With a focus on a diverse group of Latino entrepreneurs in the Houston area, Valdez explores how class, gender, race, and ethnicity shape Latino entrepreneurs' capacity to succeed in business in the United States.

The action plan for building your entrepreneurial empire—one day at a time While every entrepreneur knows that the key to success is business growth, few ever see it happen. Why? Because they know how to plant seeds, but they don’t understand that the real work lies in helping that seed grow—which takes knowledge, persistence, and patience. The Entrepreneurs Book of Actions helps you develop the mindset of a true entrepreneur and provides manageable steps for making your business vision a reality. Informative, inspiring, and based on real-life, hard-earned lessons, it provides common-sense, daily exercises you can jump into on day one. Learn how to drive sustainable business growth by: * Breaking bad habits—and developing good ones * Managing your time and money more effectively * Hiring the right people for the right job * Minimizing the effort required to perform basic tasks * Motivating your staff to be mission-focused * Creating “free” time to feed your innovative side You’ll begin to see your business in a completely new way—with a sense of clarity and purpose. You’ll begin identifying the issues that really affect your business—not the ones that feed your anxiety. You’ll become the kind of leader other entrepreneurs look up to—calm, optimistic, driven. The Entrepreneurs Book of Actions will provide the direction you need to make the best use of your time, your energy, and your creativity. It’s not isn’t a quick-fix. It’s work. But it’s manageable, it’s proven effective—and it will pay off big.

Bringing hard data to the way we think about entrepreneurial success, this bold call to action draws on the latest scientific evidence to dispel the most pervasive startup myths and light a path to entrepreneurship for those eclipsed by the hype. When you think of a successful entrepreneur, who comes to mind? Bill Gates? Mark Zuckerberg? Or maybe even Jesse Eisenberg, the man who played Zuckerberg in The Social Network? It may surprise you that most successful founders look very different from Zuckerberg or Gates. In fact, most startup origin stories are very different from the famous "unicorns" that have achieved valuations of over $1 billion, from Facebook to Google to Uber. In The Unicorn's Shadow: Combating the Dangerous Myths that Hold Back Startups, Founders, and Investors, Wharton School professor Ethan Mollick takes us to the forefront of an empirical revolution in entrepreneurship. New data and better research methods have overturned the conventional wisdom behind what a successful founder looks like, how they succeed, and how the startup ecosystem works. Among the issues he examines: Which founders are most likely to succeed?Where do the best startup ideas come from?What's the most foolproof way of securing the funding needed to take a company to the next level?Should your sales pitch really be something out of Hollywood?What's the best way to grow and scale your company and create a thriving culture that won't hinder expansion? Mollick argues that entrepreneurship is too important, both for society and for the individuals who start companies, to be eclipsed by the shadows of unicorns. He shows we can democratize entrepreneurship—but only by following an evidence-based approach that puts to rest the false narratives that surround it.

This text--a combination of Harvard Cases and text-- examines the entrepreneurial process from the initial idea through business operations to harvest. It provides the knowledge and skills required for students pursuing careers as entrepreneurs as well as valuable ideas for those in a more structured business setting. Most importantly, it takes a close look at the process of identifying and pursuing opportunity, which has become increasingly important in restoring the competitive position of many U.S. industries in a global marketplace.

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.

Despite popular belief to the contrary, entrepreneurship in the United States is dying. It has been since before the Great Recession of 2008, and the negative trend in American entrepreneurship has been accelerated by the Covid pandemic. New firms are being started at a slower rate, are employing fewer workers, and are being formed disproportionately in just a few major cities in the U.S. At the same time, large chains are opening more locations. Companies such as Amazon with their "deliver everything and anything" are rapidly displacing Main Street businesses. In The New Builders, we tell the stories of the next generation of entrepreneurs -- and argue for the future of American entrepreneurship. That future lies in surprising places -- and will in particular rely on the success of women, black and brown entrepreneurs. Our country hasn't yet even recognized the identities of the New Builders, let alone developed strategies to support them. Our misunderstanding is driven by a core misperception. Consider a "typical" American entrepreneur. Think about the entrepreneur who appears on TV, the business leader making headlines during the pandemic. Think of the type of businesses she or he is building, the college or business school they attended, the place they grew up. The image you probably conjured is that of a young, white male starting a technology business. He's likely in Silicon Valley. Possibly New York or Boston. He's self-confident, versed in the ins and outs of business funding and has an extensive (Ivy League?) network of peers and mentors eager to help his business thrive, grow and make millions, if not billions. You’d think entrepreneurship is thriving, and helping the United States maintain its economic power. You'd be almost completely wrong. The dominant image of an entrepreneur as a young white man starting a tech business on the coasts isn't correct at all. Today's American entrepreneurs, the people who drive critical parts of our economy, are more likely to be female and non-white. In fact, the number of women-owned businesses has increased 31 times between 1972 and 2018 according to the Kauffman Foundation (in 1972, women-owned businesses accounted for just 4.6% of all firms; in 2018 that figure was 40%). The fastest-growing group of female entrepreneurs are women of color, who are responsible for 64% of new women-owned businesses being created. In a few years, we believe women will make up more than half of the entrepreneurs in America. The age of the average American entrepreneur also belies conventional wisdom: It's 42. The average age of the most successful entrepreneurs -- those in the top .01% in terms of their company's growth in the first five years -- is 45. These are the New Builders. Women, people of color, immigrants and people over 40. We're failing them. And by doing so, we are failing ourselves. In this book, you'll learn: How the definition of business success in America today has grown corporate and around the concepts of growth, size, and consumption. Why and how our collective understanding of "entrepreneurship" has dangerously narrowed. Once a broad term including people starting businesses of all types, entrepreneurship has come to describe only the brash technology founders on the way to becoming big. Who are the fastest growing groups of entrepreneurs? What are they working on? What drives them? The real engine that drove Silicon Valley’s entrepreneurs. The government had a much bigger role than is widely known The extent to which entrepreneurs and small businesses are woven through our history, and the ways we have forgotten women and people of color who owned small businesses in the past. How we're increasingly afraid to fail The role small businesses are playing saving the wilderness, small

Have you wondered what goes on in the heads of entrepreneurs? What makes them tick? The New Age Entrepreneurs provides a peek into the lives of thirty successful entrepreneurs—including N.R. Panicker of Accel Ltd, Ramachandra Galla of Amaron, and M. Murali of Sri Krishna Sweets—who established flourishing businesses borne out of innovative ideas. These trailblazers delved into diverse industries, ranging from information technology to luxury hotels and Indian sweets. With snappy, insightful, and motivating tales—interspersed with interviews and vivid profiles—The New Age Entrepreneurs is a collection of vignettes of men who made their own rules and set standards for the rest of the industry to follow.