Finance Secrets of Billion-Dollar Entrepreneurs shows how one can finance ventures from concept to take off without venture capital, allowing entrepreneurs to keep control of their venture and keep more of the wealth.

Take Control of Your Business—and Watch it Grow How can entrepreneurs learn from those that came before, so they can better craft their own approach to success? Award-winning professor of entrepreneurship, Dileep Rao, presents readers with a detailed guide to success through his interviews and analysis of billionaire and millionaire entrepreneurs. While starting a business without outside help seems difficult—even impossible—Rao shows you that it can be done. And the right type of funding could even lead to a more successful business. Rao shares how more than 90 percent of America’s billion-dollar entrepreneurs avoided or delayed venture capital, and instead used smart strategies on business, capital, and leadership. It takes more than one person to grow a business from the bottom up. But that doesn’t mean you have to sacrifice control in the process. Armed with twenty-three years of experience as a financier, Rao shows readers how to optimize internal financing to attract external financing, to keep control of the venture—and more of the wealth.

“An incisive history of the venture-capital industry.” —New Yorker “An excellent and original economic history of venture capital.” —Tyler Cowen, Marginal Revolution “A detailed, fact-filled account of America’s most celebrated moneymen.” —New Republic “Extremely interesting, readable, and informative...Tom Nicholas tells you most everything you ever wanted to know about the history of venture capital, from the financing of the whaling industry to the present multibillion-dollar venture funds.” —Arthur Rock “In principle, venture capital is where the ordinarily conservative, cynical domain of big money touches dreamy, long-shot enterprise. In practice, it has become the distinguishing big-business engine of our time...[A] first-rate history.” —New Yorker VC tells the riveting story of how the venture capital industry arose from America’s longstanding identification with entrepreneurship and risk-taking. Whether the venture is a whaling voyage setting sail from New Bedford or the latest Silicon Valley startup, VC is a state of mind as much as a way of doing business, exemplified by an appetite for seeking extreme financial rewards, a tolerance for failure and experimentation, and a faith in the promise of innovation to generate new wealth. Tom Nicholas’s authoritative history takes us on a roller coaster of entrepreneurial successes and setbacks. It describes how iconic firms like Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia invested in Genentech and Apple even as it tells the larger story of VC’s birth and evolution, revealing along the way why venture capital is such a quintessentially American institution—one that has proven difficult to recreate elsewhere.

Get the Funding You Need From Venture Capitalists and Turn Your New Business Proposal into Reality Authoritative and comprehensive, Raising Venture Capital for the Serious Entrepreneur is an all-in-one sourcebook for entrepreneurs seeking venture capital from investors. This expert resource contains an unsurpassed analysis of the venture capital process, together with the guidance and strategies you need to make the best possible deal_and ensure the success of your business. Written by a leading international venture capitalist, this business-building resource explores the basics of the venture capital method, strategies for raising capital, methods of valuing the early-stage venture, and techniques for negotiating the deal. Filled with case studies, charts, and exercises, Raising Venture Capital for the Serious Entrepreneur explains: How to develop a financing map How to determine the amount of capital to raise and what to spend it on How to create a winning business plan How to agree on a term sheet with a venture capitalist How to split the rewards How to allocate control between founders/management and investors

Is it possible for entrepreneurs to succeed at growing ventures without early-stage venture capital? Based on the fact that more than 9 out of 10 of America's billion-dollar entrepreneurs did take off without early-stage VC, Dileep Rao says YES In Nothing Ventured, Everything Gained, Dileep Rao shatters the dominant myth that entrepreneurs need early-stage venture capital to build a giant business. In fact, says Rao, by avoiding or even delaying VC, billion-dollar entrepreneurs can control their companies and the wealth created by them--and retain more of that wealth. The book is based on 30 of Rao's interviews with billion-dollar entrepreneurs (BDEs) and hundred-million-dollar entrepreneurs (HMDEs) and the analysis of the strategies of 85 BDEs. The author introduces the finance-smart skills, opportunity secrets, and strategy secrets of BDEs who took off without VC, and proves his points via stories of successful giants like Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Steve Jobs. Every entrepreneur will do well to read and benefit from Rao's invaluable insights and expertise. Dileep Rao, PhD, financed the growth of hundreds of businesses and real estate projects over the twenty-three years he was VP of financing and business development at a venture development and finance institution. He advises entrepreneurs, governments, Fortune 1000 corporations, and financial institutions on building big businesses with finance-smart strategies. Dr. Rao is a clinical professor of entrepreneurship at Florida International University and has taught at Stanford University, the University of Minnesota, and in executive MBA programs in Europe, Latin America, and Asia.

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.