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

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After Ben Horowitz's "The Hard Thing About Hard Things", if there's another business book that I'd recommend people, it'd be this.

The guy seems pretty damn sour about the fact that he didn't accept an early acquisition offer for Moz and is broadly shifting blame onto Silicon Valley culture. After all, if the balance sheet looks healthy enough today, why bother investing and planning for tomorrow? If a member of your team isn’t performing well, try to find a solution like additional mentoring rather than ignoring the issue.The reason for that is simple: investors expect revenue from startups and know how to take care of their own interests. Honest, funny and more down to earth and closer to what an average successful start-up journey looks like - his company is a very successful business, but it's not Facebook or Google. It’s still a valuable exercise since it’s these kinds of questions that give you a true sense of your strengths and weaknesses. Very well told and candid, and they touch topics that are not often visited in tech/business/startup literature. Having followed Rand's "public" journey through Moz I was really interested to see what went on behind his own personal curtain.

You may not always personally agree with Rand or have made different decisions, but this book is refreshingly honest. From a marketing point-of-view he also says it gets MUCH more difficult to SELL a larger number of products (and why). 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. Me gustó mucho la transparencia con la que Rand cuenta las historias y principalmente los aprendizajes que sistematiza de cada situación.The book introduced about the reality of what it really means to start your own business (mentally and financially), how VCs work, the maybe false beliefs in pivots and MVPs, what types of growth hacks work well, and more importantly to me, about what is important in building a great team. Reading this book is like spending a day with Rand and having him tell you about his journey with Moz. He gives a specific example of a time the risk of doing so was perceived to be just too great, so it is a balanced commentary.

His honest account destroy many of the start up myths that perhaps cause many start ups to fail in the first place.Fishkin pulls back the curtain on tech startup mythology, exposing the ups and downs of startup life and sharing his hard-won lessons with you. Again, many will disagree with him and work in environments not suited to this, but he makes his case intelligently. No matter what business environment you're in - whether it's a struggling startup or a mature business, this book can help solve your problems. Both Apple and Google state that they ensure that only users who have actually downloaded the app can submit a review.