Lead Upwards


Book Description

In Lead Upwards: How Startup Joiners Can Impact New Ventures, Build Amazing Careers, and Inspire Great Teams, startup marketing leader Sarah E. Brown delivers an illuminating and accessible guide to maximizing your impact and delivering results in a startup leadership role. The author draws on over a decade of experience scaling SaaS companies as she explains how to prepare for, earn, and succeed in an executive role at a startup company. The book describes every step on the way to realizing your goals—and the goals of your startup—as you navigate the gap between a management role and the executive team. It covers what to do in your first 90 days, how to build and sustain a healthy team culture, and the art of communicating results to your leadership team and board. You’ll also learn: How to manage the challenges posed by leading a remote, distributed, or hybrid team Management strategies based on inclusive and diverse teambuilding, alignment with business objectives, and inspirational leadership Effective ways to level up your skills and stay current as your company grows A must-read book for current and aspiring executives at startup firms, Lead Upwards will also earn a place on the bookshelves of startup board members, founders, funders, and managers seeking a singularly insightful discussion of business leadership.




Power to the Startup People: How To Grow Your Startup Career When You’re Not The Founder


Book Description

I’m lounging in the living room of a vacation home located in the high country of Colorado with a handful of close friends from Boulder. We each work for startups of various sizes and maturity. We’ve rented the home for the weekend to relax in the nearby hot springs and hike local mountain trails, as well as set aside time from our harried schedules to discuss our hopes, dreams—and startup careers. As the sun sets and the dry mountain air cools, we bundle up with blankets and take turns sharing life updates, which, especially this particular weekend, offer a snapshot into the variety and complexity of startup life.




Why Startups Fail


Book Description

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.




The Founder's Dilemmas


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


Book Description

" ... [The author] shares the inspiring experiences, lessons, and words to the wise from more than forty founders, along with his own playbook for startup success"--Page 4 of cover.




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.




Founders at Work


Book Description

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.




Power Moves


Book Description

From the founder of the influential website Career Contessa, an invaluable career resource for women feeling stuck or unfulfilled that combines actionable advice, learning tools to make impactful life changes, and an in-depth discussion of how to build a meaningful career on your terms. With her popular website Career Contessa, Lauren McGoodwin built an audience of ambitious, professional, millennial women who thought they did everything right—they got the degree, the internship, and even the promotion—but still wondered why they felt stuck and unfulfilled. The first site of its kind to focus on the unique, complex aspects of women's careers, Career Contessa offers women the smart advice they deserve, in a voice that resonates. Drawing on the insights and lessons developed from Career Contessa, Power Moves is the essential handbook that helps professional women truly feel understood so they can bypass perfection and planning and head straight to evolving. McGoodwin addresses young professionals’ number-one concern: career transitions and growth, and engages them with specific goals, including: What is a Power Move and why they matter Cutting out comparison, shame, and self-loathing How to abandon the elusive “dream job” Embracing your inner questioner, your inner quester, and your inner-quitter Making money moves and taking control of your financial future Tuning out from the noise and tuning into your voice Power Moves is filled with the information, guidance, advice, and essential tools, (including helpful graphics) that can help women take decisive, bold steps without self-doubt and fear, Power Moves shows women how to build a successful career on their own terms.




Brazen Careerist


Book Description

Are you taking long lunches? Ignoring sexual harassment? Do you keep your desk neat to the point of looking like you don't have enough to do? The answer to all three should be yes, if you want to succeed in your career on your own terms. Penelope Trunk, expert business advice columnist for the Boston Globe, gives anything but standard advice to help members of the X and Y generations succeed on their own terms in any industry. Trunk asserts that a take-charge attitude and thinking outside the box are the only ways to make it in today's job market. With 45 tips that will get you thinking bigger, acting bolder, and blazing trails you never thought possible, Brazen Careerist will forever change your career outlook. Guy Kawasaki, author of The Art of the Start "Take everything you think you 'know' about career strategies, throw them away, and read this book because the rules have changed. 'Brazen,' 'counter-intuitive,' and 'radical' are the best three descriptions of Trunk's work. Life is too short to be stuck in a rat hole..." Robert I. Sutton, Ph.D, author of the New York Times Bestseller The No Asshole Rule "A delightful book, with some edgy advice that made me squirm a bit at times. I agreed with 90% of it, found myself arguing with the other 10%, and was completely engaged from start to finish." Paul D. Tieger, author of Do What You Are and CEO of SpeedReading People, LLC "Penelope Trunk brings considerable savvy and a fresh new perspective to the business of career success. Bold and sometimes unconventional, Brazen Careerist gives readers much to think about as well as concrete, practical suggestions that will help them know what they want, and know how to get it." Keith Ferrazzi, bestselling author of Never Eat Alone: And Other Secrets to Success, One Relationship at a Time "Brazen Careerist has the street-smarts you need to make your career and life work for you from the start. Read it now, or you'll wish you had when you're 40!"




Mental Health and Wellbeing in the Workplace


Book Description

***HIGHLY COMMENDED - HR & MANAGEMENT - BUSINESS BOOK AWARDS 2021*** Provides guidance for both employers and staff on promoting positive mental health and supporting those experiencing mental ill health in the workplace The importance of good mental health and wellbeing in the workplace is a subject of increased public awareness and governmental attention. The Department of Health advises that one in four people will experience a mental health issue at some point in their lives. Although a number of recent developments and initiatives have raised the profile of this crucial issue, employers are experiencing challenges in promoting the mental health and wellbeing of their employees. Mental Health & Wellbeing in the Workplace contains expert guidance for improving mental health and supporting those experiencing mental ill health. This comprehensive book addresses the range of issues surrounding mental health and wellbeing in work environments – providing all involved with informative and practical assistance. Authors Gill Hasson and Donna Butler examine changing workplace environment for improved wellbeing, shifting employer and employee attitudes on mental health, possible solutions to current and future challenges and more. Detailed, real-world case studies illustrate a variety of associated concerns from both employer and employee perspectives. This important guide: Explains why understanding mental health important and its impact on businesses and employees Discusses why and how to promote mental health in the workplace and the importance of having an effective 'wellbeing strategy' Provides guidance on managing staff experiencing mental ill health Addresses dealing with employee stress and anxiety Features resources for further support if experiencing mental health issues Mental Health & Wellbeing in the Workplace is a valuable resource for those in the workplace wanting to look after their physical and mental wellbeing, and those looking for guidance in managing staff with mental health issues.