Startup CEO


Book Description

You’re only a startup CEO once. Do it well with Startup CEO, a "master class in building a business." —Dick Costolo, Former CEO, Twitter Being a startup CEO is a job like no other: it’s difficult, risky, stressful, lonely, and often learned through trial and error. As a startup CEO seeing things for the first time, you’re likely to make mistakes, fail, get things wrong, and feel like you don’t have any control over outcomes. Author Matt Blumberg has been there, and in Startup CEO he shares his experience, mistakes, and lessons learned as he guided Return Path from a handful of employees and no revenues to over $100 million in revenues and 500 employees. Startup CEO is not a memoir of Return Path's 20-year journey but a thoughtful CEO-focused book that provides first-time CEOs with advice, tools, and approaches for the situations that startup CEOs will face. You'll learn: How to tell your story to new hires, investors, and customers for greater alignment How to create a values-based culture for speed and engagement How to create business and personal operating systems so that you can balance your life and grow your company at the same time How to develop, lead, and leverage your board of directors for greater impact How to ensure that your company is bought, not sold, when you exit Startup CEO is the field guide every CEO needs throughout the growth of their company.




The Hard Thing About Hard Things


Book Description

Ben Horowitz, cofounder of Andreessen Horowitz and one of Silicon Valley's most respected and experienced entrepreneurs, offers essential advice on building and running a startup—practical wisdom for managing the toughest problems business school doesn’t cover, based on his popular ben’s blog. While many people talk about how great it is to start a business, very few are honest about how difficult it is to run one. Ben Horowitz analyzes the problems that confront leaders every day, sharing the insights he’s gained developing, managing, selling, buying, investing in, and supervising technology companies. A lifelong rap fanatic, he amplifies business lessons with lyrics from his favorite songs, telling it straight about everything from firing friends to poaching competitors, cultivating and sustaining a CEO mentality to knowing the right time to cash in. Filled with his trademark humor and straight talk, The Hard Thing About Hard Things is invaluable for veteran entrepreneurs as well as those aspiring to their own new ventures, drawing from Horowitz's personal and often humbling experiences.




SYSTEMology


Book Description

Whether you've tried to systemise in the past or not, SYSTEMology provides a revolutionary approach to small business systems.




Building a Sustainable Business


Book Description

"Brings the business planning process alive to help today's agriculture entrepreneurs transform farm-grown inspiration into profitable enterprises. Sample worksheets illustrate how real farm families set goals, research processing alternatives, determine potential markets, and evaluate financing options. Blank worksheets offer readers the opportunity to develop their own detailed, lender-ready business plan and map out strategies" --back cover.




The Business of Building a Better World


Book Description

Twenty-nine leading scholars and executives provide a visionary look at the future of business, propelling past damaging industrial-age values to uncover the key ingredients of humanistic, ecologically sustainable, and intergenerational prosperity. Through the exploration of robust cases and stories packed with deep insight and vital science, this extraordinary collection explores how we can adapt our notions of value, markets, and models of cooperation and collective action to create a world where economies and businesses excel, all people thrive, and nature flourishes. In part I, “The Business of Business Is Betterment,” the contributors show how enterprises today are further developing-and even taking a quantum leap beyond-the multistakeholder logic of “shared value creation.” Part II, “Net Positive = Innovation's New Frontier,” is focused on what companies can and are doing to move away from “doing no harm” to playing an active role in solving environmental, social, and economic problems. The final section, “Ultimate Advantage: A Leadership Revolution That Is Changing Everything,” looks at new leadership paradigms-characterized by unexpected qualities like virtue, love, compassion, and connection-that are crucial to creating engaged, empowered, innovative, and out-performing enterprises. This book is designed to galvanize change and unite a global community of inquiry and action. It establishes the conceptual cornerstones for a new kind of business practice that will lead the way to an equitable, sustainable, and flourishing future.




Build the Damn Thing


Book Description

The Wall Street Journal Bestseller featured in Bloomberg, Fast Company, Masters of Scale, the Motley Fool, Marketplace and more. An indispensable guide to building a startup and breaking down the barriers for diverse entrepreneurs from the visionary venture capitalist and pioneering entrepreneur Kathryn Finney. Build the Damn Thing is a hard-won, battle-tested guide for every entrepreneur who the establishment has left out. Finney, an investor and startup champion, explains how to build a business from the ground up, from developing a business plan to finding investors, growing a team, and refining a product. Finney empowers entrepreneurs to take advantage of their unique networks and resources; arms readers with responses to investors who say, “great pitch but I just don’t do Black women”; and inspires them to overcome naysayers while remaining “100% That B*tch.” Don’t wait for the system to let you in—break down the door and build your damn thing. For all the Builders striving to build their businesses in a world that has overlooked and underestimated them: this is the essential guide to knowing, breaking, remaking and building your own rules of entrepreneurship in a startup and investing world designed for and by the “Entitleds.”




Entrepreneur


Book Description

Build a world class business with a clear blueprint to success Entrepreneur: Building Your Business From Start to Success is your guidebook to achieving entrepreneurial success. Whether you’re an existing business owner seeking to increase your reach, or a budding entrepreneur ready to take the next step, this book provides invaluable guidance from experts who have made it happen time and time again. A simple step-by-step process will help you translate your ideas into effective business plans, raise the capital needed to start and grow your business, build a winning team and leave the competition behind. Drawing upon their experience founding more than 30 companies, the authors share their entrepreneurial wisdom and reveal the real-world techniques that lead to success. With a pragmatic and personal approach, the authors explore the personal characteristics that are vital to achievement; managing stress, withstanding heavy workloads and coping with potential health concerns are subjects often overlooked in the pursuit of business achievement. Addressing the link between business concerns and personal welfare, the authors offer suggestions on how to most effectively reconcile entrepreneurial drive with personal well-being. Build or revitalise a business with proven methods from two globally-recognized experts in the field Develop an effective business plan to maximise your probability of success Understand funding markets and raise capital necessary to start or grow your business Grow your business by beating the competition and dominating your market Providing invaluable insight into real-world entrepreneurial methods that work, this book arms current and future business leaders with the skills, knowledge and motivation to create the organization of their dreams.




Building the Business of You


Book Description

Career Progression Isn't Linear Anymore. Here's Why That's a Good Thing. What if everything we've been told about building a successful career is wrong? What if advice like go to school, get a job at a great company, and rise through the ranks is outdated? What if there's a better way to find fulfilling work that pays well? Connie Steele has spent ten years studying the workplace trends that are now permanent changes. Working at Fortune 500, start-up and scale-up organizations, high-growth tech companies, and consulting with C-level executives, Connie has seen firsthand that business is no longer binary, hierarchical, or absolute. It's non-linear, collaborative, and fluid. You don't have to start at the bottom and earn your way up; you can start at the top, as CEO of you. In Building the Business of You, Connie shares the trends of tomorrow so professionals, entrepreneurs, freelancers, founders, and side hustlers can "skate where the puck will be" and form their own career mashup. This is Connie's term for the career of the future (and the present) in which workers merge their skills, interests, passions, values, hobbies, opportunities, relationships, education, network, identity, and even multiple jobs and gigs. Because the dream job is no longer something you get; it's something you create. And Building the Business of You provides all the practical tools you need for yours.







A Lapsed Anarchist's Approach to Building a Great Business


Book Description

The first in a series of books by Zingerman's co-founding partner Ari Weinzweig examines the basic building blocks of the culture and structure we know now as Zingerman's. These approaches are applicable whether you're running a law office, a library, a restaurant, a record label, a software firm, or an organic farm. They are the behind-the-scenes "secret" stuff that goes into making a very special, sustainable business of any kind. Inc. Magazine calls it one of the Best Books for Business Owners.