The Founder Handbook

The Founder Handbook PDF Author: Andrius Sutas
Publisher: Tfh A&s
ISBN: 9781838365707
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 208

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Book Description
The Founder Handbook is a collection of topics from two operators: Andrius Sutas, a company founder and CEO, and Siobhan Clarke, who invests in and supports multiple startups with helping to define and execute their growth plans. Why does this book matter? There are no set rules on how to succeed in building and then scaling your startup. However, we believe that there are universal lessons that every successful founder has to learn. This wisdom is usually accumulated the hard way - doing something, failing at it, learning from it and then repeating the cycle. In this book we share these experiences so that you can get a head start. Praise for the founder handbook: The great thing Siobhan and Andrius are offering founders with this book is lessons that work in practice - this is not theoretical, it's from the school of hard knocks. -PAUL MCNABB, CO MANAGING PARTNER AT EPISODE 1 VENTURES In 10 years of B2B investing every initial conversation with a startup entrepreneur distils down to the belief that "if we build a better product they will come" - they don't. When this reality becomes general knowledge inside of the startup team then this is where this book steps in - a practical, grounded and structured grand insight on how to get the sales traction to the A round. -JOHN STRAW, SENIOR ADVISOR - MCKINSEY AND COMPANY This book is an engaging and entertaining read - and one that packs a huge amount of hard-won wisdom into a relatively small space. Any founder will find their daunting journey a little easier having read this. One of the most valuable gifts to give anyone charting a course through uncertainty is a set of great questions to ask of yourself and others - Siobhan and Andrius more than deliver on this front. -STEPHEN COOK, MANAGING PARTNER AT BP LAUNCHPAD

The Founder Handbook

The Founder Handbook PDF Author: Andrius Sutas
Publisher: Tfh A&s
ISBN: 9781838365707
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 208

Get Book

Book Description
The Founder Handbook is a collection of topics from two operators: Andrius Sutas, a company founder and CEO, and Siobhan Clarke, who invests in and supports multiple startups with helping to define and execute their growth plans. Why does this book matter? There are no set rules on how to succeed in building and then scaling your startup. However, we believe that there are universal lessons that every successful founder has to learn. This wisdom is usually accumulated the hard way - doing something, failing at it, learning from it and then repeating the cycle. In this book we share these experiences so that you can get a head start. Praise for the founder handbook: The great thing Siobhan and Andrius are offering founders with this book is lessons that work in practice - this is not theoretical, it's from the school of hard knocks. -PAUL MCNABB, CO MANAGING PARTNER AT EPISODE 1 VENTURES In 10 years of B2B investing every initial conversation with a startup entrepreneur distils down to the belief that "if we build a better product they will come" - they don't. When this reality becomes general knowledge inside of the startup team then this is where this book steps in - a practical, grounded and structured grand insight on how to get the sales traction to the A round. -JOHN STRAW, SENIOR ADVISOR - MCKINSEY AND COMPANY This book is an engaging and entertaining read - and one that packs a huge amount of hard-won wisdom into a relatively small space. Any founder will find their daunting journey a little easier having read this. One of the most valuable gifts to give anyone charting a course through uncertainty is a set of great questions to ask of yourself and others - Siobhan and Andrius more than deliver on this front. -STEPHEN COOK, MANAGING PARTNER AT BP LAUNCHPAD

Super Founders

Super Founders PDF Author: Ali Tamaseb
Publisher: PublicAffairs
ISBN: 1541768418
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
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.

The Founder's Manual

The Founder's Manual PDF Author: RYAN. FREDERICK
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781941688687
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
Starting a company is an irrational act. Most successful Founders bring a unique combination of drive, determination, product knowledge, creative problem-solving skills, business acumen, stamina, and a keen sense of timing, to their fledgling enterprises. And the best of these know how to communicate with a variety of audiences by telling a great story. In the first section of this manual, author Ryan Frederick create a profile of the combination of skills, personality, and discipline that are common to successful Founders. A Founder has many audiences that compete for attention-The Core Team, Investors, Suppliers, and Customers to name a few. Each is critical to the success of a new enterprise and the ability to prioritize, communicate with them, and engage them at just the right time, is essential to the success of any start-up. With limited resources, failure to engage with any one of these important audiences at the right moment can be the difference between success and shutting down. The second section of the Founder's Manual focuses on strategy and the business decisions that go into moving from a concept to producing a deliverable and building a customer base. Here, Frederick focuses on defining a niche, becoming investable, finding customers, finding investors, working with accelerators, timing, and knowing limitations. Another important focus of this section is a Founder's role in establishing a culture that will ultimately define the enterprise, affect operations, and shape brand messaging as the organization evolves. The third section of this guidebook focuses on the process of creating a product that customers care about and will pay for. In addition to sound advice for managing your product and business relative to competing products, this section focuses on getting to know your customers, understanding the problem along with changing requirements, and designing solutions that customers will appreciate. It covers the important topics of timing, releasing early versions of a product, adding features, and keeping customers engaged throughout the process. In this essential guide, Ryan Frederick shares insights, gained from years spent working closely with start-up companies, will assist you in becoming a successful Founder.

Founding Sales

Founding Sales PDF Author: Peter R Kazanjy
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781734505115
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 428

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Book Description
This book is specifically targeted for founders who find themselves at the point where they need to transition into a selling role. Specifically founders who are leading organizations that have a B2B, direct sales model that involves sales professionals engaging in verbal, commercial conversations with buyers. Moreover, many examples in this book will be targeted specifically to the realm of B2B SAAS software, and specifically as regards new, potentially innovative or disruptive offerings that are being brought to market for the first time. In short, direct sales of the sort a B2B SAAS software startup would engage in. With that said, if you are looking to be a first time salesperson, transitioning in from another type of role, or fresh out of school, in an organization that meets those characteristics above, you will get value out of this book. Similarly, if you are a first time sales manager, either of the founder type, or a sales individual contributor who is transitioning into that role, again, in an organization who meets the criteria above, you will also get value from this book.

Lost and Founder

Lost and Founder PDF Author: Rand Fishkin
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0735213321
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
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.

High Growth Handbook

High Growth Handbook PDF Author: Elad Gil
Publisher: Stripe Press
ISBN: 1953953379
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 396

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Book Description
High Growth Handbook is the playbook for growing your startup into a global brand. Global technology executive, serial entrepreneur, and angel investor Elad Gil has worked with high-growth tech companies including Airbnb, Twitter, Google, Stripe, and Square as they’ve grown from small companies into global enterprises. Across all of these breakout companies, Gil has identified a set of common patterns and created an accessible playbook for scaling high-growth startups, which he has now codified in High Growth Handbook. In this definitive guide, Gil covers key topics, including: · The role of the CEO · Managing a board · Recruiting and overseeing an executive team · Mergers and acquisitions · Initial public offerings · Late-stage funding. Informed by interviews with some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley, including Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn), Marc Andreessen (Andreessen Horowitz), and Aaron Levie (Box), High Growth Handbook presents crystal-clear guidance for navigating the most complex challenges that confront leaders and operators in high-growth startups.

The Founder's Dilemmas

The Founder's Dilemmas PDF Author: Noam Wasserman
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691158304
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 490

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Book Description
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.

The Startup Playbook

The Startup Playbook PDF Author: Rajat Bhargava
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 1119708532
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 480

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Book Description
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

The Founders

The Founders PDF Author: Jimmy Soni
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1501197258
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 484

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Book Description
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.

Founder’s Pocket Guide: Founder Equity Splits

Founder’s Pocket Guide: Founder Equity Splits PDF Author: Stephen R. Poland
Publisher: 1x1 Media
ISBN: 1938162099
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 75

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Book Description
“How do we split up the equity ownership of our startup?” This guide provides a framework and process to help startup founders answer this common question. Equity ownership affects the culture and sense of wellbeing of a startup. Founders typically sacrifice a great deal of other life opportunities to work on a startup effort. In exchange for that sacrifice, a founder wants to feel the ownership equation with any co-founders is fair. In detail, this Founder’s Pocket Guide walks entrepreneurs though the following elements: • Take The Founder Test to make sure everybody deserves founder status • Review the case for splitting your founder equity into equal parts • Use the Equity Split Scorecard as a fair method to allocate more equity to highly skilled cofounders • Solve common equity problems using founder vesting structures • Answer common equity split questions like IP and founder-investors Note that this guide does not go into how to use equity to attract employees or using equity to pay service providers, advisors, development companies, or other contractors. This guide focuses solely on the best practices of deciding the equity ownership split between the founders of a startup venture.