Great ideas often come from a simple spark: A soccer player on the New Zealand national team notices all the unused wool his country produces and figures out a way to turn them into shoes (Allbirds). A former Buddhist monk decides the very best way to spread his mindfulness teachings is by launching an app (Headspace). A sandwich cart vendor finds a way to reuse leftover pita bread and turns it into a multimillion-dollar business (Stacy’s Pita Chips).   Award-winning journalist and NPR host Guy Raz has interviewed more than 200 highly successful entrepreneurs to uncover amazing true stories like these. In How I Built This, he shares tips for every entrepreneur’s journey: from the early days of formulating your idea, to raising money and recruiting employees, to fending off competitors, to finally paying yourself a real salary. This is a must-read for anyone who has ever dreamed of starting their own business or wondered how trailblazing entrepreneurs made their own dreams a reality.

    No one wants to add to the scrap heap. But if you restrict yourself to only reading articles from people who have actually created a business, hit some revenue target, or broken out of the MVP-in-an-incubator stage, there’s very few books and blogs left. This is why we hope this book is relevant to you.It’s not packed with startup clichés, nor is it steeped in myths about how huge companies got their break. Yes, Airbnb sold cereal before they were a 31 billion dollar company, and Slack was one hell of a pivot, but those wells have been over-drilled for their useful lessons at this point. This book is our honest, opinionated take on what we’ve learned building Intercom over the past 6 years. You won’t like it all, you won’t agree with it all, but you’re not supposed to. Your mileage will vary.

    McCord helped create the unique and high-performing culture at Netflix, where she was chief talent officer. In her new book, Powerful: Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility, she shares what she learned there and elsewhere in Silicon Valley.McCord advocates practicing radical honesty in the workplace, saying good-bye to employees who don’t fit the company’s emerging needs, and motivating with challenging work, not promises, perks, and bonus plans. McCord argues that the old standbys of corporate HR―annual performance reviews, retention plans, employee empowerment and engagement programs―often end up being a colossal waste of time and resources. Her road-tested advice, offered with humor and irreverence, provides readers a different path for creating a culture of high performance and profitability.Powerful will change how you think about work and the way a business should be run.

    Gives practical advice on developing and marketing products in the technology industry, looks in detail at Intel's marketing campaign against Motorola, and stresses the importance of commitment to a successful campaign.

    Now, in the first book of its kind, successful entrepreneur Patrick Riley shows you how to boil all the elements of your business proposal into one persuasive page magnify your business potential in the process.

    Features chapters on finance, marketing, accounting, strategy, quantitative analysis, operations, economics, organisational behaviour, and ethics, all revised to reflect the contemporary corporate culture and economic climate.

    Successfully connecting your product with consumers isn’t a matter of following trends, comparing yourself to the competition or trying to attract the widest customer base.So what is it? April Dunford, positioning guru and tech exec, will enlighten you.Her new book, Obviously Awesome, shows you how to find your product’s “secret sauce”—and then sell that sauce to those who crave it. Having spent years as a startup executive (with 16 product launches under her belt) and a consultant (who’s worked on dozens more), Dunford speaks with authority about breaking through the noise of a crowded market.Punctuated with witty anecdotes and compelling case studies, Dunford’s book is at once entertaining and illuminating. Among the invaluable lessons you’ll learn are:- The Five Components of Effective Positioning- How to instantly connect an audience to your offering’s value- How to choose the best market for your products- How to use three distinct styles of positioning to your advantage- How to leverage market trends to help buyers understand why making a purchase is important right nowWhether you’re an entrepreneur, marketer or salesperson struggling to bring inventive products to market, Dunford’s insights will help you find your awesome, so that your customers can too.

    Mountains of print have been written about culture. Loonshots identifies the small shifts in structure that control this transition, the same way that temperature controls the change from water to ice.Using examples that range from the spread of fires in forests to the hunt for terrorists online, and stories of thieves and geniuses and kings, Bahcall shows how this new kind of science helps us understand the behavior of companies and the fate of empires. Loonshots distills these insights into lessons for creatives, entrepreneurs, and visionaries everywhere.

    Forget short-term symptoms like Donald Trump and Brexit, it is innovation itself that explains them and that will itself shape the 21st century for good and ill. Yet innovation remains a mysterious process, poorly understood by policy makers and businessmen, hard to summon into existence to order, yet inevitable and inexorable when it does happen.Matt Ridley argues in this book that we need to change the way we think about innovation, to see it as an incremental, bottom-up, fortuitous process that happens to society as a direct result of the human habit of exchange, rather than an orderly, top-down process developing according to a plan. Innovation is crucially different from invention, because it is the turning of inventions into things of practical and affordable use to people. It speeds up in some sectors and slows down in others. It is always a collective, collaborative phenomenon, not a matter of lonely genius. It is gradual, serendipitous, recombinant, inexorable, contagious, experimental and unpredictable. It happens mainly in just a few parts of the world at any one time. It still cannot be modelled properly by economists, but it can easily be discouraged by politicians. Far from there being too much innovation, we may be on the brink of an innovation famine.Ridley derives these and other lessons, not with abstract argument, but from telling the lively stories of scores of innovations, how they started and why they succeeded or in some cases failed. He goes back millions of years and leaps forward into the near future. Some of the innovation stories he tells are about steam engines, jet engines, search engines, airships, coffee, potatoes, vaping, vaccines, cuisine, antibiotics, mosquito nets, turbines, propellers, fertiliser, zero, computers, dogs, farming, fire, genetic engineering, gene editing, container shipping, railways, cars, safety rules, wheeled suitcases, mobile phones, corrugated iron, powered flight, chlorinated water, toilets, vacuum cleaners, shale gas, the telegraph, radio, social media, block chain, the sharing economy, artificial intelligence, fake bomb detectors, phantom games consoles, fraudulent blood tests, faddish diets, hyperloop tubes, herbicides, copyright and even – a biological innovation -- life itself.

    This is NOT just another book about how to cold call or close deals. This is an entirely new kind of sales system for CEOs, entrepreneurs and sales VPs to help you build a sales machine. What does it take for your sales team to generate as many highly-qualified new leads as you want, create predictable revenue, and meet your financial goals without your constant focus and attention? Predictable Revenue has the answers!

    We have launched two successful Kickstarter projects, in turn paving the way for a new era of independent hardware manufacturing, and recently entered the software world with our first iPhone app. We have learned a lot in a short period of time, and wanted to share this information with the world. So we wrote a book. This book was written to offer guidance and inspiration for those charting a similar path, and covers topics such as running a small business, creating hardware products independently, launching a Kickstarter project, and tips for promoting your products. Everything is told through the lens of our own experience.It Will Be Exhilarating is a short read that will provide the needed kick to start making stuff. There isn't a better time than now.“There is no recipe for passion, no 5-step guide to making your idea real, but there is good, solid advice, and this book is filled with it.” – Clay Shirky, author, Here Comes Everybody“It Will Be Exhilarating is both fun and informative. I was shocked at how transparent and thorough Studio Neat are at sharing the details of their journey. Moreover, the book reads quick so you can get back to building your next great idea, but now with a bit of extra inspiration and insight.” – Shawn Blanc, shawnblanc.net"Dan and Tom had a wild ride through the early days of this alternative to make stuff by finding an interested audience that funds the costs of bringing a dream to fruition. This book tells those lessons learned from two successive and successful Kickstarter projects and the first two years of bootstrapping their company. Studio Neat has a practical roadmap for taking something you love and potentially making it your livelihood." – Glenn Fleishman, a freelance technology reporter who contributes to The Economist, Macworld, and BoingBoing“Tom and Dan have created a hitchhikers guide to the black art that is successfully funding a Kickstarter project.” – Ben Brooks, brooksreview.net

    - Quick, easy approach and a wealth of case studies give readers a crash course in the difference between good and bad branding. - Tons of tips and real-world advice plus a new branding dictionary help readers turn brand strategy into brand design and execution.

    We’re building more products than ever before, but most of them fail—not because we can’t complete what we set out to build, but because we waste time, money, and effort building the wrong product.What we need is a systematic process for quickly vetting product ideas and raising our odds of success. That’s the promise of Running Lean.In this inspiring book, Ash Maurya takes you through an exacting strategy for achieving a "product/market fit" for your fledgling venture, based on his own experience in building a wide array of products from high-tech to no-tech. Throughout, he builds on the ideas and concepts of several innovative methodologies, including the Lean Startup, Customer Development, and bootstrapping.Running Lean is an ideal tool for business managers, CEOs, small business owners, developers and programmers, and anyone who’s interested in starting a business project.Find a problem worth solving, then define a solutionEngage your customers throughout the development cycleContinually test your product with smaller, faster iterationsBuild a feature, measure customer response, and verify/refute the ideaKnow when to "pivot" by changing your plan’s courseMaximize your efforts for speed, learning, and focusLearn the ideal time to raise your "big round" of fundingGet on track with The Lean Series Presented by Eric Ries—bestselling author of The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses—The Lean Series gives you solid footing in a proven methodology that will help your business succeed.

    To make that move. To fulfill your vision. I want to take you closer to your goal, whether that be starting a billion-dollar unicorn, building a revolution, or just helping you better understand that change of any kind starts with you. You can be the Startup Hero. Startup Heroes are the ones that drive progress, and whether you bring us to another planet or make your neighborhood a nicer, happier place, you can become a Startup Hero. This book is the first step. It helps you take that first step. The step will be different for everyone. It might be to call that customer. It might be to draw up a design concept. It might be to talk to your boss. With this book, I hope to guide people to think big, drive change and go full speed ahead. I am giving them a pledge to do their work for good, and I am giving them some of the tools they need to accomplish their goals. This book is hard. It takes you through a variety of activities, questions, stories and challenges (even puzzles and poems) working both the right and left side of your brain and all the parts in between. The activities I propose are challenging and sometimes even embarrassing. The questions I ask are probing and provoking. The stories I tell are used as examples to guide you toward what I call Startup Heroism. So, why would you read this book? Well, I have worked for 30 years for entrepreneurs. I have supported, funded and coached Startup Heroes all my working life. And I have tested the concepts of this book on the students at Draper University and they have come out to be some of the most interesting, dynamic, and motivated people the world has ever seen. In fact, we have had about 1000 students from over 60 different countries come through the program at this writing, and they have started more than 300 companies! I wrote this book so that some of the thinking that I applied to Draper University could be spread wider, in hopes that these messages would reach other potential Startup Heroes (maybe you) who might make an impact on the world, be proactive about their work, or at the very least, improve their lives. So, I implore you. Read this book, try this book, do this book, play this book, absorb this book, experience this book. It might surprise you. It might thrill you. It might drive you. It might kill you. At the very least, I hope it will give you a perspective on how real progress is made, and at the very best, it might just change your life.

    Late fees were ubiquitous, video-streaming unheard was of, and widespread DVD adoption seemed about as imminent as flying cars. Indeed, these were the widely accepted laws of the land in 1997, when Marc Randolph had an idea. It was a simple thought—leveraging the internet to rent movies—and was just one of many more and far worse proposals, like personalized baseball bats and a shampoo delivery service, that Randolph would pitch to his business partner, Reed Hastings, on their commute to work each morning.But Hastings was intrigued, and the pair—with Hastings as the primary investor and Randolph as the CEO—founded a company. Now with over 150 million subscribers, Netflix's triumph feels inevitable, but the twenty first century's most disruptive start up began with few believers and calamity at every turn. From having to pitch his own mother on being an early investor, to the motel conference room that served as a first office, to server crashes on launch day, to the now-infamous meeting when Netflix brass pitched Blockbuster to acquire them, Marc Randolph's transformational journey exemplifies how anyone with grit, gut instincts, and determination can change the world—even with an idea that many think will never work.What emerges, though, isn't just the inside story of one of the world's most iconic companies. Full of counter-intuitive concepts and written in binge-worthy prose, it answers some of our most fundamental questions about taking that leap of faith in business or in life: How do you begin? How do you weather disappointment and failure? How do you deal with success? What even is success?From idea generation to team building to knowing when it's time to let go, That Will Never Work is not only the ultimate follow-your-dreams parable, but also one of the most dramatic and insightful entrepreneurial stories of our time.