Regular price: £18.79
Dan Lyons was Technology Editor at Newsweek for years, a magazine writer at the top of his profession. One Friday morning he received a phone call: his job no longer existed. Fifty years old, and with a wife and two young kids, Dan was unemployed and facing financial oblivion. Then an idea hit. Dan had long reported on Silicon Valley and the tech explosion. Why not join it? What could possibly go wrong?
Ben Horowitz, cofounder of Andreessen Horowitz and one of Silicon Valley’s most respected and experienced entrepreneurs, offers essential advice on building and running a startup--practical wisdom for managing the toughest problems business school doesn’t cover, based on his popular ben’s blog. While many people talk about how great it is to start a business, very few are honest about how difficult it is to run one.
With its straightforward language and easy-is-better approach, Rework is the perfect playbook for anyone who's ever dreamed of doing it on their own. Hardcore entrepreneurs, small-business owners, people stuck in day jobs who want to get out, and artists who don't want to starve anymore will all find valuable inspiration and guidance in these pages. It's time to rework work.
Growth is now the first thing that investors, shareholders and market analysts look for in assessing and valuing companies. Hacking Growth is a highly accessible, practical, method for growth that involves cross-functional teams and continuous testing and iteration. Hacking Growth does for marketshare growth what The Lean Startup does for product development and Business Model Gneration does for strategy.
Ten years ago the idea of getting into a stranger's car or walking into a stranger's home would have seemed bizarre and dangerous, but today it's as common as ordering a book online. Uber and Airbnb are household names: redefining neighbourhoods, challenging the way governments regulate business and changing the way we travel. In the spirit of iconic Silicon Valley renegades like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, a new generation of entrepreneurs is sparking yet another cultural upheaval through technology.
Twice a year in the heart of Silicon Valley, a small investment firm called Y Combinator selects an elite group of young entrepreneurs from around the world for three months of intense work and instruction. Their brand-new two- or three-person start-ups are given a seemingly impossible challenge: to turn a raw idea into a viable business, fast. Each YC session culminates in a demo day, when investors and venture capitalists flock to hear pitches from the new graduates. Any one of them might turn out to be the next Dropbox (class of 2007, now valued at $5 billion).
Dan Lyons was Technology Editor at Newsweek for years, a magazine writer at the top of his profession. One Friday morning he received a phone call: his job no longer existed. Fifty years old, and with a wife and two young kids, Dan was unemployed and facing financial oblivion. Then an idea hit. Dan had long reported on Silicon Valley and the tech explosion. Why not join it? What could possibly go wrong?
Ben Horowitz, cofounder of Andreessen Horowitz and one of Silicon Valley’s most respected and experienced entrepreneurs, offers essential advice on building and running a startup--practical wisdom for managing the toughest problems business school doesn’t cover, based on his popular ben’s blog. While many people talk about how great it is to start a business, very few are honest about how difficult it is to run one.
With its straightforward language and easy-is-better approach, Rework is the perfect playbook for anyone who's ever dreamed of doing it on their own. Hardcore entrepreneurs, small-business owners, people stuck in day jobs who want to get out, and artists who don't want to starve anymore will all find valuable inspiration and guidance in these pages. It's time to rework work.
Growth is now the first thing that investors, shareholders and market analysts look for in assessing and valuing companies. Hacking Growth is a highly accessible, practical, method for growth that involves cross-functional teams and continuous testing and iteration. Hacking Growth does for marketshare growth what The Lean Startup does for product development and Business Model Gneration does for strategy.
Ten years ago the idea of getting into a stranger's car or walking into a stranger's home would have seemed bizarre and dangerous, but today it's as common as ordering a book online. Uber and Airbnb are household names: redefining neighbourhoods, challenging the way governments regulate business and changing the way we travel. In the spirit of iconic Silicon Valley renegades like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, a new generation of entrepreneurs is sparking yet another cultural upheaval through technology.
Twice a year in the heart of Silicon Valley, a small investment firm called Y Combinator selects an elite group of young entrepreneurs from around the world for three months of intense work and instruction. Their brand-new two- or three-person start-ups are given a seemingly impossible challenge: to turn a raw idea into a viable business, fast. Each YC session culminates in a demo day, when investors and venture capitalists flock to hear pitches from the new graduates. Any one of them might turn out to be the next Dropbox (class of 2007, now valued at $5 billion).
Over the past 25 years, Jason Calacanis has made a fortune investing in creators, spotting and helping build and fund a number of successful technology startups - investments that have earned him tens of millions of dollars. Now, in this enlightening guide that is sure to become the bible for 21st century investors, Calacanis takes potential angels step-by-step through his proven method of creating massive wealth: startups.
How did salesforce.com grow from a start up in a rented apartment into the world's fastest growing software company in less than a decade? For the first time, Marc Benioff, the visionary founder, chairman and CEO of salesforce.com, tells how he and his team created and used new business, technology, and philanthropic models tailored to this time of extraordinary change.
Why do some products capture our attention, while others flop? What makes us engage with certain products out of habit? Is there a pattern underlying how technologies hook us? This audiobook introduces listeners to the "Hook Model," a four steps process companies use to build customer habits. Through consecutive hook cycles, successful products reach their ultimate goal of bringing users back repeatedly - without depending on costly advertising or aggressive messaging. Hooked is a guide to building products people can't put down.
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 10, adding more of something familiar. Every new creation goes from zero to one. This book is about how to get there.
Computer engineers use 'chaos monkey' software to wreak havoc and test system robustness. Similarly, tech entrepreneurs like Antonio García Martínez are society's chaos monkeys - their innovations disrupt every aspect of our lives, from transportation (Uber) and holidays (Airbnb) to television (Netflix) and dating (Tinder) - all in search of the perfect business miracle. Describing himself as 'high strung, fast talking, and wired on a combination of caffeine, fear, and greed at all times', García Martínez left Wall Street to make his fortune in Silicon Valley.
In The Startup Way, Eric Ries shares his insights, stories and best practices, delivering a critical toolkit to solve all business challenges. Today every company needs to get faster and smarter. Listen to The Startup Way and discover how to embrace change, survive and thrive.
The ultimate guide to building an app-based business - now revised and updated. Apps have changed the way we communicate, shop, play, interact and travel, and their phenomenal popularity has presented possibly the biggest business opportunity in history. In How to Build a Billion Dollar App, serial tech entrepreneur George Berkowski gives you exclusive access to the secrets behind the success of the select group of apps that have achieved billion-dollar success.
Following his blockbuster biography of Steve Jobs, The Innovators is Walter Isaacson’s revealing story of the people who created the computer and the Internet. It is destined to be the standard history of the digital revolution and an indispensable guide to how innovation really happens. What were the talents that allowed certain inventors and entrepreneurs to turn their visionary ideas into disruptive realities? What led to their creative leaps? Why did some succeed and others fail?
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.
Winner of the 2013 Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award. Amazon.com started off delivering books through the mail. But its visionary founder, Jeff Bezos, wasn't content with being a bookseller. He wanted Amazon to become the everything store, offering limitless selection and seductive convenience at disruptively low prices. To achieve that end, he developed a corporate culture of relentless ambition and secrecy that's never been cracked. Until now...
The New York Times best-selling author examines how people can drive creative, moral and organisational progress - and how leaders can encourage originality in their organisations. How can we originate new ideas, policies and practices without risking it all? Adam Grant shows how to improve the world by championing novel ideas and values that go against the grain, battling conformity and bucking outdated traditions.
Best-selling author Ryan Holiday, the acclaimed marketing guru for American Apparel and many bestselling authors and multiplatinum musicians, explains the new rules and provides valuable examples and case studies for aspiring growth hackers. Whether you work for a tiny start-up or a Fortune 500 giant, if you're responsible for building awareness and buzz for a product or service, this is your road map.
The real story of what it takes to risk it all and go for broke.
Conventional wisdom says most startups need to be in Silicon Valley, started by young engineers around a sexy new idea and backed by VC funding. But as Mikkel Svane reveals in Startupland, the story of founding Zendesk was anything but conventional. Founded in a Copenhagen loft by three 30-something friends looking to break free from corporate doldrums, Zendesk Inc. is now one of the hottest enterprise software companies, still rapidly growing with customers in 150 countries. But its success was anything but predestined.
With revealing stories both funny and frank, Mikkel shares how he and his friends bravely left secure jobs to start something on their own, how he almost went broke several times, how they picked up themselves and their families to travel across the world to California and the unknown, and how the three friends were miraculously still together for Zendesk's IPO and (still growing) success. Much like Zendesk's mission itself - to remove friction, barriers, and mystery in order to make customer service easier and more approachable - Startupland removes some of the myths about startups and startup founders. Mikkel's advice, hard won through experience, often bucks conventional wisdom and entrepreneurial tropes. He shares why failure (whether fast or slow) is awful, why a seemingly boring product or idea can be the most exciting, and why giving back to the community is as important as the bottom line.
From how to hire right (look for people who are not offended by swearing) to which personas generate the highest response rates, Mikkel answers the most pressing questions from the perspective of someone still in the trenches and willing to share the hard truth, warts and all.
One of the few startup books which doesn't boast about how much money they made, it is well written, honest and well narrated.
Thoroughly recommend listening/reading this book.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful
I thoroughly enjoyed this book - a great insight into starting a business and the mistakes you will make along the way and how to avoid them!
great story and love how it is told and didnt want to put it down.
Lays the struggle for success bare, in a warts and all tale of repeat failure, never say die attitude & to focus on the relationships of people, to make it to the top.
The best book on entrepreneurship I've listened to thus far.
Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?
Often the PR team get to polish the biography and backstory in the "rags to riches" stories but Mikkel's journey seems very genuine, honest and open. His frank and almost blunt manner makes for a refreshing change to the over polished "performances" of some start up biogs I've listened to.
What was one of the most memorable moments of Startupland?
Recounting the arguments and genuine disagreements he had with his fellow founders and the honesty to share those early moments when you try and look more professional than you are to people who matter. Having started in a garden shed I felt he really conveyed a time that I too had shared.
Which character – as performed by Christopher Price – was your favourite?
Mikkel's the only character really as it is his biog
Did you have an emotional reaction to this book? Did it make you laugh or cry?
I laughed at the tales of the greenhorn in Silicon Valley
Any additional comments?
A few moments I identified with and some wisdom "from the trenches" mean that I'd happily listen to this again.
0 of 1 people found this review helpful
totally worth it! it's an amazing book and very inspirational!
helps you get a clear insight!
1 of 1 people found this review helpful
Good story that is well written and we'll read. I hope it is the catalyst that gets tech companies to have difficult conversations and be more inclusive. Made me think and act differently in the work place.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful
Mikkel Svane and the people at Zendesk clearly didn't have it easy. But I think the author fails to really communicate the feelings that came with the process of building the company and overcoming those tough times. It all feels a bit to nice despite the words being said.
Also the narrator gets a lot of the names wrong. (I'm Danish like the guys from Zendesk)
1 of 1 people found this review helpful
This is the story of how three friends got together to create a very successful company. The author sounds honest and down to earth. There are no new ways or advice on how to manage your business. Its up to you to get from the story what you think applies to you. Overall, a good book
1 of 1 people found this review helpful
As the leading global photography platform, this book was a very good and timely boost for team Splento. It repeated many ideas we have discovered ourselves, reinforced and deepened our understanding of the platform model and gave us lots of ideas for future innovations. Huge thanks from team Splento.
read this wonderful book if you ate planning to start a business. lot of j helpful information
I was expecting more about the business and business tips. Although the book narrates about the company well it was lacking a little in the interaction.
It was very refreshing to hear of the raw and real story of this epic start up! Very inspiring.
Excellent story with great narration. This book tells us it's never late and if you believe in dream it's doable.
Too much of an overview for me. I felt it lacked the details that make great biographies/autobiographies like Richard Branson's Losing My Virginity or "Hatching Twitter".
Worth reading if you use Zendesk and love it. If you don't use Zendesk and don't really care about their story i'de give it a miss.