Former Amazon execs on what startups can learn from the "invention machine" of leadership principles and business processes that will outlast Bezos.
Dave Girouard sketches out the story of how Upstart got built, detailing the bumpy starts, lucky breaks and lessons learned along the journey to IPO.
Steve El-Hage picks his head up and shares his biggest lessons as a first-time founder from the 8-year, heads-down journey of building Drop.
In Dan Hockenmaier's and Lenny Rachitsky's experience, founders are often surprised to learn that there are very few routes to scalable new customer acquisition. Here, this duo unpacks the three ways to drive consumer startup growth, offering a detailed framework and set of case studies for accelerating in each lane.
Bob Moore's first brush with life as a founder started in 2008—three days before Lehman Brothers collapsed. Since he cut his teeth as a first-time founder in turbulent times, he's gone on to build two other companies. Here, Moore shares the lessons he's learned along the way, from weathering bear markets and losing out to the competition, to finding (and falling out of) product/market fit.
As he makes the transition from operator to investor, Todd Jackson looks back on his career at Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Dropbox (as well as his own chapter as a startup founder) to offer tactical takeaways and frameworks for company builders and product leaders alike.
Renowned couples therapist Esther Perel now has her sights trained on helping a different kind of pair: co-founders in the startup world. Here, she reveals her playbook for resolving recurring conflicts and communication failures between co-founders by sharing her favorite techniques for getting to the root of disagreements and tactics for navigating fights in the heat of the moment.
Gloria Lin opens up about her pre-founder journey, from founder dating and early conversations to how she prototyped with potential partners to narrow in on a specific idea. Her playbook is one of the most detailed and intentional processes we’ve ever seen — and the set of 50 questions she used to probe compatibility is an essential tool for any entrepreneur looking to team up on a startup idea.
Looker went from a single customer to more than 1700, from a small, scrappy team in Santa Cruz to a 700-person company spanning eight offices around the globe. Now on the heels of its acquisition by Google, co-founders Lloyd Tabb and Ben Porterfield, CEO Frank Bien, and first investor Bill Trenchard come together to fill in the details and dig into the lessons learned from Looker's founding story.
Jeff Wald knows firsthand that behind every startup success story is a stack of seldom discussed defeats. The investor and three-time founder opens up about why leaders should embrace vulnerability, and offers tools for extracting lessons from failure and getting back in the game.
Punit Soni cut his teeth as a product leader at large companies such Google, Motorola and Flipkart before venturing out on his own to found Suki, a healthcare startup. Here, he shares his observations on the differences between the two experiences, noting what surprised him, what he felt unprepared for, and what aspiring entrepreneurs should consider as they look to make a similar leap from big to small.
Superhuman founder and CEO Rahul Vohra walks us through the framework his startup used to make product/market fit more actionable, detailing the survey and four-step process that were key to measuring and optimizing it.
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