Download or read book A Dozen Lessons for Entrepreneurs written by Tren Griffin and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2017-11-21 with total page 397 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Dozen Lessons for Entrepreneurs shows how the insights of leading venture capitalists can teach readers to create a unique approach to building a successful business. Through profiles and interviews of figures such as Bill Gurley of Benchmark Capital, Marc Andreesen and Ben Horowitz of Andreesen Horowitz, and Jenny Lee of GGV Capital, Tren Griffin draws out the fundamental lessons from their ideas and experiences. Entrepreneurs should learn from past successes but also be prepared to break new ground. While there are best practices, there is no single recipe they should follow. By better understanding the views and experiences of a wide range of successful venture capitalists and entrepreneurs, readers can discern which of many possible paths will lead to success. With insight and verve, Griffin argues that innovation and best practices are discovered by the experimentation of entrepreneurs as they establish the evolutionary fitness of their business. The products and services created through this experimentation that have greater fitness survive, and less-fit products and services die. Entrepreneurs have always experimented when creating or altering a business. What is different today is the existence of modern tools and systems that allow experiments to be conducted more cheaply and rapidly than ever before. Griffin shows that listening to what the best venture capitalists have to say is invaluable for entrepreneurs. Their experiences, if studied carefully, teach bedrock methods and guiding principles for approaching business.
Download or read book A Dozen Lessons for Entrepreneurs written by Trenholme J. Griffin and published by Penguin Books. This book was released on 2019 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Around the Corner to Around the World written by Robert Rosenberg and published by HarperCollins Leadership. This book was released on 2020-10-13 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Learn twelve key lessons from Dunkin’ Donuts former CEO Robert Rosenberg that offer critical insights and a unique, 360-degree perspective to business leaders and managers on building one of the world’s most recognized brands. For entrepreneurs fighting for survival and leaders in growing businesses facing critical strategic decisions, competition is always fierce and the future is never certain. Throughout all the chaos, you need a mentor that has seen a business through the ins and outs and can offer guidance that will exponentially tip the odds in your favor to succeed. Robert Rosenberg took over as CEO of Dunkin’ Donuts in 1963, 13 years after the first restaurant was founded by his father William. In his remarkable 35-year run, he grew the company from $10 million in sales to over $2 billion with more than 3,000 outlets. Through his tenure, Robert learned important lessons on running and scaling a family business. Rosenberg shares his insider perspective on all the dramatic highs and lows that are part of the Dunkin’ Donuts story to guide you to your own success story. In Around the Corner to Around the World, Rosenberg helps you as he: Distills the characteristics of a successful company through all phases of growth. Provides a new perspective on the dramatic story behind the rise of one of the world’s most iconic brands. Tells the first-hand account and essential lessons learned from the tenure of one of the most successful CEO runs in modern business history. Reveals some of the dramatic and surprising plot turns in the story of Dunkin’s rise to global prominence. Around the Corner to Around the World tells a compelling story of lessons gleaned over a 35-year career building a small business into the iconic Dunkin' brand it has become. The harrowing twists and turns and sometimes existential threats to the business will enlighten anyone starting or running a business.
Download or read book The Messy Middle written by Scott Belsky and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2018-10-02 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER NAMED ONE OF THE MOST INSPIRING BOOKS OF 2018 BY INC. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST STARTUP BOOKS OF ALL TIME BY BOOKAUTHORITY The Messy Middle is the indispensable guide to navigating the volatility of new ventures and leading bold creative projects by Scott Belsky, bestselling author, entrepreneur, Chief Product Officer at Adobe, and product advisor to many of today's top start-ups. Creating something from nothing is an unpredictable journey. The first mile births a new idea into existence, and the final mile is all about letting go. We love talking about starts and finishes, even though the middle stretch is the most important and often the most ignored and misunderstood. Broken into three sections with 100+ lessons, this no-nonsense book will help you: • Endure the roller coaster of successes and failures by strengthening your resolve, embracing the long-game, and short-circuiting your reward system to get to the finish line. • Optimize what’s working so you can improve the way you hire, better manage your team, and meet your customers’ needs. • Finish strong and avoid the pitfalls many entrepreneurs make, so you can overcome resistance, exit gracefully, and continue onto your next creative endeavor with ease. With insightful interviews from today’s leading entrepreneurs, artists, writers, and executives, as well as Belsky’s own experience working with companies like Airbnb, Pinterest, Uber, and sweetgreen, The Messy Middle will outfit you to find your way through the hardest parts of any bold project or new venture.
Download or read book What You Do Is Who You Are written by Ben Horowitz and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2019-10-29 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ben Horowitz, a leading venture capitalist, modern management expert, and New York Times bestselling author, combines lessons both from history and from modern organizational practice with practical and often surprising advice to help executives build cultures that can weather both good and bad times. Ben Horowitz has long been fascinated by history, and particularly by how people behave differently than you’d expect. The time and circumstances in which they were raised often shapes them—yet a few leaders have managed to shape their times. In What You Do Is Who You Are, he turns his attention to a question crucial to every organization: how do you create and sustain the culture you want? To Horowitz, culture is how a company makes decisions. It is the set of assumptions employees use to resolve everyday problems: should I stay at the Red Roof Inn, or the Four Seasons? Should we discuss the color of this product for five minutes or thirty hours? If culture is not purposeful, it will be an accident or a mistake. What You Do Is Who You Are explains how to make your culture purposeful by spotlighting four models of leadership and culture-building—the leader of the only successful slave revolt, Haiti’s Toussaint Louverture; the Samurai, who ruled Japan for seven hundred years and shaped modern Japanese culture; Genghis Khan, who built the world’s largest empire; and Shaka Senghor, a man convicted of murder who ran the most formidable prison gang in the yard and ultimately transformed prison culture. Horowitz connects these leadership examples to modern case-studies, including how Louverture’s cultural techniques were applied (or should have been) by Reed Hastings at Netflix, Travis Kalanick at Uber, and Hillary Clinton, and how Genghis Khan’s vision of cultural inclusiveness has parallels in the work of Don Thompson, the first African-American CEO of McDonalds, and of Maggie Wilderotter, the CEO who led Frontier Communications. Horowitz then offers guidance to help any company understand its own strategy and build a successful culture. What You Do Is Who You Are is a journey through culture, from ancient to modern. Along the way, it answers a question fundamental to any organization: who are we? How do people talk about us when we’re not around? How do we treat our customers? Are we there for people in a pinch? Can we be trusted? Who you are is not the values you list on the wall. It’s not what you say in company-wide meeting. It’s not your marketing campaign. It’s not even what you believe. Who you are is what you do. This book aims to help you do the things you need to become the kind of leader you want to be—and others want to follow.
Download or read book Do More Faster written by Brad Feld and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2010-10-01 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Practical advice from some of today's top early stage investors and entrepreneurs TechStars is a mentorship-driven startup accelerator with operations in three U.S. cities. Once a year in each city, it funds about ten Internet startups with a small amount of capital and surrounds them with around fifty top Internet entrepreneurs and investors. Historically, about seventy-five percent of the companies that go through TechStars raise a meaningful amount of angel or venture capital. Do More Faster: TechStars Lessons to Accelerate Your Startup is a collection of advice that comes from individuals who have passed through, or are part of, this proven program. Each vignette is an exploration of information often heard during the TechStars program and provides practical insights into early stage entrepreneurship. Contains seven sections, each focusing on a major theme within the TechStars program, including idea and vision, fundraising, legal and structure, and work/life balance Created by two highly regarded experts in the world of early stage investing Essays in each section come from the experienced author team as well as TechStar mentors, entrepreneurs, and founders of companies While you'll ultimately have to make your own decisions about what's right for your business, Do More Faster: TechStars Lessons to Accelerate Your Startup can get your entrepreneurial endeavor headed in the right direction.
Download or read book Extreme Entrepreneurship written by Adam J. Sulkowski and published by Van Rye Publishing, LLC. This book was released on 2021-06-24 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: EXTREME ENTREPRENEURSHIP: From war zones to jungles to slums to where capitalism is illegal, this book contains true stories of people making their startups work in some of the most challenging contexts. Written by an award-winning professor at a top-ranked entrepreneurship school based on his interviews with startup founders in some of the more than 120 countries he has visited, there are no Silicon Valley stories of free office perks here. Instead, you can expect to find uniquely inspiring stories and universal lessons about life and business from interesting people and places around the world. This book will provide you with: (1) life and business tips and inspiration, provided from a fresh perspective; (2) immediately actionable ideas, including intriguing ways of overcoming obstacles related to food, water, education, energy, the environment, employment, travel, startups, entrepreneurship, meeting people, and more; (3) insight into the mindsets of people who see and create opportunities and successfully execute to make the most of those opportunities; and (4) interesting background information on people and places around the world, providing a dose of context and entertainment. Whether it is a pioneering school for the differently-abled in Peru, or nurturing local food economies with solar mini-grids in Madagascar, or rainforest stewardship in Colombia and Suriname, or startups in the wake of genocide in Timor-Leste, or sparking the rebirth of a former industrial town in the United States, you will read here stories of folks tackling tough problems with few resources. Published in book format for the first time, the author expertly presents these stories and others in what can be described as a stylistic blend of Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown and NPR’s How I Built This. Please read and enjoy!
Download or read book The Startup of You Revised and Updated written by Reid Hoffman and published by Crown Currency. This book was released on 2012-02-14 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The groundbreaking #1 New York Times bestseller that taught a generation how to transform their careers—now in a revised and updated edition “A profound book about self-determination and self-realization.”—Senator Cory Booker “The Startup of You is crammed with insights and strategies to help each of us create the work life we want.”—Gretchen Rubin, author of The Happiness Project In this invaluable book, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and venture capitalist Ben Casnocha show how to accelerate your career in today’s competitive world. The key is to manage your career as if it were a startup business: a living, breathing, growing startup of you. Why? Startups—and the entrepreneurs who run them—are nimble. They invest in themselves. They build their professional networks. They take intelligent risks. They make uncertainty and volatility work to their advantage. These are the very same skills professionals need to get ahead today. This book isn’t about cover letters or résumés. Instead, you will learn the best practices of the most successful startups and how to apply these entrepreneurial strategies to your career. Whether you work for a giant multinational corporation, stitch together multiple gigs in a portfolio career, or are launching your own venture, you need to know how to • adapt your career plans as pandemics rage and technologies upend industries • develop a competitive advantage so that you stand out from others at work • strengthen your professional network by building powerful alliances and maintaining a diverse mix of relationships • engineer serendipity that produces life-changing career opportunities • take proactive risks to become more resilient to industry tsunamis • tap your network for information and intelligence that help you make smarter decisions The career landscape has changed dramatically in the decade since Hoffman and Casnocha first published this guide. In an urgent update to the frameworks that have helped hundreds of thousands of people transform their careers, this new edition of The Startup of You will teach you how to achieve your boldest professional ambitions.
Download or read book Smartups written by Rob Ryan and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ryan focuses on methods he has developed over the years for building a sustainable business that makes money. He shows how to turn an idea into real product.
Download or read book Real You Incorporated written by Kaira Sturdivant Rouda and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2010-12-30 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Real You Incorporated empowers women entrepreneurs. The book provides insights for women on how to discover and love their personal brand, and how to bring it into the market as a real business—unique and different. In the first section of the book, Find It Within You, readers will learn how to express internal personality, passions and essence to define the internal brand. In the second section, The Competitive Advantage, readers learn how to extend the internal message into the world—to their partners, employees and ultimately their customers. Part branding—the author is a nationally known marketing expert—and part business inspiration, Real You Incorporated includes case studies of real women entrepreneurs from a variety of industries: manufacturing, retail, restaurants, real estate, publishing and many more. Their stories bring the book to life, adding inspiration and role models. The book also includes a visualization tool in the form of a chart that women entrepreneurs can complete and keep with them, to remind them of their Real You, no matter what phase their business is in.
Download or read book Personal History written by Katharine Graham and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2018-03-29 with total page 720 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As seen in the new movie The Post, directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Meryl Streep, here is the captivating, inside story of the woman who piloted the Washington Post during one of the most turbulent periods in the history of American media. In this bestselling and widely acclaimed memoir, Katharine Graham, the woman who piloted the Washington Post through the scandals of the Pentagon Papers and Watergate, tells her story - one that is extraordinary both for the events it encompasses and for the courage, candour and dignity of its telling. Here is the awkward child who grew up amid material wealth and emotional isolation; the young bride who watched her brilliant, charismatic husband - a confidant to John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson - plunge into the mental illness that would culminate in his suicide. And here is the widow who shook off her grief and insecurity to take on a president and a pressman's union as she entered the profane boys' club of the newspaper business. As timely now as ever, Personal History is an exemplary record of our history and of the woman who played such a shaping role within them, discovering her own strength and sense of self as she confronted - and mastered - the personal and professional crises of her fascinating life.
Download or read book VC written by Tom Nicholas and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2019-06-03 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From nineteenth-century whaling to a multitude of firms pursuing entrepreneurial finance today, venture finance reflects a deep-seated tradition in the deployment of risk capital in the United States. Tom Nicholas’s history of the venture capital industry offers a roller coaster ride through America’s ongoing pursuit of financial gain.
Download or read book Secrets of Sand Hill Road written by Scott Kupor and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2019-06-04 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Wall Street Journal Bestseller! What are venture capitalists saying about your startup behind closed doors? And what can you do to influence that conversation? If Silicon Valley is the greatest wealth-generating machine in the world, Sand Hill Road is its humming engine. That's where you'll find the biggest names in venture capital, including famed VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, where lawyer-turned-entrepreneur-turned-VC Scott Kupor serves as managing partner. Whether you're trying to get a new company off the ground or scale an existing business to the next level, you need to understand how VCs think. In Secrets of Sand Hill Road, Kupor explains exactly how VCs decide where and how much to invest, and how entrepreneurs can get the best possible deal and make the most of their relationships with VCs. Kupor explains, for instance: • Why most VCs typically invest in only one startup in a given business category. • Why the skill you need most when raising venture capital is the ability to tell a compelling story. • How to handle a "down round," when startups have to raise funds at a lower valuation than in the previous round. • What to do when VCs get too entangled in the day-to-day operations of the business. • Why you need to build relationships with potential acquirers long before you decide to sell. Filled with Kupor's firsthand experiences, insider advice, and practical takeaways, Secrets of Sand Hill Road is the guide every entrepreneur needs to turn their startup into the next unicorn.
Download or read book Daring Disruptive written by Lisa Messenger and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2016-09-13 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Vibrant, game-changing CEO Lisa Messenger shares an insightful account of her rollercoaster ride as the creator and founder of the globally popular Collective Hub, the hip magazine of inspiration for disrupters and innovators of all stripes—with bold ideas on how you can stay on track and remain true to whatever your passion may be. Speaking to the new generation of innovators, game changers, and disrupters who want to succeed in a fast changing and often vexing world, Daring and Disruptive: Unleashing the Entrepreneur is a personal and honest chronicle of Lisa Messenger’s various business endeavors, including her shrewd launch of her innovative entrepreneurial magazine, Collective Hub. Exuding honesty and energy, Lisa blends these wonderfully insightful stories with important business lessons she has learned along the way, such as how she empowered herself in ways that helped her harness her creativity, disrupt the system, and be fearless in all of her endeavors. Inspiring as well as instructive, Messenger’s book offers up other big-think insights such as: -Invest in yourself -Know your “why” -Realize that failure is another word for experience -Break free of the traditional thinking around what a career should look like Whether you’re a budding entrepreneur, corporate ladder-climber, or a seasoned business owner, Daring and Disruptive is a powerful and practical guide that can help you dig deep, stay on message, and stay true to your ideas in challenging times (so if you’re thrown to the wolves, you’ll have the strength to come out leading the pack).
Download or read book Getting to Plan B written by John Mullins and published by Harvard Business Press. This book was released on 2009-09-08 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: You have a new venture in mind. And you've crafted a business plan so detailed it's a work of art. Don't get too attached to it. As John Mullins and Randy Komisar explain in Getting to Plan B, new businesses are fraught with uncertainty. To succeed, you must change the plan in real time as the inevitable challenges arise. In fact, studies show that entrepreneurs who stick slavishly to their Plan A stand a greater chance of failing-and that many successful businesses barely resemble their founders' original idea. The authors provide a rigorous process for stress testing your Plan A and determining how to alter it so your business makes money, solves customers' needs, and endures. You'll discover strategies for: -Identifying the leap-of-faith assumptions hidden in your plan -Testing those assumptions and unearthing why the plan might not work -Reconfiguring the five components of your business model-revenue model, gross margin model, operating model, working capital model, and investment model-to create a sounder Plan B. Filled with success stories and cautionary tales, this book offers real cases illustrating the authors' unique process. Whether your idea is for a start-up or a new business unit within your organization, Getting to Plan B contains the road map you need to reach success.
Download or read book From Idea to Success The Dartmouth Entrepreneurial Network Guide for Start Ups written by Gregg Fairbrothers and published by McGraw Hill Professional. This book was released on 2011-08-19 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Turn Your Great Idea into a Thriving Business! “A guide that sets first-time entrepreneurs’ feet in the right direction.” Geoffrey Moore, author, Crossing the Chasm “There are many books on entrepreneurship, but this is one of the few that will convert individuals to entrepreneurs.” Desh Deshpande, founder, Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation, MIT; chairman, A123 Systems; cochair, National Council for Innovation and Entrepreneurship About the Book: Are you among the many Americans who dream of starting a business but think you don’t know how? Help has arrived . . . For generations, Dartmouth College and the Tuck School of Business have influenced and driven global entrepreneurship. Dartmouth firsts include the world petroleum industry, technological breakthroughs like artificial intelligence and BASIC computer language, as well as popular products, such as the Nerf football and the game Crainium. Today a key resource for the Dartmouth Community is the Dartmouth Entrepreneurial Network (DEN), which helps anyone from undergraduates to faculty to alumni get their ideas off the ground and into the marketplace. In From Idea to Success, entrepreneur, professor, and DEN founder Gregg Fairbrothers takes you step by proven step through the DEN approach, showing you how to apply the same principles to make your vision a reality. If you have an idea—any idea—from major technology innovations, to consumer products or services, to social enterprises, From Idea to Success shows you how to bring it to fruition. This A to Z guide based on the startup experiences of literally hundreds of entrepreneurs makes the process simple as possible by breaking it down into three distinct parts: Step 1: Focusing and Refining Your Idea Define your goals, pinpoint your market, protect your idea, manage the risks in your undertaking Step 2: Business Planning Best Practices Create a business plan, build your team, learn about the competition, raise finances, get the important legal issues right the first time Step 3: Managing Your Company Build your negotiating, selling, and decision-making skills; manage your finances; correct your course; manage the transition to a healthy, growing business Building a vibrant company based on your own creativity and hard work is one of the most fulfilling human enterprises there is. With this book and your own experience you can think and act like a successful entrepreneur from the very start.
Download or read book The Startup Playbook written by Rajat Bhargava and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2020-06-23 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Get the real guidance you need to create and build your first startup company from founders who have been there many times before. The first run printing of The Startup Playbook SOLD OUT! So, we revised, expanded, and improved this second edition, including a new foreword by Brad Feld, author of Venture Deals. We still give our personal, how-to guide for building your startup from the ground up. You'll find a collection of the major lessons and shortcuts we've learned that will shift the odds in your favor. We're sharing our tips, secrets, and advice in a frank, founder-to-founder discussion with you. We make no bones about our bias. We're on your side, the founder's side. While venture capitalists, investors, and accelerators/incubators can add great value in the startup ecosystem, this book isn't about their points of view. We'll tell you where our interests as founders diverge from those on the other side of the table—investors, bankers, advisors, board members, and others—and what to do when that happens. The Startup Playbook is not a recipe, it's not a template, it's not a list of tasks to do. It's our insider's guide to starting a company and running it successfully in those critical early months. Between us, we've started over a dozen high-tech software companies and raised over $500 million in investment capital. We've acquired over thirty-five companies, had three of our startups go public, sold six of them, and we made billions of dollars for shareholders. We've also invested in over eighty startups, advised and mentored over two hundred companies and actively worked with venture capitalists (VCs), incubators, and accelerators to help launch many other new startups. We've had plenty of failures, too. And we've probably learned more from those than from the successes. We share those lessons as well. The Startup Playbook is full of our advice, guidance, do's, and don'ts from our years of experience as founders many times. We want to share our hard-earned knowledge with you to make success easier for you to achieve. "This book is extraordinarily fresh and exciting. In an accessible, straight talk fashion, this book is a manual, and an inspiration. The Startup Playbook is smart and avoids the 'I am so smart' over-writing endemic to the genre. Read this as it is presented. You'll be doing yourself a tremendous favor." —Amazon Reviewer
