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Posted 20 hours ago

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

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The book includes some very valuable perspectives on different kinds of investors and the pros and cons from a founder's perspective. 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. A very small percentage of businesses have been built on the back of the chaotic, messy formula, but a thousandfold more have catapulted into nothingness. As people have proclaimed about it, it's truly a painfully honest, unadulterated and transparent take by Rand on building Moz. Up or down the chain of command, at both early stage startups and mature companies, whether your trajectory is riding high or down in the dumps: this book can help solve your problems, and make you feel less alone for having them.

May have been helpful for author to put lessons he's taking into his next start up in beginning as well, so we could look out for red flags with traditional VC backed approaches from start. The most successful businesses have gone from being headed by a university graduate who’s slogged her way up the corporate ladder for a decade or two, to being the brainchild of a Harvard dropout working out of a garage. I really enjoyed how Rand shared his story, gave his perspective on the difficulties of starting a business, and was completely transparent (my favorite part of the book was when he discussed his personal finances and how much he could have really made if he had a large exit and how he regretted not taking the out). He looks back at decisions he might have made differently in retrospect, which offers a lot of experiential insight.Salaries are often lower than those of employees at bigger companies because they’re determined by outside investors. 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. A startup’s board has access to aggregate salary statistics and won’t hesitate to cap the salaries of senior staff. According to her data, less than 25 percent of early-stage, venture capital-backed companies make any profit at all.

Lots of people wanted to book vacation home rentals online, but there wasn’t a simple, user-friendly service out there. I've always been a big fan of Rand's transparent style and hard working attitude, which has always come across in his writing / speaking, but Lost and Founder really takes this to a new level.And if you've ever wondered if the 'timeless wisdom' you often hear about startups is bullsh*t, here's the proof. In the end he states that the "not so much fun times" happened much more often, which is something I can relate to. You might want silent partners with deep pockets, but you can be sure your investors won’t see it quite like that.

When Rand’s not working, he’s most likely to be in the company of his partner in marriage and (mostly petty) crime, author Geraldine DeRuiter. 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. Again, many will disagree with him and work in environments not suited to this, but he makes his case intelligently.Having followed Rand's "public" journey through Moz I was really interested to see what went on behind his own personal curtain. 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.

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