The Hard Thing About Hard Things

The Hard Thing About Hard Things PDF Author: Ben Horowitz
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0062273213
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description
Ben Horowitz, cofounder of Andreessen Horowitz and one of Silicon Valley's most respected and experienced entrepreneurs, offers essential advice on building and running a startup—practical wisdom for managing the toughest problems business school doesn’t cover, based on his popular ben’s blog. While many people talk about how great it is to start a business, very few are honest about how difficult it is to run one. Ben Horowitz analyzes the problems that confront leaders every day, sharing the insights he’s gained developing, managing, selling, buying, investing in, and supervising technology companies. A lifelong rap fanatic, he amplifies business lessons with lyrics from his favorite songs, telling it straight about everything from firing friends to poaching competitors, cultivating and sustaining a CEO mentality to knowing the right time to cash in. Filled with his trademark humor and straight talk, The Hard Thing About Hard Things is invaluable for veteran entrepreneurs as well as those aspiring to their own new ventures, drawing from Horowitz's personal and often humbling experiences.

The Hard Thing About Hard Things

The Hard Thing About Hard Things PDF Author: Ben Horowitz
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0062273213
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 232

Get Book

Book Description
Ben Horowitz, cofounder of Andreessen Horowitz and one of Silicon Valley's most respected and experienced entrepreneurs, offers essential advice on building and running a startup—practical wisdom for managing the toughest problems business school doesn’t cover, based on his popular ben’s blog. While many people talk about how great it is to start a business, very few are honest about how difficult it is to run one. Ben Horowitz analyzes the problems that confront leaders every day, sharing the insights he’s gained developing, managing, selling, buying, investing in, and supervising technology companies. A lifelong rap fanatic, he amplifies business lessons with lyrics from his favorite songs, telling it straight about everything from firing friends to poaching competitors, cultivating and sustaining a CEO mentality to knowing the right time to cash in. Filled with his trademark humor and straight talk, The Hard Thing About Hard Things is invaluable for veteran entrepreneurs as well as those aspiring to their own new ventures, drawing from Horowitz's personal and often humbling experiences.

What You Do Is Who You Are

What You Do Is Who You Are PDF Author: Ben Horowitz
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 006287134X
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
Ben Horowitz, a leading venture capitalist, modern management expert, and New York Times bestselling author, combines lessons both from history and from modern organizational practice with practical and often surprising advice to help executives build cultures that can weather both good and bad times. Ben Horowitz has long been fascinated by history, and particularly by how people behave differently than you’d expect. The time and circumstances in which they were raised often shapes them—yet a few leaders have managed to shape their times. In What You Do Is Who You Are, he turns his attention to a question crucial to every organization: how do you create and sustain the culture you want? To Horowitz, culture is how a company makes decisions. It is the set of assumptions employees use to resolve everyday problems: should I stay at the Red Roof Inn, or the Four Seasons? Should we discuss the color of this product for five minutes or thirty hours? If culture is not purposeful, it will be an accident or a mistake. What You Do Is Who You Are explains how to make your culture purposeful by spotlighting four models of leadership and culture-building—the leader of the only successful slave revolt, Haiti’s Toussaint Louverture; the Samurai, who ruled Japan for seven hundred years and shaped modern Japanese culture; Genghis Khan, who built the world’s largest empire; and Shaka Senghor, a man convicted of murder who ran the most formidable prison gang in the yard and ultimately transformed prison culture. Horowitz connects these leadership examples to modern case-studies, including how Louverture’s cultural techniques were applied (or should have been) by Reed Hastings at Netflix, Travis Kalanick at Uber, and Hillary Clinton, and how Genghis Khan’s vision of cultural inclusiveness has parallels in the work of Don Thompson, the first African-American CEO of McDonalds, and of Maggie Wilderotter, the CEO who led Frontier Communications. Horowitz then offers guidance to help any company understand its own strategy and build a successful culture. What You Do Is Who You Are is a journey through culture, from ancient to modern. Along the way, it answers a question fundamental to any organization: who are we? How do people talk about us when we’re not around? How do we treat our customers? Are we there for people in a pinch? Can we be trusted? Who you are is not the values you list on the wall. It’s not what you say in company-wide meeting. It’s not your marketing campaign. It’s not even what you believe. Who you are is what you do. This book aims to help you do the things you need to become the kind of leader you want to be—and others want to follow.

The Great Mental Models, Volume 1

The Great Mental Models, Volume 1 PDF Author: Shane Parrish
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0593719972
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Discover the essential thinking tools you’ve been missing with The Great Mental Models series by Shane Parrish, New York Times bestselling author and the mind behind the acclaimed Farnam Street blog and “The Knowledge Project” podcast. This first book in the series is your guide to learning the crucial thinking tools nobody ever taught you. Time and time again, great thinkers such as Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett have credited their success to mental models–representations of how something works that can scale onto other fields. Mastering a small number of mental models enables you to rapidly grasp new information, identify patterns others miss, and avoid the common mistakes that hold people back. The Great Mental Models: Volume 1, General Thinking Concepts shows you how making a few tiny changes in the way you think can deliver big results. Drawing on examples from history, business, art, and science, this book details nine of the most versatile, all-purpose mental models you can use right away to improve your decision making and productivity. This book will teach you how to: Avoid blind spots when looking at problems. Find non-obvious solutions. Anticipate and achieve desired outcomes. Play to your strengths, avoid your weaknesses, … and more. The Great Mental Models series demystifies once elusive concepts and illuminates rich knowledge that traditional education overlooks. This series is the most comprehensive and accessible guide on using mental models to better understand our world, solve problems, and gain an advantage.

The Seventh Sense

The Seventh Sense PDF Author: Joshua Cooper Ramo
Publisher: Little, Brown
ISBN: 0316285048
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER WASHINGTON POST BESTSELLER Winner of the getAbstract 17th International Book Award "The Seventh Sense is a concept every businessman, diplomat, or student should aspire to master--a powerful idea, backed by stories and figures that will be impossible to forget." -- Walter Isaacson, author of Steve Jobs and Leonardo da Vinci Endless terror. Refugee waves. An unfixable global economy. Surprising election results. New billion-dollar fortunes. Miracle medical advances. What if they were all connected? What if you could understand why? The Seventh Sense is the story of what all of today's successful figures see and feel: the forces that are invisible to most of us but explain everything from explosive technological change to uneasy political ripples. The secret to power now is understanding our new age of networks. Not merely the Internet, but also webs of trade, finance, and even DNA. Based on his years of advising generals, CEOs, and politicians, Ramo takes us into the opaque heart of our world's rapidly connected systems and teaches us what the losers are not yet seeing--and what the victors of this age already know.

Do Hard Things

Do Hard Things PDF Author: Alex Harris
Publisher: Multnomah
ISBN: 1601428294
Category : Young Adult Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
ECPA BESTSELLER • Discover a movement of Christian young people who are rebelling against the low expectations of their culture by choosing to “do hard things” for the glory of God. Foreword by Chuck Norris • “One of the most life-changing, family-changing, church-changing, and culture-changing books of this generation.”—Randy Alcorn, bestselling author of Heaven Combating the idea of adolescence as a vacation from responsibility, Alex and Brett Harris weave together biblical insights, history, and modern examples to redefine the teen years as the launching pad of life and map a clear trajectory for long-term fulfillment and eternal impact. Written by teens for teens, Do Hard Things is packed with humorous personal anecdotes, practical examples, and stories of real-life rebelutionaries in action. This rallying cry from the heart of revolution already in progress challenges you to lay claim to a brighter future, starting today. Now featuring a conversation guide, 100 real-life examples of hard things tackled by other young people, and stories of young men and women who have taken the book’s charge to heart, Do Hard Things will inspire a new generation of rebelutionaries.

Hacking the Startup Investor Pitch

Hacking the Startup Investor Pitch PDF Author: Francisco Souza Homem De Mello
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780990457503
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 156

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Book Description
Sequoia Capital is one of the most famous venture capital funds in the world, and when they discuss start-up pitches, they know what they're talking about. This manual breaks down how to pitch investors according to what Sequoia Capital wants to see and hear from entrepreneurs. It serves as your essential companion to the challenging process of conceiving and translating a solid business plan into an effective pitch. Packed with references to Sequoia's website and other industry sources, such as well-known venture capitalist blogs, TED talks, Quora, and widely used books, this manual will arm you with a vast knowledge base on everything start-up. Using Sequoia Capital's framework will develop your idea to the point where it just might sell itself. So follow these simple guidelines, think hard about your business, and understand all of the angles that will help you raise funds and find the success you've worked so hard to achieve.

Burn Rate

Burn Rate PDF Author: Andy Dunn
Publisher: Currency
ISBN: 0593238281
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
In this “gripping” (TechCrunch), “eye-opening” (Gayle King, Oprah Daily) memoir of mental illness and entrepreneurship, the co-founder of the menswear startup Bonobos opens up about the struggle with bipolar disorder that nearly cost him everything. “Arrestingly candid . . . the most powerful book I’ve read on manic depression since An Unquiet Mind.”—Adam Grant, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Think Again and host of WorkLife ONE OF THE MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF 2022—Forbes At twenty-eight, fresh from Stanford’s MBA program and steeped in the move-fast-and-break-things ethos of Silicon Valley, Andy Dunn was on top of the world. He was building a new kind of startup—a digitally native, direct-to-consumer brand—out of his Manhattan apartment. Bonobos was a new-school approach to selling an old-school product: men’s pants. Against all odds, business was booming. Hustling to scale the fledgling venture, Dunn raised tens of millions of dollars while boundaries between work and life evaporated. As he struggled to keep the startup afloat, Dunn was haunted by a ghost: a diagnosis of bipolar disorder he received after a frightening manic episode in college, one that had punctured the idyllic veneer of his midwestern upbringing. He had understood his diagnosis as an unspeakable shame that—according to the taciturn codes of his fraternity, the business world, and even his family—should be locked away. As Dunn’s business began to take off, however, some of the very traits that powered his success as a founder—relentless drive, confidence bordering on hubris, and ambition verging on delusion—were now threatening to undo him. A collision course was set in motion, and it would culminate in a night of mayhem—one poised to unravel all that he had built. Burn Rate is an unconventional entrepreneurial memoir, a parable for the twenty-first-century economy, and a revelatory look at the prevalence of mental illness in the startup community. With intimate prose, Andy Dunn fearlessly shines a light on the dark side of success and challenges us all to take part in the deepening conversation around creativity, performance, and disorder.

Start Here

Start Here PDF Author: Alex Harris
Publisher: Multnomah
ISBN: 1601422709
Category : Young Adult Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 178

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Book Description
You want to do hard things. But you don’t know where to start. You are changing the world around you. But you are tired and burned out. You feel called to do the extraordinary for God. But you feel stuck in the ordinary. Do Hard Things inspired thousands of young people around the world to make the most of the teen years. Now Alex and Brett Harris are back and ready to tackle the questions that Do Hard Things inspired: How do I get started? What do I do when I get discouraged? What’s the best way to inspire others? Filled with stories and insights from Alex, Brett, and other real-life rebelutionaries, Start Here is a powerful and practical guide to doing hard things, right where you are. Are you ready to take the next step and blast past mediocrity for the glory of God? START HERE.

Dis!Organize

Dis!Organize PDF Author: Jonathan ANTHONY
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 115

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Book Description
99 simple activities, concepts, encouragements, ideas, tips and tricks that an individual can use (without management approval!) to improve their organization. The original definition of entrepreneurship is "creative destruction." (Joseph Schumpeter, 1942). Famed management consultant Peter Drucker said, "the entrepreneur upsets and disorganizes." This is important to hold in mind when you consider the future of work and the emergent version of your workflows, your culture and your company. The intrapreneur acts in exactly the same way inside the organization as the entrepreneur does out in the marketplace. They seek to move out in all directions, beyond their job title, to change, upgrade, and energize everything, where they can. They do so through experimentation, placing small bets, working collaboratively through networks, with courage and curiosity to the fore. The intrapreneur disorganizes their company. To do so is exciting and fun, but also challenging and tiring. Disorganizers need encouragement, direction, concepts and activities. And this book is here to help: 99 simple tips, tricks, ideas and encouragements that will help you make a bigger difference at work. Guaranteed! Some of what you will read about: Creative destruction - creative tension - working out loud - edge work - manifestos - curiosity and focus - FUQs - Sturgeon's Law - selling - X is the new Y - challenge and change - seekers - failing forward - remixing - shticks - power poses - antifragility - 80:20 - Kryptonite - modern art - battles - kith and kin - ambiguity - insights - blowing shit up - job titles and descriptions - Rocky - learning and unlearning - emergence - coffee - working backwards - serendipity - design thinking - improv - efficiency - meandering - small pieces, loosely joined - sticky notes - respect - thinking advantage - storytelling - asking questions - trust - hustle & flow - studio 20 - the flâneur - disagreeable givers - hiring advice - echo chambers - getting to "Yes!" - connecting everything - a peasant's heart - smashing the like button - having fun - This Much We Know. Let's go disorganize!

The Lean Startup

The Lean Startup PDF Author: Eric Ries
Publisher: Crown Currency
ISBN: 0307887898
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
Most startups fail. But many of those failures are preventable. The Lean Startup is a new approach being adopted across the globe, changing the way companies are built and new products are launched. Eric Ries defines a startup as an organization dedicated to creating something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty. This is just as true for one person in a garage or a group of seasoned professionals in a Fortune 500 boardroom. What they have in common is a mission to penetrate that fog of uncertainty to discover a successful path to a sustainable business. The Lean Startup approach fosters companies that are both more capital efficient and that leverage human creativity more effectively. Inspired by lessons from lean manufacturing, it relies on “validated learning,” rapid scientific experimentation, as well as a number of counter-intuitive practices that shorten product development cycles, measure actual progress without resorting to vanity metrics, and learn what customers really want. It enables a company to shift directions with agility, altering plans inch by inch, minute by minute. Rather than wasting time creating elaborate business plans, The Lean Startup offers entrepreneurs—in companies of all sizes—a way to test their vision continuously, to adapt and adjust before it’s too late. Ries provides a scientific approach to creating and managing successful startups in a age when companies need to innovate more than ever.