Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World

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The most successful businesses have gone from being headed by a university graduate who’s slogged her way up the corporate ladder for a decade or two, to being the brainchild of a Harvard dropout working out of a garage. However, he makes a case for being transparent whenever you can, that the long-term benefits are often well worth it, and the costs of not doing so can be far greater than often recognized.

According to her data, less than 25 percent of early-stage, venture capital-backed companies make any profit at all.A lack of openness doesn’t just put your relationships in jeopardy, it can also undermine your company’s growth and revenue. We are facing many of the same pitfalls that Rand faced, and were heading towards some of the same mistakes before I picked this book up. The empathy shown comes across hugely in many situations in the book - where taking care of people is top of his agenda, ahead of growing his own business / keeping shareholders happy.

But the phenomenal growth achieved by the tiny cluster of startups that became household names is misleading. His painfully honest anecdotes from Moz are insightful and relatable for anyone at a startup, while his marketing tips are dynamite and worth checking out. Came at an opportune time for me while I was navigating and making important choices from my own startup.The book is so well-written and entertaining, though, that I found myself reading it as much for entertainment as for education. Sharing the ups, and more importantly, the downs of the startup world, Rand lays it all out for his readers in stunning clarity. partly because the book confirms many of my doubts about popular startup quotes about the fake it until you make it mentality, and about the go big or go home mentality, by giving examples based on the author's startup experience as an ex-CEO, partly because the book is written in a very light and personal tone, so it's very easy and fun to read for me. This book is an honest, generous and useful look at what actually happens when you build a company, including the downs as well as the ups.

Raising and spending capital, hiring and firing, and launching and removing products were all tricky balancing acts. As opposed to how it's populated, building a startup is a murky adventure, marred with serious mental health repercussions. As a big fan of Rand's work on Moz (especially his pro tips on Twitter and Whiteboard Friday's), this book was a great look behind the curtain on the true nature of running a venture backed SaaS business.We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. I suggest everyone that is thinking about starting a new company, creating a project maybe startup to read this book. Most people don't want to talk about those startup stories, but the truth is, they're a lot more common than the Zuckerberg-esque tales of success we so often hear about. Growth hacks – marketing strategies for rapid experimentation and product development – often do more harm than good. Everyone knows how a startup story is supposed to go: a young, brilliant entrepreneur has an cool idea, drops out of college, defies the doubters, overcomes all odds, makes billions and becomes the envy of the technology world.