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.

"Straight Talk for Startups memorializes age-old best practices and empowers both experienced and new investment professionals to beat the odds."—David Krane, CEO, Google Ventures "Straight Talk for Startups is filled with real, raw, and fact-based ‘rules of the road’ that you need to know when diving into our ultra-competitive startup world. A must read and a re-read!"—Tony Fadell, Coinventor of the iPod/iPhone & Founder of Nest Labs Veteran venture capitalist Randy Komisar and finance executive Jantoon Reigersman share no-nonsense, counterintuitive guidelines to help anyone build a successful startup. Over the course of their careers, Randy Komisar and Jantoon Reigersman continue to see startups crash and burn because they forget the timeless lessons of entrepreneurship. But, as Komisar and Reigersman show, you can beat the odds if you quickly learn what insiders know about what it takes to build a healthy foundation for a thriving venture. In Straight Talk for Startups they walk budding entrepreneurs through 100 essential rules—from pitching your idea to selecting investors to managing your board to deciding how and when to achieve liquidity. Culled from their own decades of experience, as well as the experiences of their many successful colleagues and friends, the rules are organized under broad topics, from "Mastering the Fundamentals" and "Selecting the Right Investors," to "The Ideal Fundraise," "Building and Managing Effective Boards," and "Achieving Liquidity." Vital rules you’ll find in Straight Talk for Startups include: The best ideas originate from founders who are users Create two business plans: an execution plan and an aspirational plan Net income is an option, but cash flow is a fact Don’t accept money from strangers Personal wealth doesn’t equal good investing Small boards are better than big ones Add independent board members for expertise and objectivity Too many unanimous board decisions are a sign of trouble Choose an acquirer, don’t wait to be chosen Learn the rules by heart so you know when to break them Filled with helpful real-life examples and specific, actionable advice, Straight Talk for Startups is the ideal handbook for anyone running, working for, or thinking about creating a startup, or just curious about what makes high-potential ventures tick.

Note from the Author Hi, my name is Dharmesh, and I’m a startup addict. And, chances are, if you’re reading this, you have at least a mild obsession as well. This book is based on content from the OnStartups.com blog. The story behind how the blog got started is sort of interesting—but before I tell you that story, it’ll help to understand my earlier story. As a professional programmer, I used to work in a reasonably fun job doing what I liked to do (write code). Eventually, I got a little frustrated with it all, so at the ripe old age of 24, I started my first software company. It did pretty well. It was on the Inc. 500 list of fastest growing companies three times. It reached millions of dollars of sales and was ultimately acquired. I ran that first company for over 10 years working the typical startup hours. When I sold that company, I went back to school to get a master’s degree at MIT. I’ve always enjoyed academics, and I figured this would be a nice “soft landing” and give me some time to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. As part of my degree requirements, I had to write a graduate thesis. I titled my thesis “On Startups: Patterns and Practices of Contemporary Software Entrepreneurs.” And, as part of that thesis work, I wanted to get some feedback from some entrepreneurs. So, I figured I’d start a blog. I took the first two words of the thesis title, “On Startups,” discovered that the domain name OnStartups.com was available, and was then off to the races. The blog was launched on November 5, 2005. Since then, the blog and associated community have grown quite large. Across Facebook, LinkedIn, and email subscribers, there are over 300,000 people in the OnStartups.com audience. This book is a collection of some of the best articles from over 7 years of OnStartups.com. The articles have been topically organized and edited. I hope you enjoy them.

A WALL STREET JOURNAL BESTSELLER As Alexis Ohanian learned when he helped to co-found the immensely popular reddit.com, the internet is the most powerful and democratic tool for disseminating information in human history. And when that power is harnessed to create new communities, technologies, businesses or charities, the results can be absolutely stunning. In this book, Alexis will share his ideas, tips and even his own doodles about harnessing the power of the web for good, and along the way, he will share his philosophy with young entrepreneurs all over the globe. At 29, Ohanian has come to personify the dorm-room tech entrepreneur, changing the world without asking permission. Within a couple of years of graduating from the University of Virginia, Ohanian did just that, selling reddit for millions of dollars. He's gone on to start many other companies, like hipmunk and breadpig, all while representing Y Combinator and investing in over sixty other tech startups. WITHOUT THEIR PERMISSION is his personal guidebook as to how other aspiring entrepreneurs can follow in his footsteps.

Ben Horowitz, a leading venture capitalist, modern management expert, and New York Times bestselling author, combines lessons both from history and from modern organizational practice with practical and often surprising advice to help executives build cultures that can weather both good and bad times. Ben Horowitz has long been fascinated by history, and particularly by how people behave differently than you’d expect. The time and circumstances in which they were raised often shapes them—yet a few leaders have managed to shape their times. In What You Do Is Who You Are, he turns his attention to a question crucial to every organization: how do you create and sustain the culture you want? To Horowitz, culture is how a company makes decisions. It is the set of assumptions employees use to resolve everyday problems: should I stay at the Red Roof Inn, or the Four Seasons? Should we discuss the color of this product for five minutes or thirty hours? If culture is not purposeful, it will be an accident or a mistake. What You Do Is Who You Are explains how to make your culture purposeful by spotlighting four models of leadership and culture-building—the leader of the only successful slave revolt, Haiti’s Toussaint Louverture; the Samurai, who ruled Japan for seven hundred years and shaped modern Japanese culture; Genghis Khan, who built the world’s largest empire; and Shaka Senghor, a man convicted of murder who ran the most formidable prison gang in the yard and ultimately transformed prison culture. Horowitz connects these leadership examples to modern case-studies, including how Louverture’s cultural techniques were applied (or should have been) by Reed Hastings at Netflix, Travis Kalanick at Uber, and Hillary Clinton, and how Genghis Khan’s vision of cultural inclusiveness has parallels in the work of Don Thompson, the first African-American CEO of McDonalds, and of Maggie Wilderotter, the CEO who led Frontier Communications. Horowitz then offers guidance to help any company understand its own strategy and build a successful culture. What You Do Is Who You Are is a journey through culture, from ancient to modern. Along the way, it answers a question fundamental to any organization: who are we? How do people talk about us when we’re not around? How do we treat our customers? Are we there for people in a pinch? Can we be trusted? Who you are is not the values you list on the wall. It’s not what you say in company-wide meeting. It’s not your marketing campaign. It’s not even what you believe. Who you are is what you do. This book aims to help you do the things you need to become the kind of leader you want to be—and others want to follow.

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.