When inexperienced entrepreneurs ask my advice about their idea for a tech startup, they often worry "What if Google decides to compete with us? They will crush us!" I respond that far more startups die of suicide than homicide. If you can avoid hurting yourself, then you are already better off than most of your competitors. Startups are a chance to build something entirely original with brilliant and ambitious people. But startups are also dangerous. Limited money means there is little room for mistakes. One bad decision can mean bankruptcy. The potential payoff attracts capital, which in turn attracts scam artists. The unscrupulous often lack the skills needed to succeed, but sometimes they are smart enough to trick investors. Even entrepreneurs who start with a strong moral compass can find that the threat of failure unmoors their ethics from their ambition. Emotions matter. We might hope that those in leadership positions possess strength and resilience, but vanity and fragile egos have sabotaged many of the businesses that I’ve worked with. Defeat is always a possibility, and not everyone finds healthy ways to deal with the stress. In this book I offer both advice and also warnings. I've seen certain self-destructive patterns play out again and again, so I wanted to document one of the most extreme cases that I've witnessed. In 2015 I worked for a startup that began with an ingenious idea: to use the software techniques known as Natural Language Processing to allow people to interact with databases by writing ordinary English sentences. This was a multi-billion dollar idea that could have transformed the way people gathered and used information. However, the venture had inexperienced leadership. They burned through their $1.3 million seed money. As their resources dwindled, their confidence transformed into doubt, which was aggravated by edicts from the Board Of Directors ordering sudden changes that effectively threw away weeks' worth of work. Every startup forces its participants into extreme positions, often regarding budget and deadlines. Often these situations are absurd to the point of parody. Therefore, there is considerable humor in this story. The collision of inexperience and desperation gives rise to moments that are simply silly. I tell this story in a day-to-day format, both to capture the early optimism, and then the later sense of panic. Here then, is a cautionary tale, a warning about tendencies that everyone joining a startup should be on guard against."

    Now, Bornstein shifts the focus from the profiles of successful social innovators in thatbook--and teams with Susan Davis, a founding board member of the Grameen Foundation--to offer the first general overview of social entrepreneurship. In a Q & A format allowing readers to go directly to the information they need, the authors map out social entrepreneurship in its broadest terms aswell as in its particulars.Bornstein and Davis explain what social entrepreneurs are, how their organizations function, and what challenges they face. The book will give readers an understanding of what differentiates social entrepreneurship from standard business ventures and how it differs from traditional grant-basednon-profit work. Unlike the typical top-down, model-based approach to solving problems employed by the World Bank and other large institutions, social entrepreneurs work through a process of iterative learning -- learning by doing--working with communities to find unique, local solutions to unique, local problems. Most importantly, the book shows readers exactly how they can get involved.Anyone inspired by Barack Obama's call to service and who wants to learn more about the essential features and enormous promise of this new method of social change, Social Entrepreneurship: What Everyone Needs to Know(R) is the ideal first place to look.What Everyone Needs to Know(R) is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press.

    How did Tata transform itself from a family-owned business to one of the most professionally managed enterprises in the world? How did it become a world leader in an array of unrelated businesses—from steel and automobile manufacturing to hotels and IT consulting? What exactly is the ‘Tata Way’, which has earned it so much admiration and respect?This brief history of the Tatas charts the contribution of every Tata chairman—from Jamsetji Tata, who set up the company in 1868, to Ratan Tata and Cyrus Mistry—and explores the values at the heart of the Tata Group, as well as the role played in its development by the philanthropic trusts that own two-thirds of the company.For anyone curious about this Indian company that has become a leading global player, this book is the perfect introduction.

    In this remarkably instructive book, Ben dissects the entrepreneurship "gene," explaining that everyone has inherited it if they have an idea to make the world a better place. In Casnocha's case, he found a better way for city governments to communicate with constituents on the Web. Six years later, Comcate has dozens of municipal clients, a growing staff, and a record of excellence. This book is the story of his start-up, but also a conversation with his mentors, clients and fellow entrepreneurs about how to make a business idea work—and how to have the time of your life trying. From Pat Lencioni to Marc Benioff of salesforce.com, Ben has won over the best and brightest of the business world—now it's your turn!

     What if you could start your day out with an excited shout instead of a frustrated sigh? Unfortunately, selling handmade goods online is no longer as simple as throwing together a product listing and waiting for sales to roll in. There are now millions of people with handmade products and they are all eager to build a sustainable income. The Handmade Entrepreneur uses precise methods based on proven marketing techniques to set you above the competition. It teaches you how to create a genuine business you can count on rather than a bundle of shop pages and social media accounts built on a foundation of guesswork. What You Can Expect to Learn from This Book: • How to take DIY pictures that get clicks and sales • How to set up a shop that turns visitors into buyers in under two seconds • How to price your items • How to write titles and descriptions • How to brand your business with DIY techniques • How to rank your pages • How to find targeted audiences • How to build up your list of followers • Where to promote your listings • How to sell without selling • How to form relationships with people who can send you extra sales • How to start a "buzz" about your products • Which tools to incorporate into your business The goal of this book is to free you from having to rely on any third-party website for your sales. Yes, you can take advantage of platforms like Etsy, and you should, but websites come and go, and if all your sales come only from that website, you run into trouble every time there are algorithm changes, a saturation of sellers, or cheaper products to compete with. You are trying to generate sales, which means that you are trying to run a business, which in-turn means that you need a real business plan. Brick and motor stores don't just buy a bunch of goods, throw them in a building, and hope people will come. They plan, study their target market, pick a perfect store location, and prepare to market themselves. Just because you sell online does not mean that you can skip all of these steps. You have billions of products to compete with online and a crowd of shoppers who have an overwhelming number of options before them. You must prepare your storefront, get your products ready, know your audience, and then know how to market to them. Optimizing Your Shop for Sales Dani starts out showing you how to prepare your products with photos that attract clicks and sales. It doesn't just tell you how to do it, though. It SHOWS you. Thanks to the help of many carefully selected Etsy sellers, there are many example photos for each point. In addition to this, the author only shows you DIY photos to prove that you can do it all on your own. Next, Dani discusses how to optimize your shop. She goes through every aspect such as banners, profiles, descriptions, tags, and titles. You will learn how to optimize your pages so that people stay there instead of leaving instantly. This can be done by creating an inviting environment with images and content that buyers can skim through in under two seconds. If buyers can determine that your page is worth staying on in less than two seconds, you have won the battle. Finding Targeted Audiences and Marketing The issue with selling online is finding people who would be interested in your products.

     Inside the affiliate marketing blueprint you will learn exactly how to: • Choose the right offer to promote • Get the right mindset to make money with affiliate marketing • Sign up to the best affiliate networks • Start an affiliate marketing business using free methods • Create great looking landing pages that convert • Drive traffic to your offers from the best traffic networks • Track and scale your marketing campaigns to insane numbers • Automate your affiliate business to earn commissions on autopilot • The Free bonus course will take you even more in depth and connect you with thousands of internet marketers from all over the world! Don’t wait any longer! This guide will NOT be at this price forever! Scroll up, download it, read it, and begin making money online with affiliate marketing.

    Bad equity deals are the rule, not the exception. The Slicing Pie Handbook outlines a framework for perfectly fair equity splits for early-stage, bootstrapped startup companies. Based on the dynamic equity model popularized by the book Slicing Pie, a formula in use by entrepreneurs all over the world. The Slicing Pie Handbook will help you determine the right share for people who contribute the things you need to start your company including help, equipment, supplies, rent and even credit. You will learn how to fairly allocate equity when people contribute and how to fairly recover equity when people leave the company.

    So why would a team of killers want to murder him and frame it as a suicide? Finn survives the encounter to discover the killers have left behind a “suicide note” detailing a dark incident from Finn’s past no one could possibly know about.Finn escapes to Musqasset Island, his former home, to seek refuge with an old friend, but soon realizes he has trapped himself on the small island with the very people who want him dead—and with old debts that need to be paid. His only hope for survival, and redemption, is to figure out who’s trying to kill him and why they’ve waited eighteen years to act—no easy task in a raging nor’easter, where communications are shaky and relationships (and Finn’s mental state) are even shakier.

    Vaitheeswaran co-founded India’s first e-commerce company. Yet, years later, when e-commerce was exploding in India—despite enjoying first-mover advantage—Indiaplaza shut down. What went wrong? Lack of funding? Wrong strategies? Or was it ‘something else’?For the first time ever, Vaitheeswaran reveals that it was indeed something else—a set of inexplicable events that destroyed what could have been a profitable business (an extreme rarity among technology start-ups). He bares his extraordinary trials and tribulations while dealing with business failure and the impossible pressures that can threaten entrepreneurs in India. Coming at the back of stories of young start-ups raising billions of dollars in funding and creating unicorns in just a few years, as well as the recent setbacks in the e-commerce industry, Failing to Succeed delves deep into the dark side of starting up and its myriad pitfalls.Filled with interesting anecdotes, tongue-in-cheek observations, amazing customer insights, hard-hitting predictions and behind-the-scenes industry happenings, this book is an extraordinary unravelling of the challenges facing technology start-ups in India. It is a must-read for aspiring entrepreneurs, investors, industry professionals or business school students, and anyone interested in India’s start-up ecosystem.A powerful narration, Failing to Succeed is eventually about finding ways to move forward and succeed despite failures...

    The Customer Service Survival Kit recognizes that the worst customer situations demand more of front-line employees than good intentions and the right attitude. The book includes tangible tips and tricks to help readers discover how to lean into criticism, how to avoid trigger phrases that can make bad situations worse, the secret to helping people feel heard, how to safely deliver bad news, and how to become immune to intimidation--among many other skills.Issues with customers can send even the most seasoned service professionals into red alert. But you don’t need to be a crisis counselor to effectively communicate your way out of a difficult spot. With the help of these valuable insights, lessons, and indispensable problem-solving tools, your organization holds the key to radically improving its customer service reputation.

    Nonsense, says Carl Schramm in Burn the Business Plan, who for a decade headed the most important foundation devoted to entrepreneurship in this country. Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, and Google are just a few of the companies that began without one. Schramm explains that the importance of a business plan is only one of the many misconceptions about starting a company. Another is the myth of the kid genius—that all entrepreneurs are young software prodigies. In fact, the average entrepreneur is thirty-nine years old and has worked in corporate America for at least a decade. Schramm discusses why people with work experience in corporate America have an advantage as entrepreneurs. For one thing, they often have important contacts in the business world who may be customers for their new service or product. For another, they often have the opportunity to strategize with knowledgeable people and get valuable advice. Burn the Business Plan tells stories of successful entrepreneurs in a variety of fields. It shows how knowledge, passion, determination, and a willingness to experiment and innovate are vastly more important than financial skill. This is an important, motivating look at true success that dispels the myths and offers invaluable real-world advice on how to achieve your dreams.

    Willis Johnson, the founder of Copart [CPRT], offers up a personal and inspirational account of this journey to the top including lessons he learned from love, war and building a global, multi-billion dollar business. Even at the pinnacle of success, Willis remained grounded in his family-first values. His stories will inspire and provoke the entrepreneur in everyone to start building their dream.

     If you're serious about starting a YouTube business and want to make money on YouTube, I can show you the way. I've doubled my monthly income by creating a YouTube channel. Thousands of people watch each video and I've built a community that supports and motivates me every day...and that's all in less than two years! Is it Too Late to Start a YouTube Business? I"ve been developing online businesses since 2012 but was late to the game on YouTube. By the time I started my YouTube channel, people were already saying, "YouTube is dead!"; People were saying you couldn"t grow on YouTube anymore and that small channels couldn't win in the YouTube algorithm. I'm living proof you CAN start a YouTube business and be successful. I average $3,500 a month on ads alone (June 2019) and another three- to four-thousand on sponsorships, affiliates and my own products. In fact, I believe we’re just coming into the Age of YouTube with the rollout of 5G and every business owner needs a video presence. A YouTube How-To from Someone that's Been There I've seen the frustration for small YouTubers, trying to compete and get views against the million-subscriber monsters. I know what it’s like to start a channel from nothing. I’ll not only show you how to set up your channel to look professional, I’ll reveal the secrets even some of the biggest YouTube creators don’t know. In this book, you'll learn: How to get YouTube video ideas and hack the most popular videos for viral success (Pg 49) Five steps to building a YouTube channel brand that creates an army of supporters (Pg 69) The easy way to record videos, even if you don't like to be on camera (Pg 85) Five income streams that guarantee you WILL make money on YouTube (Pg 135) Since starting my YouTube channel, I've consulted and helped other video influencers grow their channels for millions of views. I’ve helped them find sponsorships and make enough money to quit their day job to make YouTube a full-time business. I can do the same for you with this book. I can show you the way but YOU have to get started. Scroll back up and click Buy Now to create your YouTube business and start making money on YouTube.

    This revised edition features amended chapters on choosing a business, adding partners, getting funded, and managing the business structure and employees, and also includes help understanding the latest tax and healthcare reform information and legalities.

    Elon Musk is the main person in the journey through a roller-coaster life. His journey includes everything from Winston Churchill’s adventures in British colonies to demolished sports cars. From failed marriages to German scientists escaping from the Red Army. From the oil industry to the Burning Man festival.Elon has been described as the Steve Jobs of heavy industry, as a modern version of the scientist Nikola Tesla, and as the Henry Ford of rockets. There’s a high probability that the British Secret Intelligence Service has a file on him. As the files of other James Bond villains, it describes secret rocket launches in the Pacific Ocean. But Elon doesn’t own a white cat - he’s more of a dog person. Maybe the most comparable persons are the great explorers who voyaged across the globe. They had an entrepreneurial spirit, were a little crazy, tried what no one else had tried, and thought what no one else had thought.If you want to describe the companies Elon has founded with one theme, you can say that they improve the world with the help of innovative technologies. This is exactly what our world needs.Buy it here: https://leanpub.com/theengineer/