Start-Ups, Pivots and Pop-Ups

by Richard Hall

Author	: Richard Hall
Publisher	: Kogan Page Publishers
Total Pages	: 257
Release	: 2019-10-03
Genre	: Business & Economics
ISBN	: 0749497459

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FINALIST: Business Book Awards 2020 - Start-Up Inspiration Category Start-Ups, Pivots and Pop-Ups is a must read for anyone with a business idea and the desire to be successful. It gives the reader the skills and knowledge to survive in today's innovation and entrepreneurial-focused world. This book is about starting a business. It's about putting your toe in the entrepreneurial water - perhaps through doing a short term business gig or a pop-up business - and then seeing what happens. It shows you how to listen to the customer and work out why failures may happen, and when they do, you'll learn how to deal with them and create a new business that is robust and ready to grow. Start-Ups, Pivots and Pop-Ups shows you the best ways of starting, testing and growing a business. It shares the stories, experience and insights of those who've done it, and explains how to innovate, trial, refine and succeed. Even if your business idea struggles, you'll find out how to learn so much that you'll pivot your business, try again and then win big time. You'll learn from a range of organizations including Blue Cow Vodka, Sandows Cold Filtered Coffee, Monty's Bakehouse and Lagom Kitchenware.

Why Startups Fail

by Tom Eisenmann

Author	: Tom Eisenmann
Publisher	: Currency
Total Pages	: 370
Release	: 2021-03-30
Genre	: Business & Economics
ISBN	: 0593137027

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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.

Startup Your Life

by Anna Akbari

Author	: Anna Akbari
Publisher	: St. Martin's Press
Total Pages	: 241
Release	: 2016-12-27
Genre	: Self-Help
ISBN	: 125009917X

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A young entrepreneur and sociologist shows readers how to reach personal fulfillment using the same strategies that power Silicon Valley's greatest startups. As an entrepreneur, Anna Akbari learned that one of the best things about startups is their ability to “pivot” quickly—basically a euphemism for failing and starting over. And she quickly found that personal success is no different. It’s not just about developing and following the right process but also having a good idea. And that demands rigor and daily maintenance—far beyond a few positive affirmations. Like any Silicon Valley startup, the business of life is not as glamorous as its Instagram account would make it seem. What do you do when planning is not an option? When control is out of your reach? You isolate the small stuff, experiment constantly, and use the results to lay a more sustainable foundation for the future. You validate your idealized vision by testing it out in bite-sized increments. You see what sticks, integrate, and move forward. And inevitably, you experience a series of failures along the way, but those failures are key to your next success. Living a start up life is about maximizing flexibility and measuring on-going results, not avoiding failure or reaching one particular end goal. It's about embracing defeat, analyzing it, and failing up. In Startup Your Life, Akbari shows that after all, it's often the stumbles that pave the way for real happiness.

The Lean Startup

by Eric Ries

Author	: Eric Ries
Publisher	: Crown Currency
Total Pages	: 337
Release	: 2011-09-13
Genre	: Business & Economics
ISBN	: 0307887898

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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.

The Startup of You (Revised and Updated)

by Reid Hoffman

Author	: Reid Hoffman
Publisher	: Crown Currency
Total Pages	: 274
Release	: 2012-02-14
Genre	: Business & Economics
ISBN	: 0307888924

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The groundbreaking #1 New York Times bestseller that taught a generation how to transform their careers—now in a revised and updated edition “A profound book about self-determination and self-realization.”—Senator Cory Booker “The Startup of You is crammed with insights and strategies to help each of us create the work life we want.”—Gretchen Rubin, author of The Happiness Project In this invaluable book, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and venture capitalist Ben Casnocha show how to accelerate your career in today’s competitive world. The key is to manage your career as if it were a startup business: a living, breathing, growing startup of you. Why? Startups—and the entrepreneurs who run them—are nimble. They invest in themselves. They build their professional networks. They take intelligent risks. They make uncertainty and volatility work to their advantage. These are the very same skills professionals need to get ahead today. This book isn’t about cover letters or résumés. Instead, you will learn the best practices of the most successful startups and how to apply these entrepreneurial strategies to your career. Whether you work for a giant multinational corporation, stitch together multiple gigs in a portfolio career, or are launching your own venture, you need to know how to • adapt your career plans as pandemics rage and technologies upend industries • develop a competitive advantage so that you stand out from others at work • strengthen your professional network by building powerful alliances and maintaining a diverse mix of relationships • engineer serendipity that produces life-changing career opportunities • take proactive risks to become more resilient to industry tsunamis • tap your network for information and intelligence that help you make smarter decisions The career landscape has changed dramatically in the decade since Hoffman and Casnocha first published this guide. In an urgent update to the frameworks that have helped hundreds of thousands of people transform their careers, this new edition of The Startup of You will teach you how to achieve your boldest professional ambitions.

Super Founders

by Ali Tamaseb

Author	: Ali Tamaseb
Publisher	: PublicAffairs
Total Pages	: 280
Release	: 2021-05-18
Genre	: Business & Economics
ISBN	: 1541768418

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Super Founders uses a data-driven approach to understand what really differentiates billion-dollar startups from the rest—revealing that nearly everything we thought was true about them is false! Ali Tamaseb has spent thousands of hours manually amassing what may be the largest dataset ever collected on startups, comparing billion-dollar startups with those that failed to become one—30,000 data points on nearly every factor: number of competitors, market size, the founder’s age, his or her university’s ranking, quality of investors, fundraising time, and many, many more. And what he found looked far different than expected. Just to mention a few: Most unicorn founders had no industry experience; There's no disadvantage to being a solo founder or to being a non-technical CEO; Less than 15% went through any kind of accelerator program; Over half had strong competitors when starting--being first to market with an idea does not actually matter. You will also hear the stories of the early days of billion-dollar startups first-hand. The book includes exclusive interviews with the founders/investors of Zoom, Instacart, PayPal, Nest, Github, Flatiron Health, Kite Pharma, Facebook, Stripe, Airbnb, YouTube, LinkedIn, Lyft, DoorDash, Coinbase, and Square, venture capital investors like Elad Gil, Peter Thiel, Alfred Lin from Sequoia Capital and Keith Rabois of Founders Fund, as well as previously untold stories about the early days of ByteDance (TikTok), WhatsApp, Dropbox, Discord, DiDi, Flipkart, Instagram, Careem, Peloton, and SpaceX. Packed with counterintuitive insights and inside stories from people who have built massively successful companies, Super Founders is a paradigm-shifting and actionable guide for entrepreneurs, investors, and anyone interested in what makes a startup successful.

Lost and Founder

by Rand Fishkin

Author	: Rand Fishkin
Publisher	: Penguin Group
Total Pages	: 321
Release	: 2024-05-14
Genre	: Business & Economics
ISBN	: 0593853962

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Rand Fishkin, the founder and former CEO of Moz, reveals how traditional Silicon Valley "wisdom" leads far too many startups astray, with the transparency and humor that his hundreds of thousands of blog readers have come to love. Everyone knows how a startup story is supposed to go: A young, brilliant entrepreneur has a cool idea, drops out of college, defies the doubters, overcomes all odds, makes billions, and becomes the envy of the technology world. This is not that story. It's not that things went badly for Rand Fishkin; they just weren't quite so Zuckerberg-esque. His company, Moz, maker of marketing software, is now a $45 million/year business, and he's one of the world's leading experts on SEO. But his business and reputation took fifteen years to grow, and his startup began not in a Harvard dorm room but as a mother-and-son family business that fell deeply into debt. Now Fishkin pulls back the curtain on tech startup mythology, exposing the ups and downs of startup life that most CEOs would rather keep secret. For instance: A minimally viable product can be destructive if you launch at the wrong moment. Growth hacking may be the buzzword du jour, but initiatives can fizzle quickly. Revenue and growth won't protect you from layoffs. And venture capital always comes with strings attached. Fishkin's hard-won lessons are applicable to any kind of business environment. Up or down the chain of command, at both early stage startups and mature companies, whether your trajectory is riding high or down in the dumps: this book can help solve your problems, and make you feel less alone for having them.

Moving Pictures

by Claire Llewellyn

Author	: Claire Llewellyn
Publisher	: Evans Brothers
Total Pages	: 32
Release	: 2005
Genre	: Juvenile Nonfiction
ISBN	: 9780237530228

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Looks at the different ways pictures can move. Includes activities such as designing a flap and planning, making and evaluating a moving picture based on a nursery rhyme. Suggested level: junior, primary.

Entrepreneurial Strategy

by Dean A. Shepherd

Author	: Dean A. Shepherd
Publisher	: Springer Nature
Total Pages	: 142
Release	: 2021-07-19
Genre	: Business & Economics
ISBN	: 3030789357

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This open access book focuses on explaining differences amongst organizations regarding various attributes, forms, and outcomes. By focusing on the “how” of new venture creation and management to produce well-established organizations, the authors aim to increase our understanding of the antecedents of most management research assumptions. New ventures are the source of most newly created jobs generated in an economy, new industries and markets, innovative products and services, and new solutions to economic, social, and environmental problems. However, most management research assumes a well-established organization as the starting point of their theorizing. Building on the notion of guided attention, it details how entrepreneurs can allocate their transient attention to identify potential opportunities from environmental change and how entrepreneurs allocate their sustained attention to form beliefs about radical and incremental opportunities requiring entrepreneurial action. The authors explain how entrepreneurs build such communities and engage community members over time to co-construct potential opportunities for new venture progress. Using the lean startup framework, they connect the dots between the theorizing on identifying and co-constructing potential opportunities and the startup of new ventures. This leads to a new overarching framework based on are (1) co-creating a startup, (2) organizing a startup, and (3) performing a startup to bring together the many disparate threads of research on new ventures. The authors then theorize on the importance of knowledge in organizational scaling. Based on cutting-edge research from the leading entrepreneurship journals, this book expands knowledge on the cognitive aspect of the new venture creation process.