Book Short: Tales of Two Cities Return Path is basically dual-headquartered in New York City and Broomfield, Colorado, so two recently published books which provide history and insights into the tech industry in those two cities were both of interest to me. Startup Communities: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City, by Brad Feld (book, kindle) came out a few months ago and is part of Brad’s Startup Revolution series which will also include my upcoming book Startup CEO, to be published this fall. In the book, Brad uses the example of the Boulder/Denver area and a few different sectors to demonstrate a blueprint to creating an entrepreneurial ecosystem – the kind that are popping up all over the world…
Archives / June, 2013
Book Short: Deep Dive on Customer Development
Book Short: Deep Dive on Customer Development I continue to be on a tear reading books about startups as I finish and get ready for the publication of Startup CEO (now available for pre-ordering at Amazon). This week’s selection was The Startup Owners Manual: A Step-by-Step Guide for Building a Great Company, by Steve Blank and Bon Dorf. This book is a significantly more detailed version of Blank’s first book, The Four Steps to the Epiphany, which was a revolutionary book a few years ago that helped spawn the Lean Startup movement. And when I say significantly, I mean it! The Startup Owners Manual is 600 pages of really detailed how-to around the first two steps of Blank’s four steps,…
Book Short: Like a Prequel to My Book
Book Short: Like a Prequel to My Book How to Start a Business, by Jason Nazar, CEO of our client Docstoc, is a great and quick (and free) eBook that feels a lot like a prequel to my book Startup CEO: A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Business (original outline here). My book is about scaling a business once you’ve started it. Jason’s book is a really practical guide to starting it in the first place. The thing that’s particularly good about this book is that it’s as much a resource guide as it is a book. At the end of each of its 24 chapters (and within them as well), Jason adds a series of external links to…