the financial services industry and those interested in working in or starting up businesses in financial services will learn valuable lessons on how to take an idea forward, how to find the right business founders, how to seek funding, how to learn from initial mistakes, and how to define and reposition your business model. Rubini also inquires into the future of fintech and uncovers provoking and insightful predictions.
How do you raise money for a small business? What is your business worth? Who are your best investors? What should you watch out for? This is one of a series of eight short, easy to read books from the Small Business Success Collection, containing actionable insights from Dave Berkus, nationally recognized successful entrepreneur, angel investor and board member, serving over forty companies. Dave tells stories of successes and failures - of strategies that worked, and those that didn't. He offers his insights for your business success based upon his many experiences. Reading this book, and others in the series, will make you a better visionary, manager, and leader! (Newly expanded second edition.)
The Lee Kuan Yew Global Business Plan Competition (LKYGBPC) is a biennial university startup challenge in Singapore which is organized by the Institute of Innovation and Entrepreneurship (IIE) at Singapore Management University. The LKYGBPC derives its name from Singapore's founding Prime Minister, who developed the country's defining business plan bringing Singapore onto the global stage. It is this spirit of entrepreneurship, innovation and ambition that the competition enshrines.This book is a practitioner's guide to the entrepreneurial journey of selected start-ups — from cradle to success. By reflecting on their personal stories, the book provides aspiring entrepreneurs with potential roadmaps on how they, too, can chase their dreams and experiment with various business models to achieve success. With real-life case studies from the finalists of the 10th Lee Kuan Yew Global Business Plan Competition, Pioneering a Smart, Sustainable, and Resilient Future: Founder Stories and Business Models seeks to provide readers with the framework to elicit their own blueprint for a successful venture.
A Secret Playbook for Transforming Stuck Startups Nine out of ten startups fail. Even venture capital firms make most of their returns on one out of ten investments hitting the proverbial “home run.” But in the media—and our culture—we glorify those success stories, leaving little room for the difficult side of entrepreneurship. Naturally, founders attempt to replicate the success of those winners by raising too much, scaling too quickly, and destroying themselves in pursuit of the much-celebrated “unicorn” status. But for those that aren’t in that 10% of hyper-growth companies, there is another path. In Reignition: Transforming Stuck Startups into Breakout Winners, entrepreneur, investor, and advisor Dave Hersh skillfully outlines how to transform a stuck startup into a lean, disciplined, focused organization with the time, space, and market position to find a breakout move. Dave’s perspective on startup transformation is unique, timeless, and in high demand from entrepreneurs worldwide who feel stuck. Drawing on his own experience and others’ stories of triumph and failure, Dave shows how companies can recover from a near-death experience and have a profoundly successful second act on a grand stage. Readers will learn how to shed unnecessary weight, adapt their leadership style, find their “best in the world” offering, optimize culture, and patiently navigate toward larger-scale success. Dave Hersh has a clear and vital message for startup founders, leaders, and stakeholders who find themselves stuck: All hope is not lost, but you must transform to survive. Bolstered by real-life stories of successful turnarounds, interviews with industry experts, and “hard lessons” from Dave’s own experiences, Reignition provides a clear and practical playbook for getting a company through the transition from stuck to great. Reignition is for anyone involved in the hard work of launching a successful second act, including startups and growth companies with $1M to $100M in revenue that have tasted success but need a different game plan to make it to the next level. Whether you are a founder, CEO, executive, advisor, or board member, this book will show you the path to successful transformation. Dave’s ability to go deep into the human side of company-building—along with his vulnerability, accessibility, and real-world experience—makes the reader feel like Dave is “in the boat” with them as they go through the difficult journey of rebooting their startup. Readers will gain the confidence to transform their companies, the skills to do it, and the reassurance that they are not alone.
If you want your startup to succeed, you need to understand why startups fail. “Whether you’re a first-time founder or looking to bring innovation into a corporate environment, Why Startups Fail is essential reading.”—Eric Ries, founder and CEO, LTSE, and New York Times bestselling author of The Lean Startup and The Startup Way Why do startups fail? That question caught Harvard Business School professor Tom Eisenmann by surprise when he realized he couldn’t answer it. So he launched a multiyear research project to find out. In Why Startups Fail, Eisenmann reveals his findings: six distinct patterns that account for the vast majority of startup failures. • Bad Bedfellows. Startup success is thought to rest largely on the founder’s talents and instincts. But the wrong team, investors, or partners can sink a venture just as quickly. • False Starts. In following the oft-cited advice to “fail fast” and to “launch before you’re ready,” founders risk wasting time and capital on the wrong solutions. • False Promises. Success with early adopters can be misleading and give founders unwarranted confidence to expand. • Speed Traps. Despite the pressure to “get big fast,” hypergrowth can spell disaster for even the most promising ventures. • Help Wanted. Rapidly scaling startups need lots of capital and talent, but they can make mistakes that leave them suddenly in short supply of both. • Cascading Miracles. Silicon Valley exhorts entrepreneurs to dream big. But the bigger the vision, the more things that can go wrong. Drawing on fascinating stories of ventures that failed to fulfill their early promise—from a home-furnishings retailer to a concierge dog-walking service, from a dating app to the inventor of a sophisticated social robot, from a fashion brand to a startup deploying a vast network of charging stations for electric vehicles—Eisenmann offers frameworks for detecting when a venture is vulnerable to these patterns, along with a wealth of strategies and tactics for avoiding them. A must-read for founders at any stage of their entrepreneurial journey, Why Startups Fail is not merely a guide to preventing failure but also a roadmap charting the path to startup success.
Communicating your idea in a clear, compelling, and persuasive manner is critical when trying to launch a new venture. This Harvard Business Review collection brings together two popular books to help you craft your story, design better visualizations, impress your audience, and turn your idea into reality. Understanding and using data viz to persuade is a must-have skill for anyone in business today--especially if you're launching a new venture. In Good Charts, dataviz maven Scott Berinato provides an essential guide to how visualization works. Berinato lays out a system for thinking visually and building better charts through a process of talking, sketching, and prototyping. How do you launch the venture of your dreams? In Get Backed, entrepreneurs Evan Baehr and Evan Loomis argue that it's not just about securing startup funding. It's about building the right relationships, crafting a compelling story, and creating the perfect pitch deck. Filled with proven tips, exercises, and templates, this book shows the process for how to successfully communicate your vision. Good Charts will help you turn plain, uninspiring charts that merely present information into smart, effective visualizations that powerfully convey ideas. Get Backed will show you exactly what it takes to get funded and will give you the tools to launch a new venture. Together, these books will help you bring your idea to life.
