I have a real passion for entrepreneurship, so much so that I married an entrepreneur and produced two children who became entrepreneurs. During my 25 years as a professor in the Greif Entrepreneurship Center at the University of Southern California, one of the top programs in the U.S., I had the privilege of inspiring and mentoring hundreds of new entrepreneurs. I found my passion in technology businesses. I had the business skills needed to help scientists and engineers raise funding, bring their inventions to market, and build their companies. I managed to start and run four ventures of my own as well as write several books about entrepreneurship.
I absolutely love this book! It’s an easy read, reads like a novel, but it’s packed with very valuable lessons on entrepreneurship, venture capital, and leadership.
The story is told through a conversation between a venture capitalist (Komisar) and two young entrepreneurs who are planning to start a business for all the wrong reasons. It’s humorous, touching, and very entertaining. I laughed a lot.
In the end, you learn that a business needs much more than nuts and bolts. It needs heart and soul.
Equally as important as what you learn about startups, the story will teach you how to avoid the Deferred Life Plan, putting off what you want to do, and instead live your life with passion.
This book describes how one Silicon Valley insider has blazed a path of professional - and personal - success playing the game by his own rules. Silicon Valley is filled with garage-to-riches stories and hot young entrepreneurs with big ideas. Yet even in this place where the exceptional is common, Randy Komisar is a breed apart. Currently a "Virtual CEO" who provides "leadership on demand" for several renowned companies, Komisar was recently described by the "Washington Post" as a "combined professional mentor, minister without portfolio, in-your-face investor, trouble-shooter and door opener." But even more interesting than what he does is…
I’ve always believed that the most successful entrepreneurs don’t do what everyone else has done. They carve new paths.
Peter Thiel was the co-founder of Paypal, Palantir, and several other very successful ventures.
In each case, he created something completely new; he went from zero to one. Later he became a venture capitalist investing in unique ventures.
Blake Masters was his student at Stanford and the notes he took in class became an Internet sensation. According to Thiel, there is no formula for success because a great innovation is by definition new and unique.
The best new companies are the result of new thinking.
Thiel encourages entrepreneur wannabes to think for themselves and to not be afraid of creating a monopoly like Google and Amazon did by developing a product that didn’t exist in the market and from which multiple additional products and applications could be spun off to serve a variety of smaller markets.
According to Thiel, all happy companies are monopolies that solved a unique problem. All failed companies are those that could not escape competition.
What Valuable Company Is Nobody Building? The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won't make a search engine. If you are copying these guys, you aren't learning from them. It's easier to copy a model than to make something new: doing what we already know how to do takes the world from 1 to n, adding more of something familiar. Every new creation goes from 0 to 1. This book is about how to get there. "Peter Thiel has built multiple breakthrough companies, and Zero to One shows how". (Elon…
I like this book because it’s very complementary to Peter Thiel’s book.
It emphasizes how to make yourself the focus of your “zero to one” effort.
Too many entrepreneurs burn out before they go the distance, usually because they’re exhausted and frustrated trying to manage their employees and all the tasks associated with the business.
Brantley, a successful entrepreneur, proposes a new approach that gets entrepreneurs out of micromanaging (which they tend to do) by leveraging the time and talent of their best people.
I tend to get myself into the weeds on things that are important to me (like a business), and this book helped me see what I was doing before I did any real damage.
I think you’ll feel like he wrote the book for you. No fluff, just great advice and tools you can actually use.
I enjoyed this book a lot because it’s full of so much actionable information.
A best-selling author and speaker, Robbins’ enthusiasm is contagious and if anything will get you off your butt and moving toward your goals, the five-second rule will do it.
It also works when you find yourself in situations that require some courage – like meeting a venture capitalist for the first time to pitch your business? Don’t let fear or lack of self-esteem keep you from doing what you know you want to do.
The secret is The 5 Second Rule, and this is the book that shares that secret.
How to enrich your life and destroy doubt in 5 seconds.
Throughout your life, you've had parents, coaches, teachers, friends and mentors who have pushed you to be better than your excuses and bigger than your fears. What if the secret to having the confidence and courage to enrich your life and work is simply knowing how to push yourself?
Using the science of habits, riveting stories and surprising facts from some of the most famous moments in history, art and business, Mel Robbins will explain the power of a "push moment."…
For a couple years, Noam Wasserman was an entrepreneurship colleague of mine at the University of Southern California.
Founders Dilemmasis the first book to focus on the critical decisions founders of new ventures must make starting on day one. Wasserman studied nearly 10,000 founders including Tim Westergren of Pandora and Evan Williams of Twitter.
It should be no surprise that he found that people are the leading cause of startup failures. The best recommendation I can give is to tell you that Wasserman offers solutions that I have personally used and passed along to hundreds of founders, because they work.
This is not a fluffy book. It’s a serious book that is well worth your time to read. If you’re going to start a business, it’s required reading! And take notes!
Not only will it help you decide if you have what it takes, it will help you learn what you’ll face during the launch of your new business.
Often downplayed in the excitement of starting up a new business venture is one of the most important decisions entrepreneurs will face: should they go it alone, or bring in cofounders, hires, and investors to help build the business? More than just financial rewards are at stake. Friendships and relationships can suffer. Bad decisions at the inception of a promising venture lay the foundations for its eventual ruin. The Founder's Dilemmas is the first book to examine the early decisions by entrepreneurs that can make or break a startup and its team. Drawing on a decade of research, Noam Wasserman…
Is it possible for just about anyone to start and run a successful business? Absolutely! Entrepreneurship for Dummies will show you why that’s true. It gives you tips for creating a new business opportunity or taking advantage of an unexpected opportunity that comes your way. And you don’t have to be a “dummy” to appreciate the step-by-step approach with examples that help you think like an entrepreneur. By the end of the book, I’m confident you will have the courage and the tools to come up with a business idea and do the work to make it happen.
My core value is realistic education—learning from each other’s errors and successes, but with full awareness of the difference between the determined past and the uncertain future. We can benefit from uncertainty, which I’ve been doing for a living as an engineer, academic researcher, and inventor. I make use of knowledge and science as much as possible, but I also know that strategic decisions for the uncertain future require skepticism and thinking to deal with the differences in a new circumstance. With my core value, I am passionate about sharing insights and knowledge that our formal education does not provide.
Everything in nature evolves by trial, error, and success—from fundamental physics, through evolution in biology, to how people learn, think, and decide.
This book presents a way of thinking and realistic knowledge that our formal education shuns. Stepping beyond this ignorance, the book shows how to deal with and even benefit from uncertainty by skeptical thinking, strategic decisions, and teamwork based on enlightened self-interests.
This bottom-up thinking is thought-provoking for leaders who wish to build teams rather than herds. The insights in the book will help you to be better prepared for the unexpected, less likely to conform when you…
Trial, Error, and Success: 10 Insights into Realistic Knowledge, Thinking, and Emotional Intelligence
Everything in nature evolves by trial, error, and success. They didn't teach you this in school, even though you should know why the rigid laws of physics don't rule nature and don't inhibit your free-will decisions to try, fail, and succeed. As a guide to success, this book shows how skepticism, prudent use of science, and thinking lead to strategic decisions for the uncertain future.
Presenting real-life examples, the thinking in the book combines sharp analyses with broad analogies to show:
How to identify realistic knowledge and avoid harm due to overgeneralized concepts.
How to create new knowledge and solve…
