The Startup Playbook

Outlines the managerial decisions and leadership goals that guide a startup business to success, and provides tips and advice from the founders of such companies as Spanx, Zipcar, Flickr, Honest Tea, and LinkedIn.

Get the real guidance you need to create and build your first startup company from founders who have been there many times before. The first run printing of The Startup Playbook SOLD OUT! So, we revised, expanded, and improved this second edition, including a new foreword by Brad Feld, author of Venture Deals. We still give our personal, how-to guide for building your startup from the ground up. You'll find a collection of the major lessons and shortcuts we've learned that will shift the odds in your favor. We're sharing our tips, secrets, and advice in a frank, founder-to-founder discussion with you. We make no bones about our bias. We're on your side, the founder's side. While venture capitalists, investors, and accelerators/incubators can add great value in the startup ecosystem, this book isn't about their points of view. We'll tell you where our interests as founders diverge from those on the other side of the table—investors, bankers, advisors, board members, and others—and what to do when that happens. The Startup Playbook is not a recipe, it's not a template, it's not a list of tasks to do. It's our insider's guide to starting a company and running it successfully in those critical early months. Between us, we've started over a dozen high-tech software companies and raised over $500 million in investment capital. We've acquired over thirty-five companies, had three of our startups go public, sold six of them, and we made billions of dollars for shareholders. We'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. We've had plenty of failures, too. And we've probably learned more from those than from the successes. We share those lessons as well. The Startup Playbook is full of our advice, guidance, do's, and don'ts from our years of experience as founders many times. We want to share our hard-earned knowledge with you to make success easier for you to achieve. "This book is extraordinarily fresh and exciting. In an accessible, straight talk fashion, this book is a manual, and an inspiration. The Startup Playbook is smart and avoids the 'I am so smart' over-writing endemic to the genre. Read this as it is presented. You'll be doing yourself a tremendous favor." —Amazon Reviewer

The missing manual on how to apply Lean Startup to build products that customers love The Lean Product Playbook is a practical guide to building products that customers love. Whether you work at a startup or a large, established company, we all know that building great products is hard. Most new products fail. This book helps improve your chances of building successful products through clear, step-by-step guidance and advice. The Lean Startup movement has contributed new and valuable ideas about product development and has generated lots of excitement. However, many companies have yet to successfully adopt Lean thinking. Despite their enthusiasm and familiarity with the high-level concepts, many teams run into challenges trying to adopt Lean because they feel like they lack specific guidance on what exactly they should be doing. If you are interested in Lean Startup principles and want to apply them to develop winning products, this book is for you. This book describes the Lean Product Process: a repeatable, easy-to-follow methodology for iterating your way to product-market fit. It walks you through how to: Determine your target customers Identify underserved customer needs Create a winning product strategy Decide on your Minimum Viable Product (MVP) Design your MVP prototype Test your MVP with customers Iterate rapidly to achieve product-market fit This book was written by entrepreneur and Lean product expert Dan Olsen whose experience spans product management, UX design, coding, analytics, and marketing across a variety of products. As a hands-on consultant, he refined and applied the advice in this book as he helped many companies improve their product process and build great products. His clients include Facebook, Box, Hightail, Epocrates, and Medallia. Entrepreneurs, executives, product managers, designers, developers, marketers, analysts and anyone who is passionate about building great products will find The Lean Product Playbook an indispensable, hands-on resource.

From Amos Schwartzfarb, serial entrepreneur and veteran Managing Director of Techstars Austin comes the elemental, essential, and effective strategy that will help any startup identify, build, and grow their customers from day 1 Most startups fail because they can’t grow revenue early or quickly enough. Startup CEOs will tell you their early missteps can be attributed to not finding their product market fit early enough, or at all. Founders overspend time and money trying to find product-market fit and make false starts, follow the wrong signals, and struggle to generate enough revenue to scale and raise funding. And all the while they never really knew who their customers were, what product they really needed, and why they needed it. But it doesn’t have to be this way, and founders don’t need to face it alone. Through expert guidance and experienced mentorship, every startup can avoid these pitfalls. The ultimate guide for building and scaling any startup sales organization, Sell More Faster shares the proven systems, methods, and lessons from Managing Director of Techstars Austin and sales expert Amos Schwartzfarb. Hear from founders of multi-million-dollar companies and CEOs who learned firsthand with Techstars, the leading mentorship-driven startup accelerator and venture capital firm that has invested in and mentored thousands of companies, collectively representing billions of dollars in funding and market cap. Schwartzfarb, and the Techstars Worldwide Network of more than 10,000 mentors do one thing better than anyone: help startup entrepreneurs succeed. They know how to sell, how to hire people who know how to sell, and how to use sales to gain venture funding—and now you can, too. Sell More Faster delivers the critical strategies and guidance necessary to avoid and manage the hazards all startups face and beat the odds. This valuable resource delivers: A comprehensive playbook to identify product market direction and product market fit Expert advice on building a diverse sales team and how to identify, recruit, and train the kinds of team members you need Models and best practices for sales funnels, pricing, compensation, and scaling A roadmap to create a repeatable and measurable path to find product-market fit Aggregated knowledge from Techstars leaders and industry experts Sell More Faster is an indispensable guide for entrepreneurs seeking product-market fit, building their sales team, developing a growth strategy, and chasing accelerated, sustained selling success.

Get the real guidance you need to create and build your first startup company from founders who have been there many times before. The first run printing of The Startup Playbook SOLD OUT! So, we revised, expanded, and improved this second edition, including a new foreword by Brad Feld, author of Venture Deals. We still give our personal, how-to guide for building your startup from the ground up. You'll find a collection of the major lessons and shortcuts we've learned that will shift the odds in your favor. We're sharing our tips, secrets, and advice in a frank, founder-to-founder discussion with you. We make no bones about our bias. We're on your side, the founder's side. While venture capitalists, investors, and accelerators/incubators can add great value in the startup ecosystem, this book isn't about their points of view. We'll tell you where our interests as founders diverge from those on the other side of the table—investors, bankers, advisors, board members, and others—and what to do when that happens. The Startup Playbook is not a recipe, it's not a template, it's not a list of tasks to do. It's our insider's guide to starting a company and running it successfully in those critical early months. Between us, we've started over a dozen high-tech software companies and raised over $500 million in investment capital. We've acquired over thirty-five companies, had three of our startups go public, sold six of them, and we made billions of dollars for shareholders. We'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. We've had plenty of failures, too. And we've probably learned more from those than from the successes. We share those lessons as well. The Startup Playbook is full of our advice, guidance, do's, and don'ts from our years of experience as founders many times. We want to share our hard-earned knowledge with you to make success easier for you to achieve. "This book is extraordinarily fresh and exciting. In an accessible, straight talk fashion, this book is a manual, and an inspiration. The Startup Playbook is smart and avoids the 'I am so smart' over-writing endemic to the genre. Read this as it is presented. You'll be doing yourself a tremendous favor." —Amazon Reviewer

This daily digest of intellectual challenge and learning will arouse curiosity, refresh knowledge, expand horizons, and keep the mind sharp Millions of Americans keep bedside books of prayer and meditative reflection—collections of daily passages to stimulate spiritual thought and advancement. The Intellectual Devotional is a secular version of the same—a collection of 365 short lessons that will inspire and invigorate the reader every day of the year. Each daily digest of wisdom is drawn from one of seven fields of knowledge: history, literature, philosophy, mathematics and science, religion, fine arts, and music. Impress your friends by explaining Plato's Cave Allegory, pepper your cocktail party conversation with opera terms, and unlock the mystery of how batteries work. Daily readings range from important passages in literature to basic principles of physics, from pivotal events in history to images of famous paintings with accompanying analysis. The book's goal is to refresh knowledge we've forgotten, make new discoveries, and exercise modes of thinking that are ordinarily neglected once our school days are behind us. Offering an escape from the daily grind to contemplate higher things, The Intellectual Devotional is a great way to awaken in the morning or to revitalize one's mind before retiring in the evening.

New startups are created every day around the word, with many founders dreaming of millions of users and billions of dollars. But the harsh reality is that very few will succeed. How can entrepreneurs stack the odds in their favor? By learning from the experiences of startup founders, executives, and investors who've been there before. That's exactly what "How to Start a Startup" provides, sharing essential lessons from 25+ Silicon Valley insiders who've faced the challenges of starting a new business and come out swinging. Based on a Stanford University course taught by Y Combinator (the prestigious startup accelerator behind companies like Dropbox and Airbnb), this in-depth reference guide features advice from experts like: - Reid Hoffman, LinkedIn co-founder - Dustin Moskovitz, Facebook co-founder - Paul Graham, Y Combinator co-founder - Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, co-founders of Netscape and Andreessen Horowitz venture capital firm - Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and Founders Fund, early Facebook investor - Ben Silbermann, Pinterest co-founder and CEO Nominated as "Book of the Year" by Product Hunt (the leading Silicon Valley community for discovering the best new products), "How to Start a Startup" reveals the secrets to raising money, building products users love, hiring a great team, getting press coverage, attracting customers, growing your business, and more. No matter what type of product you're creating (web, mobile, hardware, online-to-offline, etc.) or what audience you're targeting (consumers or the enterprise), this playbook will give you all the information necessary to launch and scale a successful startup. This book was created independently by the publishers and all net proceeds will go to support charitable causes promoting wider access to opportunity for all.

Looking for the perfect way to say I love you to a special someone? From famed cartoonists Lisa Swerling and Ralph Lazar, Me Without You features countless cute color illustrations of scenarios that are simply incomplete without two. A uniquely charming gift for Valentine's Day, anniversaries, or just because, readers will find themselves dipping into this beguiling book again and again.