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Startup: An Insider's Guide to Launching and Running a Business
Author(s): Kevin Ready (Author)
- Publisher: Apress
- Publication Date: 22 Dec. 2011
- Edition: 1st ed.
- Language: English
- Print length: 160 pages
- ISBN-10: 1430242183
- ISBN-13: 9781430242185
Book Description
Startup: An Insider’s Guide to Launching and Running a Business is for people who are excellent at something product or web development, writing code, marketing or selling anything but who are now toiling for others. Yet they have long had a dream: to take that special skill set and use it, on their own terms, in a startup business. This pattern is romanticized by the media in the form of the “tech entrepreneur” the guy brainstorming with buddies in a garage who ends up selling his startup for millions. But what is the reality behind stories like that one? For that matter, what mental processes, frames of reference, hard knocks, and lessons learned make up the “back story” behind any startup success? This book not only reveals the actual experience of entrepreneurship, but it provides readers with a set of universal entrepreneurial skills and tools they can use to build a business. Author Kevin Readyhas made this journey, and more than once. He earned his MBA Master of Bruise Acquisition through numerous encounters with “situations”, problems, black holes, bad employees, sea monsters, not enough money, and other karate chops to the organizational body. Startup illustrates in detail the lessons he learned the hard way so you don’t have to. Backed up by stories of both his successes and failures, Ready helps readers learn shortcuts to help them do what eight out of 10 entrepreneurs can’t: Build and sustain a successful start-up. Illustrates the entrepreneurial journey from start to finish Helps readers decide or not to start a business Provides dozens of lessons learned and other takeaways budding entrepreneurs can put to use today What you’ll learn What entrepreneurship is, and what it is not. How to get into the skin of an entrepreneur and see the world from that perspective before you quit your job and put everything on the line. Key lessons that have left burn marks and abrasions on the (now very thick)
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About the Author
Kevin Ready loves building things and helping people to build things. Over the last 20 years, he has built, run, consulted for, and advised numerous start-ups and businesses. For him, there is nothing more interesting than understanding business models and the problems that entrepreneurs come up against in their markets. As he says often, It is my work and my play. I never get tired of it. Born into an engineering family, Ready started his first company right out of college. While the venture was a success, he saw the limitations to scaling the business. As the Internet era took shape, he joined the “tech wave” through the late 1990s, starting several online businesses. Years before Facebook, he was a founder of a social networking site with nearly one million users. Later, he and a partner spun off and sold a digital mapping business, then moved on to become an online software and media retail business that merged with a larger rival in 2008. That same year, he became a partner at an online real estate business that was in crisis mode. By applying the lessons presented in this book, he helped turn the business around. Just 13 months later, it was acquired by the newspaper industry. That business where he still works as technical director now brings in millions of dollars of profit per year and touches five million consumers every month.
