about this book

Over the course of all my startup experiences, I found that there is an incredible amount to know. Perhaps now—but certainly not when I began my run—the entrepreneurial business schools cover some of this. I think we have all found that although what we learn in school is super helpful and useful, it is nothing like what we learn once we get out in the real world. Besides, when someone gets an idea, and they strongly believe it has the potential to be the basis of a new company, this person may not have gone to business school yet or might never want to. But I did not want to write another textbook or even a “Startups for Dummies” type of book. I had really good luck with my memoir Who Says I Can’t about personal challenges I had in my life; in that book, I related to readers things I learned the hard way that I hoped could help them short-circuit the intermediate steps and get right to the result they needed. I wanted to do the same thing here—but instead of the challenges of dealing with being an amputee cancer survivor, these are the challenges of dealing with being a startup founder and/or CEO.

I decided to write this book as my “business life memoir.” That means much of it is in the informal first-person style of storytelling because that is precisely what I am doing here—telling stories about what happened to me in certain startup situations that are common and may provide some guidance for those who follow me and read this book. I call them anecdotes rather than chapters because I had three goals for each one: (1) They stand alone, so you can read them in any order you like, and you can refer back to one when you need that information; (2) they are short—usually six to eight pages; and (3) each is focused on a single very narrow topic or lesson. There is a bit of didactic information in many anecdotes, so to keep the story-telling flow uninterrupted, I put the didactic information in clearly delineated callouts. Each anecdote also ends with a paragraph called a moral that sums up the important learning contained in that anecdote. I believe there may be times when someone skims the book, only reading the summary bullets at the beginning, the callouts, and the morals, and that is a fine way to consume the information.

Because all of my startups were technology companies, the experiences in these anecdotes are from technology companies. I do not believe this means the book is only for someone who is or might become a founder or CEO of a tech startup. I know lots of non-technology startups that go through all the same types of formation process, financing, building culture, people issues, board dynamics, and so on. But I do not think this book covers the issues of starting a grocery store, a franchise business, a family business, or lots of other types of startups.

In terms of the knowledge required to understand this book, my goal is not to require any (because I didn’t have any when I decided to do my first startup). Having said that, you do need to be interested in starting a new business, either as its leader or as part of the founding team—or perhaps you can do this as an employee of a startup company while you learn what a startup feels like on the way to doing your own at some time in the future. The reader ideally is a current or future founder or a senior person working at a startup. There are anecdotes about raising money, financing terms, and things like cash burn rate, but none of these are handled at the level a CFO would require. Instead, I assume you are not the CFO (well, if you are the CFO, your interest in this book is for a future role where you are no longer the CFO) but that you have an accountant, controller, or even a CFO who does the heavy lifting; you have to know just enough on these topics to make the critical decisions and to know what is important and what can wait until later.

Manning’s commitment to our readers is to provide a venue where a meaningful dialogue between individual readers and between readers and the author can take place. It is not a commitment to any specific amount of participation on the part of the author, whose contribution to the forum remains voluntary (and unpaid). We suggest you try asking the author some challenging questions lest his interest stray! The forum and the archives of previous discussions will be accessible from the publisher’s website as long as the book is in print.