The Startup Playbook
Secrets of the Fastest-Growing Startups from their Founding Entrepreneurs
-
-
3.6 • 14 Ratings
-
-
- $12.99
-
- $12.99
Publisher Description
According to the Kauffman Index of Entrepreneurial Activity, more than 565,000 new businesses were created in 2010 in the United States alone—each one of them hoping to strike gold. The Startup Playbook will help them succeed. Going insider to insider with unprecedented access, New York Times bestselling author and Clickable CEO, David Kidder, shares the hard-hitting experiences of some of the world’s most influential entrepreneurs and CEOs, revealing their most closely held advice. Face-to-face interviews with 40 founders give readers key insights into what it took to build PayPal, LinkedIn, AOL, TED, Flickr, and many others into household names. Special sections include topics ranging from how to select the right idea to pursue to finding funding and overcoming inevitable obstacles. In an economy demanding change, The Startup Playbook is the go-to for entrepreneurs big and small.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Kidder, a serial entrepreneur and bestselling author of the Intellectual Devotional series, has assembled what can best be described as the perfect coffee-table book of collective entrepreneurial wisdom. He set out to collect key ideas that have inspired the world's greatest entrepreneurs and asked a number of wunderkinds to explain "key practices, behaviors, and ideas" that allowed them to succeed. Aggregated, the critical ideas expressed are know thyself; keep the focus on your big ideas; build a painkiller, not a vitamin; be 10 times better than the competition; and be a monopolist. The participants including such luminaries as Steve Case of AOL, Robin Chase of Zipcar, Scott Harrison of Charity: Water, Jay Walker of Priceline, Sara Blakely of Spanx, and many others provide their advice in the form of a playbook and offer pearls of wisdom such as running lean, firing people when they lose faith in your ideas, and staying ahead of the game. The sheer range of projects and ideas makes this an inspiring look at the process behind the successful startup plan. Illus.
Customer Reviews
Good but not great!
This is a compendium and no more. I expected the author to provide context and perhaps group the thoughts of these entrepreneurs some of which are conflicting. The author's duty is to deploy the first critical skill of writing which is to create a context in which other people can think. Good book nonetheless.
Don't Write a Book While Building a Startup
Kidder should have followed that advice! While the stories of the entrepreneurs profiled in the book are interesting, Kidder failed to create a coherent playbook from their disparate experiences and often conflicting advice. The role of the author is to provide perspective and explore areas of contradiction. Kidder merely collects stories without critical examination.