Telling Startup Stories

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 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.

How do the best salespeople connect, influence and persuade? With stories. 'Seven Stories Every Salesperson Must Tell' takes you on a high-stakes sales journey, using stories to establish rapport and trust, deliver insight, inspire action and close the deal, and in doing so win new friends and collaborators. When you share purposeful stories in your client conversations, you'll create more new business than you thought possible. Sharing more than 50 stories from around the world, Mike draws on his diverse international sales career to teach and demonstrate the power of storytelling -- from first hello to signed contract. You'll learn stories to help you: Establish rapport and trust Present challenging insights Differentiate your solution Share your company values Unstick negotiation stand-offs Create better business outcomes. This book will change the way you think about selling. Rather than seeing your role as that of a transactional deal closer, you'll become a story master, creating new stories for your clients.

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.

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.

If Owen Chase can't find a way to turn his company around in the next nine days, he'll be forced to shut it down and lay off all of his employees. He has incurred substantial debt and his marriage is on shaky ground. Through pure happenstance, Owen finds himself pondering this problem while advancing steadily as a contestant at the World Series of Poker. His Las Vegas path quickly introduces him to Samantha, a beautiful and mysterious mentor with a revolutionary approach to entrepreneurship. Sam is a fountain of knowledge that may save his company, but her sexual advances might prove too much for Owen's struggling marriage. 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 for those 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 a new "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.

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.

Children Stories For Startups ... BIG is the future of SMALL.We all love stories, don't we?The entire concept of Story Telling is brilliant. While it is fun for the listener, the narrator ends by pushing through a little Learning at the end. Which is why it has been going on for ages as far back as a few centuries, or more. So storytelling, we believe, was one of the first successful Startups in human history, considering its still in business!Now let us tell 'you' a story. About two childhood friends, sleep-time tales & Startup morals hidden within them. Deepak Kapoor & Rajiv Sharma met in school more than three decades ago. That Startup relationship has flowered and matured into a blooming friendship which has stood the test of time & events. Both well cured into their respective careers.51 weeks back the idea of this book was born. We wanted to make things simple, very simple, just basic. Mostly because Startups get a lot of heavy loaded information from 'experts' who specialize in making simple things complex (well, that'll be a story for another time). It was agreed that our mission is to find the simplest way to Startup learning. Nothing simpler than Children Stories.Rajiv Sharma is a very accomplished Finance Professional in a leading role with one of the finest Hospitals in India. He contributes to his industry through leadership support at the Institute of Cost Accountants of India. When he is not analysing cost numbers, he is writing Children Stories.Deepak Kapoor is the founding team member of the BPO Association of India at CII. His contribution towards policy intervention in the BPO/ IT businesses are well known. You may say he is an advanced practitioner in the art of 'failing, to succeed' but sails in deep calm waters. A hopeless romantic for all things logically audacious, he does not believe in giving up. He shares his stories with Startups, at Business Schools & Industry Forums, showing them where the reefs are. Ah! And also the sharks 'we see' (pun intended).If you are a Startup, up-your-antennae because our stories & their morals may be too simple. Too simple to understand sometimes, if you are not evolved enough. Irony! No, only reason. Just like atoms are the simplest particles, yet they can only be seen with a microscope. You get the drift. And yeah, our stories are just a bit different from your average bed time story. They are wake-up calls!So then ... people Startup your engines!Children Stories by: Rajiv SharmaStartup Morals by: Deepak Kapoor