Startup Story

THE HOW-TO GUIDE FOR INNOVATORS TO IMPROVE THEIR IDEAS AND SUCCESSFULLY LAUNCH THEM THROUGH THE POWER OF NARRATIVE In a world that’s been turned upside down by a pandemic, social upheavals, environmental disasters, and economic disruptions, the need for reinvention is paramount. While many entrepreneurs and innovators have brilliant ideas, they desperately need the skills to successfully articulate their vision to investors, prospective customers, employees, and stakeholders. In this informative and empowering book, David Riemer breaks down the storytelling clutter so you can gain the attention you need to be successful. Storytelling is foundational. If you have a groundbreaking invention in mind or have a plan to solve worldwide problems, Get Your Startup Story Straight is the tool you need to create better customer-focused solutions, motivate more backers to your project, and ultimately dominate in the market. Broken down into three acts, this book will allow you to discover the building blocks of your narrative, the storytelling techniques to convey your ideas clearly, and the archetypes for inspiration. The author’s own words tell it all: “Innovators are ubiquitous nowadays, and for this community, storytelling is essential.” If you are a creator struggling to get others on board, this is the handbook to refine your story to guide your product strategy, shape your company, and ultimately improve lives.

An instant USA Today bestseller. A founder's wild memoir of startup success, told from hot tub inception to $50 million exit with the humor of a comic and the perspective of an educator. In The Startup Story: An Entrepreneur’s Journey from Idea to Exit, renowned serial entrepreneur Martin Warner takes a fledgling company all the way from zero to hero, selling it for $50 million after a mere 17 months. It’s a memoir of whirlwind entrepreneurial success, a nonfiction narrative that puts the reader in the CEO’s seat, giving the feel of what it’s really like to steer a company around the toughest of tracks and come out with a massive payday. A mix of Wolf of Wall Street, The Big Short, and The Apprentice, The Startup Story reads like a novel but is strictly a true story packed with entrepreneurial insights. It is a rollercoaster ride through the heaven and hell of the tech business world, populated by geeks, pirates, conmen, tycoons, geniuses, and fools. Forced to do everything at warp speed, Warner chucks all the accumulated wisdom of his own Entrepreneur Seminar out of the window on his way to a holy grail exit. Along the way, readers piece together an entrepreneurial how-to (and how-not-to) manual, with each chapter traversing the highs and the lows of founding a growing company. It shows the reader how to build a tech company out of pure desire and dogged willpower, combined with some timely expertise. The short, hilarious, and hair-raising history of Warner and his company, botObjects, provides a parable of the quintessential business experience packed with entrepreneurial insights and lessons to be learned.

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.

Telling Startup Stories: Keep the End in Mind is Will Keyser's first ebook. The second, No Surprises: Essential Numbers for Entrepreneurs is in preparation. Will has also been writing fiction and non-fiction for many years. His passion is entrepreneurship. This is expressed through his blog and website, StartUp Owl; and as a professor teaching strategy and entrepreneurship on the MBA in Managing for Sustainability at Marlboro College Graduate and Professional Studies. He is a consultant to StartUps in many fields, both in the US and Europe over the last 20 years. His StartUp consulting practice is Venture Founders LLC, where his work concentrates on issues of business planning and development. With a partner, he started, built and sold (for a symbolic £1 Sterling) his own business, and some others, as well as having tried and failed to start yet more. He has also served on the Board of a regional venture capital company, on the boards of many non-profits and a $16 million food retailing cooperative. He advises students on establishing their own StartUps, both while studying and following graduation. He has lived and worked in the UK and France and have been in the US for many years, splitting his time between Vermont and Texas. Will can be contacted at [email protected] on anything read in the book.

The definitive account of India’s biggest startup that redefined e-commerce, entrepreneurship and the way we shop and live. IIT graduates Sachin Bansal and Binny Bansal founded out of a Bangalore apartment what would become India’s biggest e-commerce startup. Established in October 2007, Flipkart began as an online bookstore and soon came to be known for its ‘customer obsession’. As the startup’s reputation grew, so did its value, with venture capitalists in India and abroad lining up to invest heavily in the company that stood for bold ambition, unabashed consumerism and the virtues of technology. Investigative journalist Mihir Dalal recounts the astounding story of how the Bansals built Flipkart into a multi-billion-dollar powerhouse in the span of a few years and made internet entrepreneurship a desirable occupation. But it is also a story of big money, power and hubris, as both business and interpersonal complexities weakened the founders’ control over their creation and forced them to sell out to a retailer whose dominance they had once dreamt of emulating. Flipkart’s auction involved some of the corporate world’s biggest names, from Jeff Bezos, Satya Nadella, Sundar Pichai to Masayoshi Son and Doug McMillon, an ironic testimony to the strength of what the Bansals had forged. Based on extraordinary research, extensive interviews and deep access to key characters in the Flipkart story, Big Billion Startup is the riveting and revealing account of how Sachin and Binny Bansal built and sold India’s largest internet company.

What the world can learn from Israel's meteoric economic success. Start-Up Nation addresses the trillion dollar question: How is it that Israel -- a country of 7.1 million, only 60 years old, surrounded by enemies, in a constant state of war since its founding, with no natural resources-- produces more start-up companies than large, peaceful, and stable nations like Japan, China, India, Korea, Canada and the UK? With the savvy of foreign policy insiders, Senor and Singer examine the lessons of the country's adversity-driven culture, which flattens hierarchy and elevates informality-- all backed up by government policies focused on innovation. In a world where economies as diverse as Ireland, Singapore and Dubai have tried to re-create the "Israel effect", there are entrepreneurial lessons well worth noting. As America reboots its own economy and can-do spirit, there's never been a better time to look at this remarkable and resilient nation for some impressive, surprising clues.

Have a startup idea? Want to launch it fast? People often spend years on working on startup ideas that fail—and they could have known long before, had they asked the hard questions earlier. Five-time tech founder Dave Parker has been there, and in Trajectory: Startup he offers a path to get you from ideation to launch and revenue in just six months. With a track record of starting companies from scratch, raising both angel and venture capital, and participating in eight exits as founder, operator, and board member, Parker's experience is practical and actionable. Having sold three of his own startups and closed two, Parker learned just as much from his failures as from his successes, and he brings this wit and wisdom into his writing in a transparent way. Parker shares advice on: • What makes a good idea that makes money • Recruiting and working with cofounders • Asking customers what product they want (customer development) • How to build a tech product even as a non-tech founder • How to get out of your head, ship a product, and make your first sale Trajectory: Startup removes the mystery from the startup process and outlines a roadmap of tasks and timeframes, with monthly milestones and resources. This pre-accelerator program will help you get the momentum you need. Skip the Executive MBA and go make money! This guide makes starting a company accessible to a broad range of founders, investors, and employees who have the spark of innovation and drive to follow their dreams.