He has incurred substantial debt and his marriage is on shaky ground. Through pure happenstance, Owen finds himself pondering this problem while advancing steadily as a contestant at the World Series of Poker. His Las Vegas path quickly introduces him to Samantha, a beautiful and mysterious mentor with a revolutionary approach to entrepreneurship. Sam is a fountain of knowledge that may save his company, but her sexual advances might prove too much for Owen's struggling marriage. All In Startup is more than just a novel about eschewing temptation and fighting to save a company. It is a lifeline for entrepreneurs who are thinking about launching a new idea or for those who have already started but can't seem to generate the traction they were expecting. Entrepreneurs who achieve success in the new economy do so using a new scientific method of innovation. All In Startup demonstrates why four counterintuitive principles separate successful entrepreneurs from the wanna-preneurs who bounce from idea to idea, unable to generate real revenue. You will likely get only one opportunity in your life to go all in in on an idea: to quit your job, talk your spouse into letting you drain the savings account, and follow your dream. All In Startup will prepare you for that all in moment and make sure that you push your chips into the middle only when the odds are in your favor. This book holds the keys to significantly de-risking your idea so that your success appears almost lucky. Join Owen and Sam for this one-of-a-kind journey that will set you on the right path for when it's your turn to put everything on the line.

    Uber and Airbnb are household names: redefining neighbourhoods, challenging the way governments regulate business and changing the way we travel.In the spirit of iconic Silicon Valley renegades like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, a new generation of entrepreneurs is sparking yet another cultural upheaval through technology. They are among the Upstarts, idiosyncratic founders with limitless drive and an abundance of self-confidence. Young, hungry and brilliant, they are rewriting the traditional rules of business, changing our day-to-day lives and often sidestepping serious ethical and legal obstacles in the process.The Upstarts is the definitive account of a dawning age of tenacity, creativity, conflict and wealth. In Brad Stone’s highly anticipated and riveting account of the most radical companies of the new Silicon Valley, we find out how it all started, and how the world is wildly different than it was ten years ago.

    And, as he reveals in his new book, these superstars have a lot in common despite their wide range of industries, which includes software, food services, medical supplies, and sporting goods.It turns out that the best long-term performers all combine the strengths of a big organization with the hunger of a start-up. They build excellent relationships with their customers, suppliers, workers, and shareholders. They groom future leaders at all levels. They balance their short-term goals with their long-term visions. And they teach their managers to get their hands dirty.Jennings did extensive interviews at his nine featured companies to find out exactly how they consistently increase revenue and profits without using manipulation or gimmickry. He reveals their unique approach to leadership and shows how any company, no matter what size or industry, can benefit from following their examples.Think Big, Act Small may be the most powerful management book since Good to Great and Execution."

    Friendships and relationships can suffer. Bad decisions at the inception of a promising venture lay the foundations for its eventual ruin. The Founder's Dilemmas is the first book to examine the early decisions by entrepreneurs that can make or break a startup and its team.Drawing on a decade of research, Noam Wasserman reveals the common pitfalls founders face and how to avoid them. He looks at whether it is a good idea to cofound with friends or relatives, how and when to split the equity within the founding team, and how to recognize when a successful founder-CEO should exit or be fired. Wasserman explains how to anticipate, avoid, or recover from disastrous mistakes that can splinter a founding team, strip founders of control, and leave founders without a financial payoff for their hard work and innovative ideas. He highlights the need at each step to strike a careful balance between controlling the startup and attracting the best resources to grow it, and demonstrates why the easy short-term choice is often the most perilous in the long term. The Founder's Dilemmas draws on the inside stories of founders like Evan Williams of Twitter and Tim Westergren of Pandora, while mining quantitative data on almost ten thousand founders.People problems are the leading cause of failure in startups. This book offers solutions.

    This is the book for gardeners who want plants they can plant and forget! Tough Plants for Southern Gardens is written for novice and accomplished gardeners alike, for all gardeners who value their leisure time. They also value the appearance of their home and appreciate the benefits of well-placed landscaping…however; they do not want to devote too much time to keeping it beautiful. Tough Plants for Southern Gardens includes 120 of the toughest plants for Southern gardens, including annuals, bulbs, perennials, shrubs and small trees, ornamental vines, and lawns. Each featured plant is noted for its ability to thrive with minimal care. Many of the selections can withstand drought, poor soils, and minimal (or no) pruning, while providing beauty and charm in the home landscape. Each selection provides specific information on the plant's use in the landscape, mature size, flowering characteristics (if applicable), varieties, soil preference, and propagation. Each chapter also contains informative essays covering topics such as: companion planting tips, pest avoidance, and handling invasive plants.

    Uber had catapulted to the top of the tech world, yet for many came to symbolize everything wrong with Silicon Valley.Award-winning New York Times technology correspondent Mike Isaac’s Super Pumped presents the dramatic rise and fall of Uber, set against an era of rapid upheaval in Silicon Valley. Backed by billions in venture capital dollars and led by a brash and ambitious founder, Uber promised to revolutionize the way we move people and goods through the world. A near instant “unicorn,” Uber seemed poised to take its place next to Amazon, Apple, and Google as a technology giant.What followed would become a corporate cautionary tale about the perils of startup culture and a vivid example of how blind worship of startup founders can go wildly wrong. Isaac recounts Uber’s pitched battles with taxi unions and drivers, the company’s toxic internal culture, and the bare-knuckle tactics it devised to overcome obstacles in its quest for dominance. With billions of dollars at stake, Isaac shows how venture capitalists asserted their power and seized control of the startup as it fought its way toward its fateful IPO.Based on hundreds of interviews with current and former Uber employees, along with previously unpublished documents, Super Pumped is a page-turning story of ambition and deception, obscene wealth, and bad behavior that explores how blistering technological and financial innovation culminated in one of the most catastrophic twelve-month periods in American corporate history.

    A lack of proper validation kills more businesses than anything else. As Joel Barker says, “Speed is only useful if you’re running in the right direction.” Will It Fly? will help you make sure you are clear for takeoff. It answers questions like: - Does your business idea have merit? - Will it succeed in the market you’re trying to serve, or will it just be a waste of time and resources? - Is it a good idea for you? In other words, will it fly?Chock-full of practical suggestions you can apply to your business idea today, Will It Fly? combines action-based exercises and real-world case studies with anecdotes from the author’s personal experience of making money online, hosting successful podcasts, testing niche sites, and launching several online businesses.Will It Fly? will challenge you to think critically, act deliberately, and dare greatly. You can think of the book as your business flight manual, something you can refer to for honest and straight-forward advice as you begin to test your idea and build a business that takes off and soars.In five parts, Will It Fly? will guide you through the validation of your next business idea:- Part one, Mission Design, helps you make sure your target idea aligns with and supports your goals. - Part two, Development Lab, walks you through uncovering important details about your idea that you haven't even thought about. - Part three, Flight Planning, is all about assessing current market conditions. - Part four, Flight Simulator, focuses on the actual validating and testing of an idea with a small segment of a target market. - Finally, Part five, All Systems Go, is for final analysis to help you make sure your idea is one you are ready to move forward with.

    Reveals how to run an online business profitably in spite of the Internet's inherently free culture, disseminating the principles of a ''priceless economy'' in six categories that pertain to advertising, labor exchange, and advanced-version fees.

    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.

    Testing Business Ideas aims to reverse that statistic. In the tradition of Alex Osterwalder's global bestseller Business Model Generation, this practical guide contains a library of hands-on techniques for rapidly testing new business ideas.Testing Business Ideas explains how systematically testing business ideas dramatically reduces the risk and increases the likelihood of success for any new venture or business project. It builds on the internationally popular Business Model Canvas and Value Proposition Canvas by integrating Assumptions Mapping and other powerful lean startup-style experiments.Testing Business Ideas uses an engaging 4-color format to:Increase the success of any venture and decrease the risk of wasting time, money, and resources on bad ideas Close the knowledge gap between strategy and experimentation/validation Identify and test your key business assumptions with the Business Model Canvas and Value Proposition Canvas A definitive field guide to business model testing, this book features practical tips for making major decisions that are not based on intuition and guesses. Testing Business Ideas shows leaders how to encourage an experimentation mindset within their organization and make experimentation a continuous, repeatable process.

    Not as a freelancer who only gets paid on a per piece basis, and not as an entrepreneurial start-up that wants to scale as soon as possible, but as a small business that is deliberately committed to staying that way. By staying small, one can have freedom to pursue more meaningful pleasures in life, and avoid the headaches that result from dealing with employees, long meetings, or worrying about expansion. Company of One introduces this unique business strategy and explains how to make it work for you, including how to generate cash flow on an ongoing basis. Paul Jarvis left the corporate world when he realized that working in a high-pressure, high profile world was not his idea of success. Instead, he now works for himself out of his home on a small, lush island off of Vancouver, and lives a much more rewarding and productive life. He no longer has to contend with an environment that constantly demands more productivity, more output, and more growth.   In Company of One, Jarvis explains how you can find the right pathway to do the same, including planning how to set up your shop, determining your desired revenues, dealing with unexpected crises, keeping your key clients happy, and of course, doing all of this on your own.

    Ashlee Vance captures the full spectacle and arc of the genius's life and work, from his tumultuous upbringing in South Africa and flight to the United States to his dramatic technical innovations and entrepreneurial pursuits. Vance uses Musk's story to explore one of the pressing questions of our age: can the nation of inventors and creators who led the modern world for a century still compete in an age of fierce global competition? He argues that Musk is an amalgam of legendary inventors and industrialists including Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Howard Hughes, and Steve Jobs. More than any other entrepreneur today, Musk has dedicated his energies and his own vast fortune to inventing a future that is as rich and far-reaching as the visionaries of the golden age of science-fiction fantasy

    The more startups try to snatch a piece of the establishment's pie, the more they risk running into a political wall. That's where Bradley Tusk comes in.Described as Silicon Valley's Political Savior (Fast Company) Uber's Political Genius (Vanity Fair) and Silicon Valley's Favorite Fixer (TechCrunch) Tusk deploys the skills and knowledge he developed working with Chuck Schumer, Michael Bloomberg, Rod Blagojevich, and other political and business legends to help startups fight back. This book goes behind the scenes on how he helped stop the taxi industry from killing Uber in its infancy, how he held insurance companies at bay while startup Lemonade launched in each state, and how he helped online sports betting sites FanDuel and Draft Kings escape the regulatory death grip casinos tried to put on them.As Tusk writes, Every new company is essentially a tech startup. And when you disrupt someone in any industry, they don't say thank you. They punch you in the nose. These are the lessons startups need to learn to punch back and survive the clutches of politics. Combining a firsthand glimpse behind the curtain with tangible advice for how any new venture can play the political game, THE FIXER is a must-read for aspiring entrepreneurs.

    Infrastructure engineers use a software version of this “chaos monkey” to test online services’ robustness—their ability to survive random failure and correct mistakes before they actually occur. Tech entrepreneurs are society’s chaos monkeys, disruptors testing and transforming every aspect of our lives, from transportation (Uber) and lodging (AirBnB) to television (Netflix) and dating (Tinder). One of Silicon Valley’s most audacious chaos monkeys is Antonio García Martínez.After stints on Wall Street and as CEO of his own startup, García Martínez joined Facebook’s nascent advertising team, turning its users’ data into profit for COO Sheryl Sandberg and chairman and CEO Mark “Zuck” Zuckerberg. Forced out in the wake of an internal product war over the future of the company’s monetization strategy, García Martínez eventually landed at rival Twitter. He also fathered two children with a woman he barely knew, committed lewd acts and brewed illegal beer on the Facebook campus (accidentally flooding Zuckerberg's desk), lived on a sailboat, raced sport cars on the 101, and enthusiastically pursued the life of an overpaid Silicon Valley wastrel.Now, this gleeful contrarian unravels the chaotic evolution of social media and online marketing and reveals how it is invading our lives and shaping our future. Weighing in on everything from startups and credit derivatives to Big Brother and data tracking, social media monetization and digital “privacy,” García Martínez shares his scathing observations and outrageous antics, taking us on a humorous, subversive tour of the fascinatingly insular tech industry. Chaos Monkeys lays bare the hijinks, trade secrets, and power plays of the visionaries, grunts, sociopaths, opportunists, accidental tourists, and money cowboys who are revolutionizing our world. The question is, will we survive?

    No B.S. No fluff. No Sugar-coating. Are you driven to succeed so much it hurts? Are you tired of books which promise a sugar-coated tactic to overnight success, only to be left with disappointment? Do you want to live a life on your own terms? Then this book is for you… Do you know what the #1 regret of the dying is? “I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.” All of us start out with the desire and the potential to live a remarkable life. But along the way something happens… We start to accept mediocrity. But there is a way to live life on your own terms. And entrepreneur Peter Voogd wants to show you how… Peter started his first business when he was 15, and found himself broke, stressed and discouraged by the age of 22. By 23, he made his first 6 figure income, and by 27 his earnings were over 1 million. Through his own experiences and that of helping over 4,000 entrepreneurs with The Game Changers Academy and starting The Young Entrepreneur Lifestyle, Peter has identified the exact strategies young entrepreneurs can use to create a business so they can live a life on their own terms. In this book that is sure to be as big of a hit as 6 Months to 6 Figures, you’ll learn the 30 strategies you need to create the lifestyle of your dreams including: - The tactical tips, experience and mindset it will take to build your ideal lifestyle. - How to handle information overwhelm, and implement what you learn into your life and business for massive results. - How to drop your past and transform your future to see the change you want in your life. - The 6 “musts” to extreme achievement. - How to build a morning routine that’ll start you off energized and hungry to achieve your goals. "There are two types of people in this world. Those who will do whatever it takes to succeed… and everybody else. Choose wisely." - Peter Voogd Remember the number one regret of the dying? To have the courage to live a life true to themselves... Well do you have the courage? The courage to stand up and to create an exceptional lifestyle that’s true to who you are? If you do, get this book. Because with that courage, and Peter’s advice, you’re sure to get everything you want out of life. Just think… in 6 months you could be one of the entrepreneurs who isn’t just barely surviving, but thriving. Whichever one you become is up to you. To get free downloadable resources (PDF and audio files) from leading entrepreneurship authority Peter Voogd, visit: TheEntrepreneurBreakthrough.com Tags: lifestyle entrepreneurs, young entrepreneurs, entrepreneurship, financial freedom, success, Peter Voogd, 6 Months to 6 Figures