Blackstone LaunchPad Entrepreneurship Book Collection: Strategy & Planning

Whether your dream is escaping the rat race, experiencing high-end world travel, or earning a monthly five-figure income with zero management, The 4-Hour Workweek is the blueprint. This step-by-step guide teaches how Tim went from $40,000 per year and 80 hours per week to $40,000 per month and 4 hours per week. This new expanded edition includes more than 50 practical tips and case studies from readers (including families) who have doubled income, overcome common sticking points, and reinvented themselves using the original book as a starting point.

All In Startup is more than just a novel about eschewing temptation and fighting to save a company. It is a lifeline for entrepreneurs who are thinking about launching a new idea or fo rthose who have already started but can't seem to generate the traction they were expecting. Entrepreneurs who achieve success in the new economy do so using anew "scientific method" of innovation. All In Startup demonstrates why four counterintuitive principles separate successful entrepreneurs from the wanna-preneurs who bounce from idea to idea, unable to generate real revenue. You will likely get only one opportunity in your life to go "all in" in on an idea: to quit your job, talk your spouse into letting you drain the savings account, and follow your dream. All In Startup will prepare you for that "all in" moment and make sure that you push your chips into the middle only when the odds are in your favor. This book holds the keys to significantly de-risking your idea so that your success appears almost lucky. Join Owen and Sam for this one-of-a-kind journey that will set you on the right path for when it's your turn to put everything on the line.

Whether you're an aspiring entrepreneur, small-business owner, intrapreneur, or not-for-profit leader, there's no shortage of advice on topics such as innovating, recruiting, fund raising, and branding. In fact, there are so many books, articles, websites, blogs, webinars, and conferences that many startups get paralyzed, or they focus on the wrong priorities and go broke before they succeed.  The Art of the Start 2.0 solves that problem by distilling Guy Kawasaki's decades of experience as one of the most hardworking and irreverent strategists in the business world. Guy has totally overhauled this iconic, essential guide for anyone starting anything.  It's 64 percent longer than version 1.0 and features his latest insights and practical advice about social media, crowdfunding, cloud computing, and many other topics.   Many of the basics of getting established have become easier, cheaper, and more democratic. Business plans are no longer necessary. Social media has replaced PR and advertising as the key method of promotion. Crowdfunding is now a viable alternative to investors. The cloud makes basic infrastructure affordable for almost any new venture.   The Art of the Start 2.0 will show you how to effectively deploy all these new tools.  And it will help you master the fundamental challenges that have not changed: building a strong team, creating an awesome product or service, and facing down your competition.

As adults, we seem to make everything harder. We’re driven to accelerate growth in our local startup communities—but in the process, we overthink, overanalyze, and overload even our simplest activities. Before long, our community goals buckle under the weight of our complex adult concerns. Our motivation dries up. Our best ideas fade away, leaving entrepreneurs no choice but to find another city in which to make their dreams come true. The solution? Channel our inner ten-year-old…and Build the Fort. With this simple, actionable metaphor, Chris Heivly empowers readers to replace the grown-up tendency to overcomplicate with his simple framework for effective community and ecosystem building. Energetic, friendly, and relatable, Build the Fort: The Startup Community Builder’s Field Guide provides a compass to move our ideas forward more successfully and propel our cities into the upper echelon of startup communities.

This bestselling, up-to-date guide shows you how to start your own import/export business, from researching a raw idea to a successful launch to ongoing, profitable business operations. Complete with real-life examples from importers and exporters, it helps you every step of the way, from targeting a market and preparing a business plan to dealing with foreign currencies, shipping procedures, customs requirements, and more. It also shares tips to help you take advantage of NAFTA and other trade pacts, plus online resources to help you start and grow your business.

Drawing upon a six-year research project at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business, Collins and Porras took eighteen truly exceptional and long-lasting companies -- they have an average age of nearly one hundred years and have outperformed the general stock market by a factor of fifteen since 1926 -- and studied each company in direct comparison to one of its top competitors. They examined the companies from their very beginnings to the present day. Throughout, the authors asked: "What makes the truly exceptional companies different from other companies?" What separates General Electric, 3M, Merck, Wal-Mart, Hewlett-Packard, Walt Disney, and Philip Morris from their rivals? Collins and Porras go beyond the incessant barrage of management buzzwords and fads of the day to discover timeless qualities that have consistently distinguished out-standing companies. They also provide inspiration to all executives and entrepreneurs by destroying the false but widely accepted idea that only charismatic visionary leaders can build visionary companies. Filled with hundreds of specific examples and organized into a coherent framework of practical concepts that can be applied by managers and entrepreneurs at all levels, Built to Last provides a master blueprint for building organizations that will prosper long into the twenty-first century and beyond.

Burn the Business Plan reveals the true stories about how a range of entrepreneurs created their successful start-ups: hint, many of them never began with a business plan. Business schools teach that the most important prerequisite for starting a business is a business plan. Nonsense, says Carl Schramm, who for a decade headed the most important foundation devoted to entrepreneurship in this country. Schramm explains that the importance of a business plan is only one of the many misconceptions about starting a company. Another is the myth of the kid genius--that all entrepreneurs are young software prodigies. In fact, the average entrepreneur is thirty-nine years old and has worked in corporate America for at least a decade. Schramm discusses why people with work experience in corporate America have an advantage as entrepreneurs. For one thing, they often have important contacts in the business world who may be customers for their new service or product. Burn the Business Plan tells stories of successful entrepreneurs in a variety of fields. It shows how knowledge, passion, determination, and a willingness to experiment and innovate are vastly more important than financial skill. This is an important, motivating look at true success that dispels the myths and offers invaluable real-world advice on how to achieve your dreams.

Business Model Generation is a handbook for visionaries, game changers, and challengers striving to defy outmoded business models and design tomorrow's enterprises. If your organization needs to adapt to harsh new realities, but you don't yet have a strategy that will get you out in front of your competitors, you need Business Model Generation. The book features a beautiful, highly visual, 4-color design that takes powerful strategic ideas and tools, and makes them easy to implement in your organization. It explains the most common Business Model patterns, based on concepts from leading business thinkers, and helps you reinterpret them for your own context. You will learn how to systematically understand, design, and implement a game-changing business model--or analyze and renovate an old one. Along the way, you'll understand at a much deeper level your customers, distribution channels, partners, revenue streams, costs, and your core value proposition.

A startup executive and investor draws on expertise developed at the premier venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and as an executive at Uber to address how tech's most successful products have solved the dreaded "cold start problem"--by leveraging network effects to launch and scale toward billions of users. Although software has become easier to build, launching and scaling new products and services remains difficult. Startups face daunting challenges entering the technology ecosystem, including stiff competition, copycats, and ineffective marketing channels. Teams launching new products must consider the advantages of "the network effect," where a product or service's value increases as more users engage with it. Apple, Google, Microsoft, and other tech giants utilize network effects, and most tech products incorporate them, whether they're messaging apps, workplace collaboration tools, or marketplaces. Network effects provide a path for fledgling products to break through, attracting new users through viral growth and word of mouth. Yet most entrepreneurs lack the vocabulary and context to describe them--much less understand the fundamental principles that drive the effect. What exactly are network effects? How do teams create and build them into their products? How do products compete in a market where every player has them? Andrew Chen draws on his experience and on interviews with the CEOs and founding teams of LinkedIn, Twitch, Zoom, Dropbox, Tinder, Uber, Airbnb, and Pinterest to offer unique insights in answering these questions. Chen also provides practical frameworks and principles that can be applied across products and industries.  The Cold Start Problem reveals what makes winning networks thrive, why some startups fail to successfully scale, and, most crucially, why products that create and compete using the network effect are vitally important today.

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

Laura Huang shows that success is about gaining an edge: that elusive quality that gives you an upper hand and attracts attention and support. Some people seem to naturally have it. Now, Huang teaches the rest of us how to create our own from the challenges and biases we think hold us back, and turning them to work in our favor. How do you find a competitive edge when the obstacles feel insurmountable? How do you get people to take you seriously when they're predisposed not to, and perhaps have already written you off? Laura Huang has come up against that problem many times--and so has anyone who's ever felt out of place or underestimated. Many of us sit back quietly, hoping that our hard work and effort will speak for itself. Or we try to force ourselves into the mold of who we think is "successful," stifling the creativity and charm that makes us unique and memorable. In Edge, Huang offers a different approach. She argues that success is rarely just about the quality of our ideas, credentials, and skills, or our effort. Instead, achieving success hinges on how well we shape others' perceptions--of our strengths, certainly, but also our flaws. It's about creating our own edge by confronting the factors that seem like shortcomings and turning them into assets that make others take notice. Huang draws from her groundbreaking research on entrepreneurial intuition, persuasion, and implicit decision-making, to impart her profound findings and share stories of previously-overlooked Olympians, assistants-turned-executives, and flailing companies that made momentous turnarounds. Through her deeply-researched framework, Huang shows how we can turn weaknesses into strengths and create an edge in any situation. She explains how an entrepreneur scored a massive investment despite initially being disparaged for his foreign accent, and how a first-time political candidate overcame voters' doubts about his physical disabilities. Edge shows that success is about knowing who you are and using that knowledge unapologetically and strategically. This book will teach you how to find your unique edge and keep it sharp.

To effectuate is to engage in a specific type of entrepreneurial action. It has special importance for situations where the future is truly unknowable or human agency is of primary importance. In Effectuation, Saras Sarasvathy explores the theory and techniques of non-predictive control for creating new firms, markets and economic opportunities. Using empirical and theoretical work done in collaboration with Nobel Laureate Herbert A. Simon, the author employs methods from cognitive science and behavioral economics to develop the notion of entrepreneurial expertise and effectuation. Supportive empirical evidence is provided by the author's study of 27 entrepreneurs as well as other independent studies. The book then traces the consequences of effectuation for business management, economics and social philosophy. The author finds that effectuators generate constraint-satisfying solutions rather than searching for optimal ones, make rather than find opportunities, and in a deep sense, convert 'as-if' propositions into 'even-if' ones. The way they accomplish this is the central discussion of the book.Students and scholars of entrepreneurship will find this path-breaking research of great value. The book's conclusions will also be of interest to those in the fields of behavioral and evolutionary economics, cognitive science and management.

It's time to drop the rose-colored glasses and face the facts: most new businesses fail, with often devastating consequences for the would-be entrepreneur. The Entrepreneur Equation helps you do the math before you set down the entrepreneurial path so that you can answer more than just "Could I be an entrepreneur?" but rather "Should I be an entrepreneur?". By understanding what it takes to build a valuable business as well as how to assess the risks and rewards of business ownership based on your personal circumstances, you can learn how to stack the odds of success in your favor and ultimately decide if business ownership is the best possible path for you, now or ever. Through illustrative examples and personalized exercises, tell-it-like-it-is Carol Roth helps you create and evaluate your own personal Entrepreneur Equation.

In business, performance is key. In performance, how you organize can be the key to growth. In the past five years, the business world has seen the birth of a new breed of company--the Exponential Organization--that has revolutionized how a company can accelerate its growth by using technology. An ExO can eliminate the incremental, linear way traditional companies get bigger, leveraging assets like community, big data, algorithms, and new technology into achieving performance benchmarks ten times better than its peers. Three luminaries of the business world--Salim Ismail, Yuri van Geest, and Mike Malone--have researched this phenomenon and documented ten characteristics of Exponential Organizations. Here, they walk the reader through how any company, from a startup to a multi-national, can become an ExO, streamline its performance, and grow to the next level.

Unicorns--companies that reach a valuation of more than $1 billion--are rare. Uri Levine has built two. And in Fall in Love with the Problem, Not the Solution, he shows you just how he did it. As the cofounder of Waze--the world's leading commuting and navigation app with more than 700 million users to date, and which Google acquired in 2013 for $1.15 billion--Levine is committed to spreading entrepreneurial thinking so that other founders, managers, and employees in the tech space can build their own highly valued companies.   Levine offers an inside look at the creation and sale of Waze and his second unicorn, Moovit, revealing the formula that drove those companies to compete with industry veterans and giants alike. He offers tips on: Firing and hiring Disrupting "broken" markets Raising funding Understanding your users Reaching product market fit Making scale-up decisions Going global Deciding when to sell   Fall in Love with the Problem, Not the Solution offers mentorship in a book from one of the world's most successful entrepreneurs, and empowers you to build a successful business by identifying your consumers' biggest problems and disrupting the inefficient markets that currently serve them.

The bestselling classic that launched 10,000 startups and new corporate ventures - The Four Steps to the Epiphany is one of the most influential and practical business books of all time. The Four Steps to the Epiphany launched the Lean Startup approach to new ventures. It was the first book to offer that startups are not smaller versions of large companies and that new ventures are different than existing ones. Startups search for business models while existing companies execute them. The book offers the practical and proven four-step Customer Development process for search and offers insight into what makes some startups successful and leaves others selling off their furniture. Rather than blindly execute a plan, The Four Steps helps uncover flaws in product and business plans and correct them before they become costly. Rapid iteration, customer feedback, testing your assumptions are all explained in this book. Packed with concrete examples of what to do, how to do it and when

The Challenge Built to Last, the defining management study of the nineties, showed how great companies triumph over time and how long-term sustained performance can be engineered into the DNA of an enterprise from the very beginning. But what about the company that is not born with great DNA? How can good companies, mediocre companies, even bad companies achieve enduring greatness? Are there companies that defy gravity and convert long-term mediocrity or worse into long-term superiority? And if so, what are the universal distinguishing characteristics that cause a company to go from good to great? Using tough benchmarks, Collins and his research team identified a set of elite companies that made the leap to great results and sustained those results for at least fifteen years. How great? After the leap, the good-to-great companies generated cumulative stock returns that beat the general stock market by an average of seven times in fifteen years, better than twice the results delivered by a composite index of the world's greatest companies. The research team contrasted the good-to-great companies with a carefully selected set of comparison companies that failed to make the leap from good to great. What was different? Why did one set of companies become truly great performers while the other set remained only good? Over five years, the team analyzed the histories of all twenty-eight companies in the study. After sifting through mountains of data and thousands of pages of interviews, Collins and his crew discovered the key determinants of greatness. The findings of the Good to Great study will surprise many readers and shed light on virtually every area of management strategy and practice.

In this instant New York Times bestseller, pioneering psychologist Angela Duckworth shows anyone striving to succeed--be it parents, students, educators, athletes, or business people--that the secret to outstanding achievement is not talent but a special blend of passion and persistence she calls "grit." Drawing on her own powerful story as the daughter of a scientist who frequently noted her lack of "genius," Duckworth, now a celebrated researcher and professor, describes her early eye-opening stints in teaching, business consulting, and neuroscience, which led to the hypothesis that what really drives success is not "genius" but a unique combination of passion and long-term perseverance.

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.

The first book to present innovation and entrepreneurship as purposeful and systematic discipline which explains and analyzes the challenges and opportunities of America's new entrepreneurial economy. A superbly practical book that explains what established businesses, public survey institutions, and new yentures have to know, have to learn, and have to do in today's economy and marketplace.

The bestselling classic on disruptive innovation, 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, innovation expert Clayton Christensen shows how even the most outstanding companies can do everything right--yet still lose market leadership. Read this international bestseller to avoid a similar fate. Clay Christensen--who authored the award-winning Harvard Business Review article "How Will You Measure Your Life?"--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, provocative, and one of the most influential business books of all time--The Innovator's Dilemma is the book no manager or entrepreneur should be without.

A behind-the-scenes look at how tomorrow's hottest startups are being primed for greatness   Investment firm Y Combinator is the most sought-after home for startups in Silicon Valley. Twice a year, it funds dozens of just-founded startups and provides three months of guidance from Paul Graham, YC's impresario, and his partners. Receiving an offer from YC creates the opportunity of a lifetime.   Acclaimed journalist Randall Stross was granted unprecedented access to Y Combinator, enabling a unique inside tour of the world of software startups. Over the course of a summer, we watch as a group of founders scramble to make something people want.   This is the definitive story of a seismic shift in the business world, in which coding skill trumps experience, undergraduates confidently take on Goliaths, and investors fall in love.

Most startups fail. But many of those failures are preventable. The Lean Startup is a new approach being adopted across the globe, changing the way companies are built and new products are launched. Eric Ries defines a startup as an organization dedicated to creating something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty. This is just as true for one person in a garage or a group of seasoned professionals in a Fortune 500 boardroom. What they have in common is a mission to penetrate that fog of uncertainty to discover a successful path to a sustainable business. The Lean Startup approach fosters companies that are both more capital efficient and that leverage human creativity more effectively. Inspired by lessons from lean manufacturing, it relies on "validated learning," rapid scientific experimentation, as well as a number of counter-intuitive practices that shorten product development cycles, measure actual progress without resorting to vanity metrics, and learn what customers really want. It enables a company to shift directions with agility, altering plans inch by inch, minute by minute. Rather than wasting time creating elaborate business plans, The Lean Startup offers entrepreneurs--in companies of all sizes--a way to test their vision continuously, to adapt and adjust before it's too late. Ries provides a scientific approach to creating and managing successful startups in a age when companies need to innovate more than ever.

Why do good teams kill great ideas? Loonshots reveals a surprising new way of thinking about the mysteries of group behavior that challenges everything we thought we knew about nurturing radical breakthroughs. Bahcall, a physicist and entrepreneur, shows why teams, companies, or any group with a mission will suddenly change from embracing new ideas to rejecting them, just as flowing water will suddenly change into brittle ice. Mountains of print have been written about culture. Loonshots identifies the small shifts in structure that control this transition, the same way that temperature controls the change from water to ice. Using examples that range from the spread of fires in forests to the hunt for terrorists online, and stories of thieves and geniuses and kings, Bahcall shows how a new kind of science can help us become the initiators, rather than the victims, of innovative surprise. Over the past decade, researchers have been applying the tools and techniques of this new science--the science of phase transitions--to understand how birds flock, fish swim, brains work, people vote, diseases erupt, and ecosystems collapse. Loonshots is the first to apply this science to the spread of breakthrough ideas. Bahcall distills these insights into practical lessons creatives, entrepreneurs, and visionaries can use to change our world.

A former international hostage negotiator for the FBI offers a new, field-tested approach to high-stakes negotiations--whether in the boardroom or at home. After a stint policing the rough streets of Kansas City, Missouri, Chris Voss joined the FBI, where his career as a hostage negotiator brought him face-to-face with a range of criminals, including bank robbers and terrorists. Reaching the pinnacle of his profession, he became the FBI's lead international kidnapping negotiator. Never Split the Difference takes you inside the world of high-stakes negotiations and into Voss's head, revealing the skills that helped him and his colleagues succeed where it mattered most: saving lives. In this practical guide, he shares the nine effective principles--counterintuitive tactics and strategies--you too can use to become more persuasive in both your professional and personal life. Life is a series of negotiations you should be prepared for: buying a car, negotiating a salary, buying a home, renegotiating rent, deliberating with your partner. Taking emotional intelligence and intuition to the next level, Never Split the Difference gives you the competitive edge in any discussion.

Thinking about starting a new business? Stop! Is there a genuine market for your idea? Do you really want to compete in that industry? Are you the right person to pursue it? No matter how talented you are or how much capital you have, if you're pursuing a fundamentally flawed opportunity then you're heading for failure. So before you launch your lean start-up, take your idea for a test drive and make sure it has a fighting chance of working.

In this refreshing, counterintuitive book, author Will Thorndike brings to bear the analytical wisdom of a successful career in investing, closely evaluating the performance of companies and their leaders. You will meet eight individualistic CEOs whose firms' average returns outperformed the S&P 500 by a factor of twenty--in other words, an investment of $10,000 with each of these CEOs, on average, would have been worth over $1.5 million twenty-five years later. You may not know all their names, but you will recognize their companies: General Cinema, Ralston Purina, The Washington Post Company, Berkshire Hathaway, General Dynamics, Capital Cities Broadcasting, TCI, and Teledyne. In The Outsiders, you'll learn the traits and methods--striking for their consistency and relentless rationality--that helped these unique leaders achieve such exceptional performance. Humble, unassuming, and often frugal, these "outsiders" shunned Wall Street and the press, and shied away from the hottest new management trends. Instead, they shared specific traits that put them and the companies they led on winning trajectories: a laser-sharp focus on per share value as opposed to earnings or sales growth; an exceptional talent for allocating capital and human resources; and the belief that cash flow, not reported earnings, determines a company's long-term value.

Pitching & Closing gives you concrete action steps for mastering the specific skill set today's business-development professionals need to define their roles and meet revenue expectations. Written in practical terms, this A-to-Z guide walks you through forging relationships, pitching a company's product, building a network, sourcing deals, making rejection positive, and staying cool while closing large deals. Firsthand accounts from business development executives across many industries, from tech to television to finance, bring to life such topics as: How to consistently identify and land the best strategic alliances for your business Why people say "yes" and why they say "no" Etiquette for making introductions and reaching out to people in ways that elicit responses Monitoring core metrics to know where to invest your time In addition to implementable advice and techniques from the top minds in the industry, this complete resource features an entire section of best practices for every step of the partnering process.

The logical and enduring way to innovate. Conventional wisdom today says that to survive, companies must move beyond incremental, sustaining innovation and invest in some form of radical innovation. "Disrupt yourself or be disrupted!" is the relentless message company leaders hear. The Power of Little Ideas argues there's a "third way" that is neither sustaining nor disruptive. This low-risk, high-reward strategy is an approach to innovation that all company leaders should understand so that they recognize it when their competitors practice it, and apply it when it will give them a competitive advantage. This distinctive approach has three key elements: It consists of creating a family of complementary innovations around a product or service, all of which work together to make that product more appealing and competitive. The complementary innovations work together as a system to carry out a single strategy or purpose. Crucially, unlike disruptive or radical innovation, innovating around a key product does not change the central product in any fundamental way. In this powerful, practical book, Wharton professor David Robertson illustrates how many well-known companies used this approach to stave off competitive threats and achieve great success. He outlines the organizational practices that unintentionally torpedo this approach to innovation in many companies and shows how organizations can overcome those challenges.

Disruption and innovation are at the top of every executive agenda for the world's largest companies. These leaders are trying to determine how to compete with a new breed of competitors that are playing the game by an entirely different set of rules. Predicting the Turn discusses the new high-stakes game of business between disruptive startups and Blue Chip companies, teaching you how to foresee the future of your industry.

In this highly inspirational book, Kaplan uses a unique approach that combines optimal mindset with experiential leadership to provide you with the greatest opportunity for success. His 30 years of successful military and business experience lays a solid foundation to provide exacting strategies for both personal and professional development. He offers an in-depth approach to taking control of your life and successfully reach the goals you set for yourself despite any obstacles you believe stand in your way. The Prior-Service Entrepreneur is MUCH more than a book for starting a business; it provides valuable insights into life skills, job readiness and mastering your competitive advantage. It will show you how to overcome personal challenges, increase confidence and reinvigorate your passion and sense of purpose.

We live in an age of unparalleled opportunity for innovation. We're building more products than ever before, but most of them fail--not because we can't complete what we set out to build, but because we waste time, money, and effort building the wrong product. What we need is a systematic process for quickly vetting product ideas and raising our odds of success. That's the promise of Running Lean. In this inspiring book, Ash Maurya takes you through an exacting strategy for achieving a "product/market fit" for your fledgling venture, based on his own experience in building a wide array of products from high-tech to no-tech. Throughout, he builds on the ideas and concepts of several innovative methodologies, including the Lean Startup, Customer Development, and bootstrapping. Running Lean is an ideal tool for business managers, CEOs, small business owners, developers and programmers, and anyone who's interested in starting a business project.

Bestselling author, Robert Sutton and Stanford colleague, Huggy Rao tackle a challenge that determines every organization's success: how to scale up farther, faster, and more effectively as an organization grows.  Sutton and Rao have devoted much of the last decade to uncovering what it takes to build and uncover pockets of exemplary performance, to help spread them, and to keep recharging organizations with ever better work practices. Drawing on inside accounts and case studies and academic research from a wealth of industries Sutton and Rao identify the key scaling challenges that confront every organization.  They tackle the difficult trade-offs that organizations must make between whether to encourage individualized approaches tailored to local needs or to replicate the same practices and customs as an organization or program expands. They reveal how the best leaders and teams develop, spread, and instill the right mindsets in their people-- rather than ruining or watering down the very things that have fueled successful growth in the past. They unpack the principles that help to cascade excellence throughout an organization, as well as show how to eliminate destructive beliefs and behaviors that will hold them back.  Scaling Up Excellence is the first major business book devoted to this universal and vexing challenge and it is destined to become the standard bearer in the field.

As one of today's most influential business thinkers, Seth Godin's books, blog sports, articles and speeches have inspired countless entrepreneurs, marketeers and managers around the world. Here, for the first time, Godin has collected the most provocative short peices from his pioneering blog which has a worldwide readership. Small Is The New Big also includes his most popular columns from Fast Company magazine and several short e-books he's written in the last few years. This truly is an overflowing bowl of inspiration that can be dipped into any time.

From the author of "The Power of Habit "comes a fascinating book that explores the science of productivity, and why managing "how" you think is more important than "what" you think with an appendix of real-world lessons to apply to your life. At the core of "Smarter Faster Better" are eight key productivity concepts from motivation and goal setting to focus and decision making that explain why some people and companies get so much done. Drawing on the latest findings in neuroscience, psychology, and behavioral economics as well as the experiences of CEOs, educational reformers, four-star generals, FBI agents, airplane pilots, and Broadway songwriters this painstakingly researched book explains that the most productive people, companies, and organizations don't merely act differently. They view the world, and their choices, in profoundly different ways.

So what? who cares? why you? lives at theintersection of inspiration and commercialization. It s a visual methodology to discover, define and describe the business value of a new idea. People with new ideas use it to win support for their projects, products and startup company ideas. Perhaps most importantly, they rely on it to engage people in conversation about why their idea matters and how it creates value for others.This methodology is designed to answer the key questions that every potential supporter of a new idea will have.

For the technology startup raising venture capital, the freelancer, social entrepreneur, and coffee shop owner, Edwards has written a modern textbook for entrepreneurship, covering all aspects of starting a business, including finance, branding, advertising, PR, accounting, and business law. Part manual, part manifesto, the nearly 400-page text presents proven strategies for launching a startup on a shoestring budget. In "Startup: The Complete Handbook for Launching a Company for Less," Edwards draws upon her own experiences as a venture capital investor and bootstrap entrepreneur to outline over $100,000 in savings with do-it-yourself guides and personal finance strategies.The book explains how to create a profitable business model, conserve cash, and get operational fast, giving equal attention to the risks and wealth creation opportunities business ownership provides."Startup" tackles both strategy and tactics – discussing high-level business strategy concepts and illustrating back of the napkin calculations to help entrepreneurs make good decisions. Edwards offers three tests for feasibility (to minimize risk), 16 creative ways to finance a startup, and a formulaic approach to marketing (to grow revenue).In concise, plain English, "Startup" explains the finer points of venture funding, angel investors, grants, SBA loans, intellectual property, and corporate structure, and includes templates of business plans, press releases, and startup expenses.

"Startup communities" are popping up everywhere, from cities like Boulder to Boston and even in countries such as Iceland. These types of entrepreneurial ecosystems are driving innovation and small business energy. Startup Communities documents the buzz, strategy, long-term perspective, and dynamics of building communities of entrepreneurs who can feed off of each other's talent, creativity, and support. Based on more than twenty years of Boulder-based entrepreneur turned-venture capitalist Brad Feld's experience in the field' as well as contributions from other innovative startup communities' this reliable resource skillfully explores what it takes to create an entrepreneurial community in any city, at anytime. Along the way, it offers valuable insights into increasing the breadth and depth of the entrepreneurial ecosystem by multiplying connections among entrepreneurs and mentors, improving access to entrepreneurial education, and much more. Details the four critical principles needed to form a sustainable startup community Perfect for entrepreneurs and venture capitalists seeking fresh ideas and new opportunities Written by Brad Feld, a thought-leader in this field who has been an early-stage investor and successful entrepreneur for more than twenty years Engaging and informative, this practical guide not only shows you how startup communities work, but it also shows you how to make them work anywhere in the world.

Visualize Your Successful New Business You have a great idea for a new business. Now what? How do you turn that great idea into a viable business? Leveraging visual tools, The Startup Equation leads you step by step through the decisions you need to make to find your perfect startup model. You'll learn things such as identifying your unique entrepreneurial type, creating a great product, building a great team, finding funding and scaling in addition to other elements essential to crafting a roadmap that fits you and your business. Drawing from their extensive experience working with startups, entrepreneurs Steve Fisher and Ja-Naé Duane offer expert advice on dealing with the challenges and opportunities that accompany every type of new business. Using visual storytelling, they provide a much-needed blueprint to understanding the startup economy. The authors include illustrative business examples from companies such as TechStars and 500Startups, as well as interviews with over 40 entrepreneurs from across the globe. Filled with insightful case studies, The Startup Equation is a vibrant, practical guide to creating a winning business model for any startup. By following the accessible visual roadmap within, you'll discover how to build your own successful business plan for your unique dream. Steve Fisher is product designer, filmmaker, entrepreneur, and startup advisor.Ja-Naé Duane is an entrepreneur, researcher, startup advisor, and professor of entrepreneurship & innovation.

For more than 40 years, venture capitalist Bill Draper has worked with top entrepreneurs in fabled Silicon Valley, where today's vision is made into tomorrow's reality. From the VC who saw the value in Skype, Zappos, and many other companies, comes firsthand stories of success. In these pages Draper explores: how to evaluate innovative ideas and the entrepreneurs behind those ideas (lessons from Yahoo, Baidu, Tesla Motors, Activision, Measurex, and more); and the value of political leadershipin creating opportunity, including on-the-ground accounts of how Deng Xiaoping brought China roaring into the modern world.

The Startup Playbook is not a recipe, it's not a template, it's not a list of tasks to do. It's a insider's guide to starting a company and running it successfully in those critical early months. Between the two authors, they have started over a dozen high-tech software companies and raised over $500 million in investment capital. They've acquired over thirty-five companies, had three of their startups go public, sold six of them, and have made billions of dollars for shareholders. They'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.

Clickable CEO David Kidder shares the hard-hitting experiences of some of the world's most influential entrepreneurs and CEOs, revealing their most closely held advice. Face-to-face interviews with 40 founders give readers key insights into what it took to build PayPal, LinkedIn, AOL, TED, Flickr, and many others into household names. Special sections include topics ranging from how to select the right idea to pursue to finding funding and overcoming inevitable obstacles.

Entrepreneur and bestselling author of The Lean Startup, Eric Ries reveals how entrepreneurial principles can be used by businesses of all kinds, ranging from established companies to early-stage startups, to grow revenues, drive innovation, and transform themselves into truly modern organizations, poised to take advantage of the enormous opportunities of the twenty-first century.   In The Lean Startup, Eric Ries laid out the practices of successful startups - building a minimal viable product, customer-focused and scientific testing based on a build-measure-learn method of continuous innovation, and deciding whether to persevere or pivot. In The Startup Way, he turns his attention to an entirely new group of organizations: established enterprises like iconic multinationals GE and Toyota, tech titans like Amazon and Facebook, and the next generation of Silicon Valley upstarts like Airbnb and Twilio. Drawing on his experiences over the past five years working with these organizations, as well as nonprofits, NGOs, and governments, Ries lays out a system of entrepreneurial management that leads organizations of all sizes  and from every industry to sustainable growth and long-term impact. Filled with in-the-field stories, insights, and tools, The Startup Way is an essential road map for any organization navigating the uncertain waters of the century ahead.

These students have been there. The Student Startup Guide is a collection of advice-filled stories from student founders across the globe. The book demystifies the process of starting a company while in college and makes entrepreneurship approachable for students. This book: Incorporates stories and practical advice from other students who have been there, done that; Represents diversity in student background, university size/type, college major, geography, gender, race, and company industry/stage; Includes access to a list of resources that student founders have used to find success—saving you countless hours searching for the right resource to help grow your company; Provides access to a community of other student founders; Offers confidence that you can do it!

Innovation principles to bring about meaningful and sustainable growth in your organization Using a list of more than 2,000 successful innovations,including Cirque du Soleil, early IBM mainframes, the Ford Model-T,and many more, the authors applied a proprietary algorithm and determined ten meaningful groupings the Ten Types of Innovation that provided insight into innovation. The Ten Types of Innovation explores these insights to diagnose patterns of innovation within industries, to identify innovation opportunities, and to evaluate how firms are performing against competitors. The framework has proven to be one of the mosten during and useful ways to start thinking about transformation. Details how you can use these innovation principles to bring about meaningful and sustainable growth within your organization. The Ten Types of Innovation concept has influenced thousands of executives and companies around the world since its discovery in 1998. The Ten Types of Innovation is the first book explaining how to implement it.

A practical guide to effective business model testing 7 out of 10 new products fail to deliver on expectations. Testing Business Ideas aims to reverse that statistic. In the tradition of Alex Osterwalder's global bestseller Business Model Generation, this practical guide contains a library of hands-on techniques for rapidly testing new business ideas. Testing Business Ideas explains how systematically testing business ideas dramatically reduces the risk and increases the likelihood of success for any new venture or business project. It builds on the internationally popular Business Model Canvas and Value Proposition Canvas by integrating Assumptions Mapping and other powerful lean startup-style experiments. Testing Business Ideas uses an engaging 4-color format to: Increase the success of any venture and decrease the risk of wasting time, money, and resources on bad ideas Close the knowledge gap between strategy and experimentation/validation Identify and test your key business assumptions with the Business Model Canvas and Value Proposition Canvas A definitive field guide to business model testing, this book features practical tips for making major decisions that are not based on intuition and guesses. Testing Business Ideas shows leaders how to encourage an experimentation mindset within their organization and make experimentation a continuous, repeatable process. 

As an entrepreneur or innovator, you're trained to run fast. But are you running in the right direction?   Choosing the right market for your innovation is the biggest, and trickiest, question for innovators. Research has shown that all too often entrepreneurs don't spend enough time identifying and researching their market opportunities - instead they jump at the first opportunity that looks good, and fail to properly evaluate and leverage other opportunities. These common mistakes means that you often choose the wrong market or lock yourself into one specific direction.   Where to Play helps you to set a promising strategy, by giving a clear, structured and practical framework - the Market Opportunity Navigator- to better identify, evaluate and focus on the right market opportunities. With three dedicated and reusable worksheets covering: Market Opportunity Set - assess your core strengths and identify which market opportunities exist for your business, Attractiveness Map - evaluate your market opportunities to reveal the most attractive option for focus, Agile Focus Strategy - create a strategic plan for your chosen market opportunity that keeps you open-minded and agile. Get the most value for your innovation with Where to Play!

Will It Fly? introduces the first intuitive, practical tool for assessing and refining new business ideas. Fast, confidential, and reliable, it addresses 44 key elements of success, distilling experience from more than 200 business launches. Use it to fine-tune your idea... protect yourself and your investors... quickly evaluate multiple options... and dramatically improve your odds of success.

Through stories of young entrepreneurs who have started businesses, this book illustrates how to turn hobbies, skills, and interests into profit-making ventures. Mariotti describes the characteristics of the successful entrepreneur and covers the nuts and bolts of getting a business up, running and successful.

In Zero to One, legendary entrepreneur and investor Peter Thiel shows how we can find singular ways to create those new things. Thiel begins with the contrarian premise that we live in an age of technological stagnation, even if we're too distracted by shiny mobile devices to notice. Information technology has improved rapidly, but there is no reason why progress should be limited to computers or Silicon Valley. Progress can be achieved in any industry or area of business. It comes from the most important skill that every leader must master: learning to think for yourself. Doing what someone else already knows how to do takes the world from 1 to n, adding more of something familiar. But when you do something new, you go from 0 to 1.