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

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This book is an honest, generous and useful look at what actually happens when you build a company, including the downs as well as the ups. He delivers a refreshing open and honest account of his start up journey and how he dealt with the pitfalls, pressures and perversities of his own start up. With this attitude, you can't help but want him to win - and in the long-term I have no doubt he will. Came at an opportune time for me while I was navigating and making important choices from my own startup. His grandparents would like you all to know that they remain disappointed about this, nearly twenty years later.

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. He also notes that the benefits to a small startup company with no brand recognition to lose releasing an MVP may outweigh the negatives.I'd put this in the Top 10 list of reads for anyone that's looking to start a company, but more importantly - wants to do it right. However, I think the book rises well above this kind of company biography and offers us thoughtful takes on tactics and strategies to think about, anchored by experience. Lots of people wanted to book vacation home rentals online, but there wasn’t a simple, user-friendly service out there. On their own the value of growth hacks are often more than short-term otherwise and can often even have negative consequences. 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.

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. Covering everything from his unhealthy decisions, his own unstable self and the mistakes he committed while building. partly because the book confirms many of my doubts about popular startup quotes about the fake it until you make it mentality, and about the go big or go home mentality, by giving examples based on the author's startup experience as an ex-CEO, partly because the book is written in a very light and personal tone, so it's very easy and fun to read for me. One example of this is how one of his values he mentions a lot in the book, is being empathetic and looking at things from someone else's point of view. Me gustó mucho la transparencia con la que Rand cuenta las historias y principalmente los aprendizajes que sistematiza de cada situación.At Moz, for example, the CEO’s salary remained lower than that of an average Seattle-based software engineer for five years. From a marketing point-of-view he also says it gets MUCH more difficult to SELL a larger number of products (and why). I, for one, wouldn't have got to the realization of the importance of these elements, had I not experienced the pain resulting from neglecting them - clear values, mission and a clearly defined culture, just to name a few. These may be valuable regardless of where you are in your founder journey - assuming you are on the brink of bringing in external capital or at least consider it.

Here he tells how the company spent so much energy growing new products (and why they did so) that his key product features became an 'also-ran' in three-quarters of the main features. I just got a bit distracted by life along the way but once I dove back into it, I couldn't put it down. The refreshingly down to earth, no bullshit and, even though written by American, non repetitive advice on how to build and run a business. As someone that's been familiar with the story of Moz and Rand for the last few years, Lost and Founder wasn't a surprise. I found this book profoundly helpful and revealing for my work as the founder and CEO of a small but quickly growing online education business.This is not only a startup story but also a practical guide to marketing management based on genuine numbers and real names. but Rand can be very proud of what he's stood for, often against what others more purely business-focused would likely advise against. He talks about the strengths and weaknesses of different investor categories (VC, speciality VC's, angel, debt, equity crowdfunding, debt crowd funding, etc. On top of his incredible candor, the fact that Rand packages this all together with humility and humor is the icing on my favorite (book) cake of the year. Welcome to the startup world, where a good idea and a convincing pitch can kickstart the path to global dominance.