Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World

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That means if you’re after the big bucks, you’re probably better off working for a market leader than setting up your own company. Instead of scrolling through your social media news feed, this is a much better way to spend your spare time in my opinion. Lost and Founder isn't as much a "warning" story about the state of the startup industry, but is more of an honest look from a founder who was part of that industry, saw what was happening, made some mistakes, and is happy to own up to them and provide simple advice to people looking to run their own companies.

It covers a lot of the theory stuff that you read in other books, but really does give a ton of insight beyond that too. This serves as an example of an exception to the adage that you want to build and invest in a company, not a product. Using a web site improvement project as an example, he talks about the benefits to taking the time to go out and collect objections from real people who would otherwise use the product. He’s dedicated his professional life to helping people do better marketing through the Whiteboard Friday video series, his blog, and his book, Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World.

I love his transparency, but I tend to think he just sees stuff in a somewhat pessimistic way, most of the time.

After all, how can you get the best possible product out there if you don’t have the know-how to make it? Very well told and candid, and they touch topics that are not often visited in tech/business/startup literature. Most startups take years to see success and only a small percentage of those that make it go on to make their founders millionaires. His grandparents would like you all to know that they remain disappointed about this, nearly twenty years later.Me gustó mucho la transparencia con la que Rand cuenta las historias y principalmente los aprendizajes que sistematiza de cada situación. The main reason I'm not giving this a higher rating is I found Rand's attitude a bit obnoxious and not truthful to his own values.

However, he makes a case for being transparent whenever you can, that the long-term benefits are often well worth it, and the costs of not doing so can be far greater than often recognized. The purpose of Lost and Founder is similar to what a number of other entrepreneurs and Silicon Valley success stories (like DHH) are trying to push, which is that startups don't have to be crazy, massively funded, chaotic and run by tyrants. It's highly addictive to get core insights on personally relevant topics without repetition or triviality. If a member of your team isn’t performing well, try to find a solution like additional mentoring rather than ignoring the issue. Yet, in support of his position, I've seen poorly fitting employees with terrible communication skills nearly destroy teams.At Moz, for example, the CEO’s salary remained lower than that of an average Seattle-based software engineer for five years. The book is an easy read, with occasional humor ranging from cheesy to funny, it is well-written and well laid-out, something I particularly appreciate having just previously read a fairly dry thesis published in a subatomic font size with barely 2-3 paragraphs per page. Most people don't want to talk about those startup stories, but the truth is, they're a lot more common than the Zuckerberg-esque tales of success we so often hear about. Some flywheel-unsticking examples, Yelp paying for references, Yelp giving badges out with links back to Yelp, etc.