A Dozen Lessons for Entrepreneurs

A Dozen Lessons for Entrepreneurs PDF Author: Tren Griffin
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 023154569X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 397

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Book Description
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.

A Dozen Lessons for Entrepreneurs

A Dozen Lessons for Entrepreneurs PDF Author: Tren Griffin
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 023154569X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 397

Get Book Here

Book Description
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.

Around the Corner to Around the World

Around the Corner to Around the World PDF Author: Robert Rosenberg
Publisher: HarperCollins Leadership
ISBN: 1400220491
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
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.

The Messy Middle

The Messy Middle PDF Author: Scott Belsky
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0735218080
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 418

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Book Description
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.

Do More Faster

Do More Faster PDF Author: Brad Feld
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0470948795
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
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.

What You Do Is Who You Are

What You Do Is Who You Are PDF Author: Ben Horowitz
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 006287134X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 235

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Book Description
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.

Extreme Entrepreneurship

Extreme Entrepreneurship PDF Author: Adam J. Sulkowski
Publisher: Van Rye Publishing, LLC
ISBN: 1734034459
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 198

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Book Description
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!

The Startup of You (Revised and Updated)

The Startup of You (Revised and Updated) PDF Author: Reid Hoffman
Publisher: Crown Currency
ISBN: 0307888924
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 274

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Book Description
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.

Disciplined Entrepreneurship

Disciplined Entrepreneurship PDF Author: Bill Aulet
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1118692284
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
24 Steps to Success! Disciplined Entrepreneurship will change the way you think about starting a company. Many believe that entrepreneurship cannot be taught, but great entrepreneurs aren’t born with something special – they simply make great products. This book will show you how to create a successful startup through developing an innovative product. It breaks down the necessary processes into an integrated, comprehensive, and proven 24-step framework that any industrious person can learn and apply. You will learn: Why the “F” word – focus – is crucial to a startup’s success Common obstacles that entrepreneurs face – and how to overcome them How to use innovation to stand out in the crowd – it’s not just about technology Whether you’re a first-time or repeat entrepreneur, Disciplined Entrepreneurship gives you the tools you need to improve your odds of making a product people want. Author Bill Aulet is the managing director of the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship as well as a senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management. For more please visit http://disciplinedentrepreneurship.com/

Secrets of Sand Hill Road

Secrets of Sand Hill Road PDF Author: Scott Kupor
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0593083598
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
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.

World Changers

World Changers PDF Author: John A. Byrne
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101565640
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 303

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Book Description
What if you could sit down with some of the world's most influential entrepreneurs and gain their knowledge and insights on how to create a game changing business? Imagine having the chance to listen to a John Mackey (Whole Foods) or a Fred Smith (FedEx) on the most important things they've learned from their experiences. Or having the benefit of the self-reflection of Howard Schultz of Starbucks, who had to come back to the company he originally built to reinvent it and himself? Of course it's not possible to deliver these rock star entrepreneurs to your dinner table. But John A. Byrne offers the next best thing: he spoke with many who have changed the face of business. In World Changers he captures the most important lessons they've learned, the biggest challenges they've tackled, and the most valuable advice they can offer others who have an entrepreneurial dream. You'll learn the inspiring stories of how these world changers discovered their disruptive ideas, then made them a reality; overcame a variety of obstacles; and created sustainable enterprises. You'll get the firsthand accounts of how: Bernie Marcus and Arthur Blank got the confidence to start The Home Depot after being fired from their jobs. Reed Hastings turned a forty-dollar video late fee into a disruptive upstart called Netflix. Herb Kohler, the "reluctant prince of porcelain," came back to the family business and made it number one in its industry again. Narayana Murthy, after one fateful train ride and wrongful incarceration, converted from communist to capitalist and cofounded one of the most successful entrepreneurial ventures in India. World Changers is an inspiration for those who want to create something meaningful on their own. It serves as both a celebration of entrepreneurial achievement as well as a practical handbook for everyone who dreams of starting his or her own world-changing business.