Download or read book The Founder s Dilemmas written by Noam Wasserman and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2013-04 with total page 490 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Founder's Dilemmas examines how early decisions by entrepreneurs can make or break a startup and its team. Drawing on a decade of research, including quantitative data on almost ten thousand founders as well as inside stories of founders like Evan Williams of Twitter and Tim Westergren of Pandora, Noam Wasserman reveals the common pitfalls founders face and how to avoid them.

Download or read book The Founder s Dilemmas written by Noam Wasserman and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2012-03-25 with total page 491 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A guide to the early decisions that can make or break startup ventures Often downplayed in the excitement of starting up a new business venture is one of the most important decisions entrepreneurs will face: should they go it alone, or bring in cofounders, hires, and investors to help build the business? More than just financial rewards are at stake. Friendships and relationships can suffer. Bad decisions at the inception of a promising venture lay the foundations for its eventual ruin. The Founder's Dilemmas is the first book to examine the early decisions by entrepreneurs that can make or break a startup and its team. Drawing on a decade of research, Noam Wasserman reveals the common pitfalls founders face and how to avoid them. He looks at whether it is a good idea to cofound with friends or relatives, how and when to split the equity within the founding team, and how to recognize when a successful founder-CEO should exit or be fired. Wasserman explains how to anticipate, avoid, or recover from disastrous mistakes that can splinter a founding team, strip founders of control, and leave founders without a financial payoff for their hard work and innovative ideas. He highlights the need at each step to strike a careful balance between controlling the startup and attracting the best resources to grow it, and demonstrates why the easy short-term choice is often the most perilous in the long term. The Founder's Dilemmas draws on the inside stories of founders like Evan Williams of Twitter and Tim Westergren of Pandora, while mining quantitative data on almost ten thousand founders. People problems are the leading cause of failure in startups. This book offers solutions.

Download or read book The Founder s Dilemmas written by Noam Wasserman and published by . This book was released on 2021-02-02 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Often downplayed in the excitement of starting up a new business venture is one of the most important decisions entrepreneurs will face: should they go it alone, or bring in cofounders, hires, and investors to help build the business? More than just financial rewards are at stake. Friendships and relationships can suffer. Bad decisions at the inception of a promising venture lay the foundations for its eventual ruin. The Founder's Dilemmas is the first book to examine the early decisions by entrepreneurs that can make or break a startup and its team. Drawing on a decade of research, Noam Wasserman reveals the common pitfalls founders face and how to avoid them. He looks at whether it is a good idea to cofound with friends or relatives, how and when to split the equity within the founding team, and how to recognize when a successful founder-CEO should exit or be fired. Wasserman explains how to anticipate, avoid, or recover from disastrous mistakes that can splinter a founding team, strip founders of control, and leave founders without a financial payoff for their hard work and innovative ideas. He highlights the need at each step to strike a careful balance between controlling the startup and attracting the best resources to grow it, and demonstrates why the easy short-term choice is often the most perilous in the long term. The Founder's Dilemmas draws on the inside stories of founders like Evan Williams of Twitter and Tim Westergren of Pandora, while mining quantitative data on almost ten thousand founders. People problems are the leading cause of failure in startups. This book offers solutions.

Download or read book The Founder s Mentality written by Chris Zook and published by Harvard Business Review Press. This book was released on 2016-05-17 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Washington Post Bestseller Three Principles for Managing—and Avoiding—the Problems of Growth Why is profitable growth so hard to achieve and sustain? Most executives manage their companies as if the solution to that problem lies in the external environment: find an attractive market, formulate the right strategy, win new customers. But when Bain & Company’s Chris Zook and James Allen, authors of the bestselling Profit from the Core, researched this question, they found that when companies fail to achieve their growth targets, 90 percent of the time the root causes are internal, not external—increasing distance from the front lines, loss of accountability, proliferating processes and bureaucracy, to name only a few. What’s more, companies experience a set of predictable internal crises, at predictable stages, as they grow. Even for healthy companies, these crises, if not managed properly, stifle the ability to grow further—and can actively lead to decline. The key insight from Zook and Allen’s research is that managing these choke points requires a “founder’s mentality”—behaviors typically embodied by a bold, ambitious founder—to restore speed, focus, and connection to customers: • An insurgent’s clear mission and purpose • An unambiguous owner mindset • A relentless obsession with the front line Based on the authors’ decade-long study of companies in more than forty countries, The Founder’s Mentality demonstrates the strong relationship between these three traits in companies of all kinds—not just start-ups—and their ability to sustain performance. Through rich analysis and inspiring examples, this book shows how any leader—not only a founder—can instill and leverage a founder’s mentality throughout their organization and find lasting, profitable growth.

Download or read book Life Is a Startup written by Noam Wasserman and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2018-10-23 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After two decades of research on founders, a best-selling book on the subject, and experience teaching and mentoring thousands of students in this field, Noam Wasserman is a prominent authority on startups. Hearing from countless readers and students that his insights helped them with important life decisions, beyond the incubator and boardroom, Wasserman brings us a new book that applies to everyday life his research on the methods of successful startup founders. Like entrepreneurs, we all deal with uncertainty, tough decision-making, and necessary problem-solving. Whether we freelance or work for large organizations, whether we're married or single, have kids or not, we must be able to think on our feet, assess risks and opportunities, and recruit others to help us navigate them. This book offers important advice for envisioning change in our lives—from contemplating the next step in a relationship to making a radical career move—and managing changes to which we've already committed. We can learn to recognize our own well-worn patterns and keep our tendencies and habits in check, recruit a personal taskforce—our own board of directors—to advise us, and plan ahead for growth. With his extensive database of entrepreneurship case studies—from Pandora to Twitter to Nike—complemented with data on 20,000 founders, Wasserman is able to go deeply into the entrepreneurial mindset and show us how startups provide specific lessons for crafting our most successful lives.

Download or read book Why Startups Fail written by Tom Eisenmann and published by Currency. This book was released on 2021-03-30 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Lost and Founder written by Rand Fishkin and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2018-04-24 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book The Innovator s Dilemma written by Clayton M. Christensen and published by Harvard Business Review Press. This book was released on 2013-10-22 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Named one of 100 Leadership & Success Books to Read in a Lifetime by Amazon Editors An innovation classic. From Steve Jobs to Jeff Bezos, Clay Christensen’s work continues to underpin today’s most innovative leaders and organizations. The bestselling classic on disruptive innovation, by renowned author Clayton M. Christensen. His work is cited by the world’s best-known thought leaders, from Steve Jobs to Malcolm Gladwell. In this classic bestseller—one of the most influential business books of all time—innovation expert Clayton Christensen shows how even the most outstanding companies can do everything right—yet still lose market leadership. Christensen explains why most companies miss out on new waves of innovation. No matter the industry, he says, a successful company with established products will get pushed aside unless managers know how and when to abandon traditional business practices. Offering both successes and failures from leading companies as a guide, The Innovator’s Dilemma gives you a set of rules for capitalizing on the phenomenon of disruptive innovation. Sharp, cogent, and provocative—and consistently noted as one of the most valuable business ideas of all time—The Innovator’s Dilemma is the book no manager, leader, or entrepreneur should be without.

Download or read book Founders at Work written by Jessica Livingston and published by Apress. This book was released on 2008-11-01 with total page 468 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Venture Deals written by Brad Feld and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2011-07-05 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An engaging guide to excelling in today's venture capital arena Beginning in 2005, Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson, managing directors at Foundry Group, wrote a long series of blog posts describing all the parts of a typical venture capital Term Sheet: a document which outlines key financial and other terms of a proposed investment. Since this time, they've seen the series used as the basis for a number of college courses, and have been thanked by thousands of people who have used the information to gain a better understanding of the venture capital field. Drawn from the past work Feld and Mendelson have written about in their blog and augmented with newer material, Venture Capital Financings puts this discipline in perspective and lays out the strategies that allow entrepreneurs to excel in their start-up companies. Page by page, this book discusses all facets of the venture capital fundraising process. Along the way, Feld and Mendelson touch on everything from how valuations are set to what externalities venture capitalists face that factor into entrepreneurs' businesses. Includes a breakdown analysis of the mechanics of a Term Sheet and the tactics needed to negotiate Details the different stages of the venture capital process, from starting a venture and seeing it through to the later stages Explores the entire venture capital ecosystem including those who invest in venture capitalist Contain standard documents that are used in these transactions Written by two highly regarded experts in the world of venture capital The venture capital arena is a complex and competitive place, but with this book as your guide, you'll discover what it takes to make your way through it.

Download or read book Winners Take All written by Anand Giridharadas and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2018-08-28 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The groundbreaking investigation of how the global elite's efforts to "change the world" preserve the status quo and obscure their role in causing the problems they later seek to solve. An essential read for understanding some of the egregious abuses of power that dominate today’s news. "Impassioned.... Entertaining reading.” —The Washington Post Anand Giridharadas takes us into the inner sanctums of a new gilded age, where the rich and powerful fight for equality and justice any way they can—except ways that threaten the social order and their position atop it. They rebrand themselves as saviors of the poor; they lavishly reward “thought leaders” who redefine “change” in ways that preserve the status quo; and they constantly seek to do more good, but never less harm. Giridharadas asks hard questions: Why, for example, should our gravest problems be solved by the unelected upper crust instead of the public institutions it erodes by lobbying and dodging taxes? His groundbreaking investigation has already forced a great, sorely needed reckoning among the world’s wealthiest and those they hover above, and it points toward an answer: Rather than rely on scraps from the winners, we must take on the grueling democratic work of building more robust, egalitarian institutions and truly changing the world—a call to action for elites and everyday citizens alike.

Download or read book The Founders written by Jimmy Soni and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2022-02-22 with total page 484 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NAMED A BEST BOOK OF 2022 BY THE NEW YORKER National Bestseller * New York Times Editors’ Choice * Financial Times “Books to Read in 2022” A SABEW BEST IN BUSINESS BOOK AWARDS FINALIST “A gripping account of PayPal’s origins and a vivid portrait of the geeks and contrarians who made its meteoric rise possible” (The Wall Street Journal)—including Elon Musk, Amy Rowe Klement, Peter Thiel, Julie Anderson, Max Levchin, Reid Hoffman, and many others whose stories have never been shared. Today, PayPal’s founders and earliest employees are considered the technology industry’s most powerful network. Since leaving PayPal, they have formed, funded, and advised the leading companies of our era, including Tesla, Facebook, YouTube, SpaceX, Yelp, Palantir, and LinkedIn, among many others. As a group, they have driven twenty-first-century innovation and entrepreneurship. Their names stir passions; they’re as controversial as they are admired. Yet for all their influence, the story of where they first started has gone largely untold. Before igniting the commercial space race or jumpstarting social media’s rise, they were the unknown creators of a scrappy online payments start-up called PayPal. In building what became one of the world’s foremost companies, they faced bruising competition, internal strife, the emergence of widespread online fraud, and the devastating dot-com bust of the 2000s. Their success was anything but certain. In The Founders: The Story of PayPal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley, award-winning author and biographer Jimmy Soni explores PayPal’s turbulent early days. With hundreds of interviews and unprecedented access to thousands of pages of internal material, he shows how the seeds of so much of what shapes our world today—fast-scaling digital start-ups, cashless currency concepts, mobile money transfer—were planted two decades ago. He also reveals the stories of countless individuals who were left out of the front-page features and banner headlines but who were central to PayPal’s success. Described as “an intensely magnetic chronicle” (The New York Times) and “engrossing” (Business Insider), The Founders is a story of iteration and inventiveness—the products of which have cast a long and powerful shadow over modern life. This narrative illustrates how this rare assemblage of talent came to work together and how their collaboration changed our world forever.

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

Download or read book Extreme Ownership written by Jocko Willink and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2017-11-21 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An updated edition of the blockbuster bestselling leadership book that took America and the world by storm, two U.S. Navy SEAL officers who led the most highly decorated special operations unit of the Iraq War demonstrate how to apply powerful leadership principles from the battlefield to business and life. Sent to the most violent battlefield in Iraq, Jocko Willink and Leif Babin’s SEAL task unit faced a seemingly impossible mission: help U.S. forces secure Ramadi, a city deemed “all but lost.” In gripping firsthand accounts of heroism, tragic loss, and hard-won victories in SEAL Team Three’s Task Unit Bruiser, they learned that leadership—at every level—is the most important factor in whether a team succeeds or fails. Willink and Babin returned home from deployment and instituted SEAL leadership training that helped forge the next generation of SEAL leaders. After departing the SEAL Teams, they launched Echelon Front, a company that teaches these same leadership principles to businesses and organizations. From promising startups to Fortune 500 companies, Babin and Willink have helped scores of clients across a broad range of industries build their own high-performance teams and dominate their battlefields. Now, detailing the mind-set and principles that enable SEAL units to accomplish the most difficult missions in combat, Extreme Ownership shows how to apply them to any team, family or organization. Each chapter focuses on a specific topic such as Cover and Move, Decentralized Command, and Leading Up the Chain, explaining what they are, why they are important, and how to implement them in any leadership environment. A compelling narrative with powerful instruction and direct application, Extreme Ownership revolutionizes business management and challenges leaders everywhere to fulfill their ultimate purpose: lead and win.

Download or read book The Innovator s DNA written by Jeff Dyer and published by Harvard Business Press. This book was released on 2011-07-12 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new classic, cited by leaders and media around the globe as a highly recommended read for anyone interested in innovation. In The Innovator’s DNA, authors Jeffrey Dyer, Hal Gregersen, and bestselling author Clayton Christensen (The Innovator’s Dilemma, The Innovator’s Solution, How Will You Measure Your Life?) build on what we know about disruptive innovation to show how individuals can develop the skills necessary to move progressively from idea to impact. By identifying behaviors of the world’s best innovators—from leaders at Amazon and Apple to those at Google, Skype, and Virgin Group—the authors outline five discovery skills that distinguish innovative entrepreneurs and executives from ordinary managers: Associating, Questioning, Observing, Networking, and Experimenting. Once you master these competencies (the authors provide a self-assessment for rating your own innovator’s DNA), the authors explain how to generate ideas, collaborate to implement them, and build innovation skills throughout the organization to result in a competitive edge. This innovation advantage will translate into a premium in your company’s stock price—an innovation premium—which is possible only by building the code for innovation right into your organization’s people, processes, and guiding philosophies. Practical and provocative, The Innovator’s DNA is an essential resource for individuals and teams who want to strengthen their innovative prowess.

Download or read book Secrets of Sand Hill Road written by Scott Kupor and published by Random House. This book was released on 2019-06-06 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Worth far more than its cover price ... I wish I’d had it available to me when I was first looking for startup funding' -- Eric Ries Every startup needs capital, and ambitious startups seek it on Sand Hill Road – Silicon Valley’s dream street for entrepreneurs. That’s where you’ll find the biggest names in venture capital, including the 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. Secrets of Sand Hill Road is the first book that shows you exactly how VCs decide where and how much to invest. It will help you get the best possible deal and make the most of your relationships with VCs. You’ll learn, for instance: -- Why most VCs typically invest in only one startup in a given business category -- Why the talent you need most when raising venture capital is your storytelling ability -- How to handle a 'down round', when you have to raise funds at a lower valuation than in your previous round -- Why bridge financing (reopening your last round to existing investors) is generally a bad idea -- What to do when VCs get too entangled in the day-to-day operations of your 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 you need to turn yourstartup into the next unicorn.

Download or read book The Disney Way written by Bill Capodagli and published by McGraw Hill Professional. This book was released on 1999-01-21 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "I dream, I test my dreams against my beliefs, I dare to take risks, and I execute my vision to make those dreams come true." -Walt Disney. Walt Disney's dreams, beliefs, and daring gave birth to captivating characters, thrilling theme park attractions, and breathtaking tales that have inspired the imaginations of generations of children and adults. Disney also launched an entertainment and marketing empire whose influence is felt around the world, and whose success provides a model of business excellence that can guide any company. Each principle is then examined in detail by illustrating the principle at work at Disney as well as at other successful companies. Capodagli and Jackson have spent their careers studying Disney and teaching this unique management method to others. As consultants to companies ranging from Illinois Power to Bristol-Myers Squibb and Whirlpool, they have used the Disney principles again and again, and have seen them yield startling performance improvements. They have distilled this wisdom in THE DISNEY WAY. In this book, you'll learn how to: Give every member of your organization the chance to dream, and tap into the creativity those dreams embody; Treat your customers like guests; Build long-term relationships with key suppliers and partners; Dare to take calculated risks in order to bring innovative ideas to fruition; Align long-term vision with short-term execution. And more. No fairy dust. No magic wands. No wishing on a star. Just sound, effective management principles that stem from Walt Disney's values, vision, and philosophy. Lists of questions to ask and actions to take, along with real-life examples, will help you adapt the Disney Way to suit your company's needs. From the hiring and training of employees to the realization of a creative concept to exceptional customer service, every aspect of the Walt Disney Company is linked to Walt Disney's vision.