WALL STREET JOURNAL BESTSELLER From the cofounder of a $40 billion software company comes an invaluable guide packed with $1 trillion worth of advice from some of the world’s most successful and recognizable entrepreneurs. Over the past 20 years, first as an early employee at Salesforce and later as a cofounder of Okta (a publicly traded software company now valued at over $40 billion), Frederic Kerrest has met the most successful entrepreneurs and investors in Silicon Valley and beyond. He’s discussed every angle of entrepreneurship with them—what works, what doesn’t, and what to do when things get rough—and he’s taken notes. The result is this unmatched blueprint for building and growing a business, drawn from his own experience as well as that of his fellow visionaries and business leaders, who have collectively built over $1 trillion worth of wealth for themselves and their investors. They include Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz (Andreessen Horowitz), Eric Yuan (Zoom), Stewart Butterfield (Slack), Aneel Bhusri (Workday), Julia Hartz (Eventbrite), Aaron Levie (Box), Fred Luddy (ServiceNow), Melanie Perkins (Canva), Patty McCord (Netflix), Sebastian Thrun (Udacity), and dozens of other luminaries. These ideas and practices aren’t taught in business schools. They’ve been learned the hard way, through trial and error in the real world of business. Kerrest has battle-tested them himself, so he knows their power. Organized by topic in roughly the order that leaders will encounter them as they scale their businesses, this book is the ultimate guide to taking a company all the way from founding to IPO—and beyond.

A practical guide to taking your company public--successfully This updated version of the Ernst & Young Guide to Taking Your Company Public looks at the IPO as a milestone in a larger process called The Value Journeysm, the basis for the work of the Ernst & Young Center for Strategic Transactions(R), a business advisory resource for CEOs. This practical book is designed to help you determine whether an IPO is the right move for your company and addresses the major leadership challenges that CEOs face. It describes how to plan your IPO journey and chart your business strategy, focusing on the steps you must take to succeed during and after the IPO event and fulfill the critical need to continuously innovate and renew your company.

“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.

Blender, the free alternative for professional-quality 3D animation is a complex program to learn, but once users become familiar with its power, they begin to seek more from it. This book is the first of its kind to explore the more advanced features of Blender so that you can get the most out of the software. You’ll take your Blender skills to a whole new level with the featured in-depth coverage of intricate uses for Blender's modeling, texturing, animation, and visual effects tools in a professional environment. Note: CD-ROM/DVD and other supplementary materials are not included as part of eBook file.

A comprehensive, in-depth, and authoritative guide to China's financial system The Chinese economy is one of the most important in the world, and its success is driven in large part by its financial system. Though closely scrutinized, this system is poorly understood and vastly different than those in the West. The Handbook of China’s Financial System will serve as a standard reference guide and invaluable resource to the workings of this critical institution. The handbook looks in depth at the central aspects of the system, including banking, bonds, the stock market, asset management, the pension system, and financial technology. Each chapter is written by leading experts in the field, and the contributors represent a unique mix of scholars and policymakers, many with firsthand knowledge of setting and carrying out Chinese financial policy. The first authoritative volume on China’s financial system, this handbook sheds new light on how it developed, how it works, and the prospects and direction of significant reforms to come. Contributors include Franklin Allen, Marlene Amstad, Kaiji Chen, Tuo Deng, Hanming Fang, Jin Feng, Tingting Ge, Kai Guo, Zhiguo He, Yiping Huang, Zhaojun Huang, Ningxin Jiang, Wenxi Jiang, Chang Liu, Jun Ma, Yanliang Mao, Fan Qi, Jun Qian, Chenyu Shan, Guofeng Sun, Xuan Tian, Chu Wang, Cong Wang, Tao Wang, Wei Xiong, Yi Xiong, Tao Zha, Bohui Zhang, Tianyu Zhang, Zhiwei Zhang, Ye Zhao, and Julie Lei Zhu.

The Way Forward for Entrepreneurship Around the World We are in the midst of a startup revolution. The growth and proliferation of innovation-driven startup activity is profound, unprecedented, and global in scope. Today, it is understood that communities of support and knowledge-sharing go along with other resources. The importance of collaboration and a long-term commitment has gained wider acceptance. These principles are adopted in many startup communities throughout the world. And yet, much more work is needed. Startup activity is highly concentrated in large cities. Governments and other actors such as large corporations and universities are not collaborating with each other nor with entrepreneurs as well as they could. Too often, these actors try to control activity or impose their view from the top-down, rather than supporting an environment that is led from the bottom-up. We continue to see a disconnect between an entrepreneurial mindset and that of many actors who wish to engage with and support entrepreneurship. There are structural reasons for this, but we can overcome many of these obstacles with appropriate focus and sustained practice. No one tells this story better than Brad Feld and Ian Hathaway. The Startup Community Way: Evolving an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem explores what makes startup communities thrive and how to improve collaboration in these rapidly evolving, complex environments. The Startup Community Way is an explanatory guide for startup communities. Rooted in the theory of complex systems, this book establishes the systemic properties of entrepreneurial ecosystems and explains why their complex nature leads people to make predictable mistakes. As complex systems, value creation occurs in startup communities primarily through the interaction of the "parts" - the people, organizations, resources, and conditions involved - not the parts themselves. This continual process of bottom-up interactions unfolds naturally, producing value in novel and unexpected ways. Through these complex, emergent processes, the whole becomes greater and substantially different than what the parts alone could produce. Because of this, participants must take a fundamentally different approach than is common in much of our civic and professional lives. Participants must take a whole-system view, rather than simply trying to optimize their individual part. They must prioritize experimentation and learning over planning and execution. Complex systems are uncertain and unpredictable. They cannot be controlled, only guided and influenced. Each startup community is unique. Replication is enticing but impossible. The race to become "The Next Silicon Valley" is futile - even Silicon Valley couldn't recreate itself. This book: Offers practical advice for entrepreneurs, community builders, government officials, and other stakeholders who want to harness the power of entrepreneurship in their city Describes the core components of startup communities and entrepreneurial ecosystems, as well as an explanation of the differences between these two related, but distinct concepts Advances a new framework for effective startup community building based on the theory of complex systems and insights from systems thinking Includes contributions from leading entrepreneurial voices Is a must-have resource for entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, executives, business and community leaders, economic development authorities, policymakers, university officials, and anyone wishing to understand how startup communities work anywhere in the world