Competing with Unicorns

Competing with Unicorns

Author: Jonathan Rasmusson

Publisher: Pragmatic Bookshelf

Published: 2020-03-16

Total Pages: 194

ISBN-13: 1680507672

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Today's tech unicorns develop software differently. They've developed a way of working that lets them scale like an enterprise while working like a startup. These techniques can be learned. This book takes you behind the scenes and shows you how companies like Google, Facebook, and Spotify do it. Leverage their insights, so your teams can work better together, ship higher-quality product faster, innovate more quickly, and compete with the unicorns. Massively successful tech companies, or Unicorns, have discovered how to take the techniques that made them successful as a startup and scale them to the enterprise level. Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Spotify all work like startups, despite having workforces numbering in the tens of thousands. Ex-Spotify engineer and coach, Jonathan Rasmusson, takes you behind the scenes and shows you how to develop software the way the best companies do it. Learn how to give teams purpose through Missions, empower and trust with Squads, and align large scale efforts through Bets. Create the culture necessary to make it happen. If you're a tech or product lead and you want to ship product better, this is your playbook on how the world's best do it. If you're an engineer, tester, analyst, or project manager, and you suspect there are better ways you could be working, you are correct. This book will show you how. And if you're a manager, Agile coach, or someone just charged with improving how your company ships software, this book will give you the tools, techniques, and practices of the world's most innovative, delivery-focused companies. Don't just admire the top companies - learn from them.


The Agile Samurai

The Agile Samurai

Author: Jonathan Rasmusson

Publisher: Pragmatic Bookshelf

Published: 2010-09-25

Total Pages: 383

ISBN-13: 1680504940

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Printed in full color. Faced with a software project of epic proportions? Tired of over-committing and under-delivering? Enter the dojo of the agile samurai, where agile expert Jonathan Rasmusson shows you how to kick-start, execute, and deliver your agile projects. Combining cutting-edge tools with classic agile practices, The Agile Samurai gives you everything you need to deliver something of value every week and make rolling your software into production a non-event. Get ready to kick some software project butt. By learning the ways of the agile samurai you will discover: how to create plans and schedules your customer and your team can believe in what characteristics make a good agile team and how to form your own how to gather requirements in a fraction of the time using agile user stories what to do when you discover your schedule is wrong, and how to look like a pro correcting it how to execute fiercely by leveraging the power of agile software engineering practices By the end of this book you will know everything you need to set up, execute, and successfully deliver agile projects, and have fun along the way. If you're a project lead, this book gives you the tools to set up and lead your agile project from start to finish. If you are an analyst, programmer, tester, usability designer, or project manager, this book gives you the insight and foundation necessary to become a valuable agile team member. The Agile Samurai slices away the fluff and theory that make other books less-than-agile. It's packed with best practices, war stories, plenty of humor and hands-on tutorial exercises that will get you doing the right things, the right way. This book will make a difference.


Skandar and the Unicorn Thief

Skandar and the Unicorn Thief

Author: A.F. Steadman

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2022-05-03

Total Pages: 448

ISBN-13: 1665912731

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Soar into a breathtaking world of heroes and unicorns as you’ve never seen them before in this fantastical middle grade debut perfect for fans of the Percy Jackson and Eragon series! Skandar Smith has always yearned to leave the Mainland and escape to the secretive Island, where wild unicorns roam free. He’s spent years studying for his Hatchery exam, the annual test that selects a handful of Mainlander thirteen-year-olds to train to become unicorn riders. But on the day of Skandar’s exam, things go horribly wrong, and his hopes are shattered…until a mysterious figure knocks on his door at midnight, bearing a message: the Island is in peril and Skandar must answer its call. Skandar is thrust into a world of epic sky battles, dangerous clashes with wild unicorns, and rumors of a shadowy villain amassing a unicorn army. And the closer Skandar grows to his newfound friends and community of riders, the harder it becomes to keep his secrets—especially when he discovers their lives may all be in graver danger than he ever imagined.


How to Kill a Unicorn

How to Kill a Unicorn

Author: Mark Payne

Publisher: Crown Currency

Published: 2014-10-07

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 0804138745

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A unique behind-the-scenes look at the groundbreaking methodology that today's most in-demand innovation factory uses to create some of the boldest products and successfully bring them to market. Today, innovation is seen by business leaders and the media alike as the key to growth, a burning issue in every company, from startups to the Fortune 500. And in that space, Fahrenheit 212 is viewed as a high-performance innovation SWAT team, able to solve the most complex, mission-critical challenges. Under Mark Payne, the firm's president and head of Idea Development, Fahrenheit 212, since its inception a decade ago, has worked with such giants of industry as Coca-Cola, Samsung, Hershey's, Campbell's Soup, LG, Starbucks, Mattel, Office Depot, Citibank, P&G, American Express, Nutrisystem, GE, and Goldman Sachs, to name but a few. It has been praised as a hotspot for innovation in publications like Fortune, Esquire, Businessweek, and FastCompany. What Drives Fahrenheit 212's success is its unique methodology, combining what it calls Magic--the creative side of innovation--with Money, the business side. They explore every potential idea with the end goal in mind--bringing an innovative product to market in a way that will transform a company's business and growth. In How to Kill a Unicorn, Mark Payne pulls back the curtain on how the company is able to bring more innovative products and ideas successfully to market than any other firm and offers blow by blow inside accounts of how they grapple with and solved their biggest challenges.


Super Founders

Super Founders

Author: Ali Tamaseb

Publisher: PublicAffairs

Published: 2021-05-18

Total Pages: 280

ISBN-13: 1541768418

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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.


To Kill a Unicorn

To Kill a Unicorn

Author: John Corwin

Publisher:

Published: 2020-04-10

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 9781942453192

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KILL A UNICORN OR DIE TRYINGThe gods are dead. The fae rule Gaia.Cain used to kill for the fae. The only human to become a member of the Oblivion Guard, he killed one time too many and had enough. Leaving it all behind wasn't as easy as turning in a resignation. But the fae had trained him well and soon it was they who bargained for him to leave Feary and live in exile in Gaia.Now a tracker for an assassination and bounty hunting agency, Cain doesn't kill anymore. When his mission to track a teenage girl goes horribly wrong, he and the girl end up on the run from powerful forces the likes of which he's never seen before.That's because the fae have been hiding a terrible secret. The gods aren't dead. In fact, they're very much alive and killing humans they deem too powerful to survive. The girl is in their crosshairs and now he is too.To make matters worse, Cain discovers he's dying from the curse of Cthulhu. The cure? Eating a living, beating unicorn heart. Cain thought unicorns were extinct, but a mystery party offers him salvation: a unicorn for the assassination of the leader of the Mages Guild. With the gods, the fae, and the rest of the supernatural world hunting the hunter, the odds don't look good. But Cain has survived too much to give up now. And the high and mighty are about to find out what real fear feels like.


Competing in the New World of Work

Competing in the New World of Work

Author: Keith Ferrazzi

Publisher: Harvard Business Press

Published: 2022-02-15

Total Pages: 149

ISBN-13: 1647821967

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A Wall Street Journal bestseller The #1 New York Times bestselling author on how to use radical adaptability to win in a world of unprecedented change. You've shed antiquated systems and processes. You went all-in on digital. Your teams settled into new, often better, ways of doing things. But did your organization change enough to stay competitive in the post-pandemic world? Did you fully leverage the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to leap forward and grow stronger? Are you shaping the new environment to your advantage? If not, it's not too late to learn from the best. New York Times #1 bestselling author Keith Ferrazzi, along with coauthors Kian Gohar and Noel Weyrich, shows leaders how to shape their organizations and practices to remain competitive in a new, post-pandemic context. Based on an ambitious global research initiative involving thousands of executives, innovators, and changemakers who redefined their strategies, business models, organizational systems, and even their cultures, Competing in the New World of Work: Offers a bold new vision for the organization of the future Reveals the workplace innovations that emerged during the pandemic Defines the new model of leadership—radical adaptability—for sustaining continuous change throughout the coming years of opportunity and transformation Competing in the New World of Work is both your inspiration and your road map to embracing new realities, motivating talent, and winning bold frontiers.


Modern Monopolies

Modern Monopolies

Author: Alex Moazed

Publisher: Macmillan

Published: 2016-05-31

Total Pages: 274

ISBN-13: 1250091896

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What do Google, Snapchat, Tinder, Amazon, and Uber have in common, besides soaring market share? They're platforms - a new business model that has quietly become the only game in town, creating vast fortunes for its founders while dominating everyone's daily life. A platform, by definition, creates value by facilitating an exchange between two or more interdependent groups. So, rather that making things, they simply connect people. The Internet today is awash in platforms - Facebook is responsible for nearly 25 percent of total Web visits, and the Google platform crash in 2013 took about 40 percent of Internet traffic with it. Representing the ten most trafficked sites in the U.S., platforms are also prominent over the globe; in China, they hold the top eight spots in web traffic rankings. The advent of mobile computing and its ubiquitous connectivity have forever altered how we interact with each other, melding the digital and physical worlds and blurring distinctions between "offline" and "online." These platform giants are expanding their influence from the digital world to the whole economy. Yet, few people truly grasp the radical structural shifts of the last ten years. In Modern Monopolies, Alex Moazed and Nicholas L. Johnson tell the definitive story of what has changed, what it means for businesses today, and how managers, entrepreneurs, and business owners can adapt and thrive in this new era.


The Unicorn Problem

The Unicorn Problem

Author: Mitchell J. Frangadakis

Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform

Published: 2016-07-14

Total Pages: 232

ISBN-13: 9781534762329

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Beginning with the ancient Vedas of India to this century, what we call "The Truth" is interspersed with impassioned convictions, superstitious beliefs, inspired revelations, and intriguing, yet ultimately contradictory, versions of reality. Through parables, religious doctrines, philosophy, and the proclamations of modern science, we are offered competing narratives regarding incontrovertible truths, and consequently, Ultimate Reality. These competing epistemological traditions have necessarily implanted the ground of human knowledge with both error and uncertainty - the fertile soil in which Unicorns abound and proliferate - leaving us with solutions to life's perennial questions that must ultimately remain incomplete. The fundamental purpose of this book is to assist the reader in the recognition of these Unicorns and their sanctuaries, since it is our most adamant beliefs that determine how we live our lives, and, perhaps most importantly, define our moral outlook


C Brain Teasers

C Brain Teasers

Author: Dan Gookin

Publisher: Pragmatic Bookshelf

Published: 2024-03-21

Total Pages: 101

ISBN-13:

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You thought you knew C, but can you solve 25 puzzles in this popular programming language? Noted C programmer and author Dan Gookin provides a series of pointed questions, puzzles, and problems to keep your C programming skills sharp. Each one will provide insight into various aspects of handling strings, numeric operations, and other activities, giving you techniques to take the best advantage of all C has to offer. Challenge yourself, and get to know some powerful tricks and details for writing better, faster, more accurate C code. Most C programming books present the information sequentially, teaching you the right way to code and only rarely describing what could go wrong. In this book, the goal is to find out what did go wrong - or what potentially goes right. Explore interesting and unusual programming concepts and approaches with small, to-the-point, programs and exercises. Hone your C programming skills and expand your knowledge. By working through the brain teasers in this book, you'll fill in gaps in your knowledge and work with advanced concepts such as pointers and recursion. All of the teaser topics were selected to give you food for thought, explaining the technical details behind each puzzle. Look at a code sample and try to guess what output it will give. Code it yourself and see the result. Is it what you expected? Then read the author's lighthearted explanation of exactly why the language does what it does, and how you can take advantage of it. You'll come away with a much better understanding of how the language works, and how to use it for efficient and effective programming. What You Need: You need to know the basics of coding in C, and have an environment for compiling and executing your C code. Any Windows, MacOS, or Linux system with a C compiler does the job. Use the terminal window for traditional C programming. Or obtain an Integrated Development Enviornment (IDE) such as Visual Studio Code, which contains all the software tools you need: Editor, Compiler, and Output.