Startup Myths and Models
What You Won't Learn in Business School
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- $26.99
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- $26.99
Publisher Description
Budding entrepreneurs face a challenging road. The path is not made any easier by all the clichés they hear about how to make a startup succeed—from platitudes and conventional wisdom to downright contradictions.
This witty and wise guide to the dilemmas of entrepreneurship debunks widespread misconceptions about how the world of startups works and offers hard-earned advice for every step of the journey. Instead of startup myths—legends spun from a fantasy version of Silicon Valley—Rizwan Virk provides startup models—frameworks that help make thoughtful decisions about starting, growing, managing, and selling a business. Rather than dispensing simplistic rules, he mentors readers in the development of a mental toolkit for approaching challenges based on how startup markets evolve in real life.
In snappy prose with savvy pop-culture and real-world examples, Virk recasts entrepreneurship as a grand adventure. He points out the pitfalls that appear along the way and offers insights into how to avoid them, sharing the secrets of founding a startup, raising money, hiring and firing, when to enter a market and when to exit, and how to value a company.
Virk combines lessons learned the hard way during his twenty-five years of founding, investing in, and advising startups with reflections from well-known venture capitalists and experts. His candid advice makes Startup Myths and Models an ideal guide for those readers just embarking on the startup life and those looking for their next adventure.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Entrepreneur and venture capitalist Virk (The Simulation Hypothesis) thorougly debunks my-way-or-the-highway thinking about start-ups in this strong offering aimed at MBAs. Arguing that business schools are better at preparing students to work for established companies than to start their own, he presents his advice in the spirit of an alternative business school curriculum. MBAs often flounder, Virk argues, when they need to understand start-up market life cycles or know how to approach strategic decisions, and are left relying on the outdated clich s they learned in school. He destroys myths about being first to market, raising money only from certain recognized venture capitalists, hiring big names, and allocating time to investors. Instead, he points out that the VC field is no longer small and insular, that it's better to hire people attuned to the specific culture of the start-up, and plenty of time should be spent on working on the pitch. Moreover, he advises, business school grads have to understand that there are no shortcuts to success. This cogent, far-thinking explanation of how start-ups work will be invaluable for any aspiring founders stymied by traditional business wisdom.
