Best of
Entrepreneurship
2022
Amp It Up: Leading for Hypergrowth by Raising Expectations, Increasing Urgency, and Elevating Intensity
Frank Slootman - 2022
In Amp It Up Leading for Hypergrowth by Raising Expectations, Increasing Urgency, and Elevating Intensity, he shares his leadership approach for the first time.Amp It Up delivers an authoritative look at what it takes to transform an organization for maximum growth and scale. Slootman shows that most leaders have significant room to improve their organization's performance without making expensive changes to their talent, structure, or fundamental business model--and they don't need to bring in an army of consultants to do it. What they do need is to align people around what matters and execute with urgency and intensity every day.Leading for unprecedented growth means declaring war on mediocrity, breaking the status quo, and making conflicted choices daily, all with a relentless focus on the mission. Amp It Up provides the first principles to guide that change, and the tactical advice for organizing a company around them.Perfect for executives, entrepreneurs, founders, managers, and leaders of all kinds, Amp It Up is a must-read resource for anyone who seeks to unleash the growth potential of a company and scale it to heights they never thought possible.
The Pathless Path: Imagining a New Story For Work and Life
Paul Millerd - 2022
The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley
Jimmy Soni - 2022
“Deeply reported and bracingly written, this book is an indispensable guide to modern innovation and entrepreneurship.” —Walter Isaacson, New York Times bestselling author of Code BreakerToday, PayPal’s founders and earliest employees are considered the technology industry’s most powerful network. Since leaving PayPal, they have formed, funded, and advised the leading companies of our era, including Tesla, Facebook, YouTube, SpaceX, Yelp, Palantir, and LinkedIn, among many others. As a group, they have driven twenty-first-century innovation and entrepreneurship. Their names stir passions; they’re as controversial as they are admired. Yet for all their influence, the story of where they first started has gone largely untold. Before igniting the commercial space race or jumpstarting social media’s rise, they were the unknown creators of a scrappy online payments start-up called PayPal. In building what became one of the world’s foremost companies, they faced bruising competition, internal strife, the emergence of widespread online fraud, and the devastating dot-com bust of the 2000s. Their success was anything but certain. In The Founders: The Story of PayPal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley, award-winning author and biographer Jimmy Soni explores PayPal’s turbulent early days. With hundreds of interviews and unprecedented access to thousands of pages of internal material, he shows how the seeds of so much of what shapes our world today—fast-scaling digital start-ups, cashless currency concepts, mobile money transfer—were planted two decades ago. He also reveals the stories of countless individuals who were left out of the front-page features and banner headlines but who were central to PayPal’s success. Described as “an intensely magnetic chronicle” (The New York Times) and “engrossing” (Business Insider), The Founders is a story of iteration and inventiveness—the products of which have cast a long and powerful shadow over modern life. This narrative illustrates how this rare assemblage of talent came to work together and how their collaboration changed our world forever.
Special Characters: My Adventures with Tech's Titans and Misfits
Laurie Segall - 2022
With wit and candor, Laurie Segall offers an intimate account of a young woman finding her voice in the boys' clubs of Silicon Valley and cable news. Laurie Segall's memoir is funny, charming, and sincere, and a staggeringly good book.” —Sophia Amoruso, New York Times bestselling author of #GirlbossSweetbitter meets Brotopia in a story of self-discovery and breaking barriers by award-winning investigative reporter and former CNN Senior Tech Correspondent Laurie Segall.In 2008, 23-year-old Laurie Segall was a newly minted assistant at CNN and was living in an East Village walk-up apartment. As Wall Street was crashing down, Segall began discovering a group of scrappy misfits who were rising from the ashes of the recession to change the world: the tech entrepreneurs.A misfit herself, Segall gained entrance to New York’s burgeoning tech scene, with its limitless cash flow and parties populated by geeks-turned-billionaires. Back at the news desk, she rose through the ranks at CNN, while these entrepreneurs went from minnows to sharks, building companies that would become our democracy and our social fabric: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Uber, Tinder.Over the course of a decade, Laurie Segall became one of the first reporters to give airtime to many of these founders—from Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook) to Jack Dorsey (Twitter) to Kevin Systrom (Instagram) to Travis Kalanick (Uber)—while tracking their evolution and society’s cultural shift in the CNN startup beat she created. By the end of her tenure at CNN, she had become its on-air senior technology correspondent and had witnessed the rise of second-wave tech, from the boom to the “complicated years” to the backlash, as her misfits emerged as some of the world’s most influential leaders.A coming-of-age narrative chronicling an era transformed, Special Characters is, at its core, a young woman’s origin story—in love, in career, and in life—and an account of the humans behind the companies that have shaped our modern society. Filled with emotional heft and razor-sharp observations, Segall’s empowering memoir is a richly rendered backstage pass to the tech bubble that reimagined the ethos of our social, political, and cultural experience.