Tag Archives: Start-up

A Library of Books about Startups, High-Tech, Innovation

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I began this blog in July 2007, so more than 15 years ago. I began my professional activity around startups in September 1997, so more than 25 years ago. So many adventures, so many great moments. And so much book reading! I revisited these pages and did an exhaustive list of the books I could remember reading. Most have a post somewhere in the blog.

I created a little artificially 6 categories:
– About Google and Apple
– Entrepreneurs’ Biographies
– Startup Stories and Analyses
– Ecosystems and Innovation
– Venture Capital
– How to
– Fictions / Thrillers (or close)

Here they are… Enjoy (maybe!)

About Google and Apple

  • Goomics, Google’s corporate culture revealed through internal comics, Manu Cornet
  • In the Plex, How Google Thinks, Works and Shapes Our Lives, Stephen Levy
  • How Google Works, Eric Schmidt, Jonathan Rosenberg
  • Dogfight, How Apple and Google Went to War and Started a Revolution, Fred Vogelstein
  • I’M Feeling Lucky, Falling On My Feet in Silicon Valley, Douglas Edwards
  • The Apple Revolution, Steve Jobs, the Counter Culture and How the Crazy Ones Took Over the World, Luke Dormehl
  • Work Rules! Insights from inside Google that will transform how you live and lead, Laszlo Bock
  • The Google Story, David Vise
  • Return to the Little Kingdom, How Apple and Steve Jobs Changed the World, Michael Moritz

Biographies

  • Elon Musk, Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for A Fantastic Future, Ashlee Vance
  • Steve Jobs, La vie d’un génie, Walter Isaacson
  • Inside Steve’s Brain, Leander Kahney
  • The Man Behind the Microchip, Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley, Leslie Berlin

Startups Stories / Analyses

  • Trillion Dollar Coach, The Leadership Playbook of Silicon Valley’s Bill Campbell, Eric Schmidt, Jonathan Rosenberg, and Alan Eagle
  • L’entrepreneuriat en action, Ou comment de jeunes ingénieurs créent des entreprises innovantes, Philippe Mustar
  • Chercheurs et entrepreneurs : c’est possible ! Belles histoires du numérique à la française, Laurent Kott, Antoine Petit
  • Bad Blood, Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup, John Carreyrou
  • Bienvenue dans le Nouveau Monde, Comment j’ai survécu à la coolitude des startups, Mathilde Ramadier
  • Les start-up expliquées à ma fille, L’entrepreneuriat vu de l’intérieur, Guillene Ribière
  • Startup, Arrêtons la mascarade, Contribuer vraiment à l’économie de demain, Nicolas Menet, Benjamin Zimmer
  • No Exit, Struggling to Survive a Modern Gold Rush, Gideon Lewis-Kraus
  • The Hard Thing About Hard Things, Building a Business When There are no Easy Answers, Ben Horowitz
  • Zero to One, Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future, Peter Thiel, Blake Masters
  • Startupland, How Three Guys Risked Everything to Turn an Idea into a Global Business, Mikkel Svane, Carlye Adler
  • European Founders at Work, Pedro Gairifo Santos
  • Founders at Work, Stories of Startups’ Early Days, Jessica Livingston
  • The Monk and the Riddle, The Education of a Silicon Valley Entrepreneur, Randy Komisar
  • Once you’re lucky, Twice you’re good, The Rebirth of Silicon Valley and the Rise of Web, Sarah Lacy
  • They Made It! Angelika Blendstrup
  • Betting It All, The Entrepreneurs of Technology, Michael Malone,
  • In the Company of Giants, Candid Conversations With the Visionaries of the Digital World, Rama Dev Jager, Rafael Ortiz
  • Startup, A Silicon Valley Adventure, Jerry Kaplan

Ecosystems and Innovation

  • From the Basement to the Dome, How MIT’s Unique Culture Created a Thriving Entrepreneurial Community, Jean-Jacques Degroof
  • The Microchip Revolution: A brief history, Luc O. Bauer, E. Marshall Wilder
  • The Code, Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America, Margaret O’Mara
  • Loonshots or how to nurture crazy ideas, Safi Bahcall
  • Troublemakers, How Generation of Silicon Valley Upstarts Invented the Future, Leslie Berlin
  • The Rainforest, The Secret to Building the Next Silicon Valley, Victor W. Hwang, Greg Horowitt
  • The Innovators, How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution, Walter Isaacson
  • The Entrepreneurial State, Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths, Mariana Mazzucato
  • Genentech, The Beginnings of Biotech, Sally Smith Hughes
  • Science Lessons, What the Business of Biotech Taught Me About Management, Gordon Binder
  • Le prochain Google sera Suisse (à 10 conditions), Fathi Derder
  • Prophet of Innovation, Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction, Thomas McCraw
  • Start-up Nation, The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle, Dan Senor, Saul Singer
  • Boulevard of Broken Dreams, Why Public Efforts to Boost Entrepreneurship and Venture Capital Have Failed–and What to Do About It, Josh Lerner
  • The Innovation Illusion, How So Little is Created by So Many Working So Hard, Fredrik Erixon, Bjorn Weige
  • Un paléoanthropologue dans l’entreprise, S’adapter et innover pour survivre, Pascal Picq
  • Against Intellectual Monopoly, Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine
  • The New Argonauts, Regional Advantage in a Global Economy, AnnaLee Saxenian
  • Regional Advantage, Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128, AnnaLee Saxenian
  • Silicon Valley Fever, Growth of High Technology Culture, Everett M. Rogers, Judith K. Larsen
  • Creating the Cold War University, The Transformation of Stanford, Rebecca S. Lowen
  • Nurturing Science-based Ventures, An International Case Perspective, Ralf Seifert, Benoït Leleux, Christopher Tucci
  • Entrepreneurship and Innovation, Peter F. Drucker
  • The Gorilla Game, Picking Winners in High Technology, Geoffrey Moore
  • Inside the Tornado, Strategies for Developing, Leveraging, and Surviving Hypergrowth Markets, Geoffrey Moore
  • Crossing the Chasm, Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers, Geoffrey Moore
  • The Founder’s Dilemmas, Anticipating and Avoiding the Pitfalls That Can Sink a Startup, Noam Wasserman
  • The Innovators Dilemma, When New Technologies Cause Good Firms To Fail, Clayton M. Christensen
  • Accidental Empires, How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition, and Still Can’t Get a Date, Robert X. Cringley

Venture Capital

  • The Power Law, Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future, Sebastian Mallaby
  • The Masters of Private Equity and Venture Capital, Management Lessons from the Pioneers of Private Investing, Robert A. Finkel
  • The Startup Game, Inside the Partnership between Venture Capitalists and Entrepreneurs, William H. Draper III
  • Creative Capital, Georges Doriot and the Birth of Venture Capital, Spencer Ante
  • The Business of Venture Capital, Insights from Leading Practitioners on the Art of Raising a Fund, Deal Structuring, Value Creation, and Exit Strategies, Mahendra Ramsinghani
  • The New Venturers, Inside the High-Stakes World of Venture Capital, John Wilson

 

How To

  • The Mom Test, How to talk to customers & learn if your business is a good idea when everyone is lying to you, Rob Fitzpatrick
  • Straight Talk for Startups, 100 Insider Rules for Beating the Odds, Randy Komisar, Jantoon Reigersman
  • Measure What Matters, OKRs, The Simple Idea that Drives 10x Growth, John Doerr,
  • The start-up of You, Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career, Reid Hoffman
  • Don’t f**k it up, How Founders and Their Successors Can Avoid the Clichés That Inhibit Growth, Les Trachtman
  • How To Start a Business That Doesn’t Suck (and will actually turn a profit), Michael Clarke
  • The Four Steps to the Epiphany, Successful Strategies for Products That Win, Steve Blank (NB: the book has been updated and renamed as The Startup Owner’s Manual, The Step-by-Step Guide for Building a Great Company, Steve Blank, Bob Dorf)
  • The Lean Startup, How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses, Eric Ries
  • Business Model Generation, Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur
  • Slicing Pie, Funding Your Company Without Funds, Mike Moyer
  • Getting to Plan B, Breaking Through to a Better Business Model, John Mullins, Randy Komisar
  • Winning Opportunities, Proven Tools for Converting Your Projects into Success (without a Business Plan), Raphael Cohen
  • Start-up, (anti-)bible à l’usage des fous et des futurs entrepreneurs, Bruno Martinaud
  • The Art of the Start, GuyKawasaki

 

Fiction / Thrillers or close

  • Drop by Drop, Keith Raffel
  • Smasher, a Silicon Valley Mystery, Keith Raffel
  • dead, a Silicon Valley Mystery, Keith Raffel
  • The Ultimate Cure, Peter Harboe-Schmidt
  • The First $20 Million Is Always The Hardest, Po Bronson
  • The Nudist on the Late Shift, And Other True Tales of Silicon Valley, Po Bronson

Guy Kawasaki – Make Meaning in Your Company

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This morning I was participating to a workshop when a debate started about why making a startup. The best answer I know is from Guy kawasaki:


A presentation by Guy Kawasaki for the Stanford Technology Ventures Program Educators Corner in the School of Engineering at Stanford University. October 20, 2004.

Guy Kawasaki is among other things the author of a great book, the Art of Start

An example of his greate advice below is how to make a 10-slide great presentation of a company pitch:
Art of Start – Kawasaki

Equity sharing in startups – a presentation

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A few days ago, I had the opportunity to present a video conference on equity sharing in a startup, between founders, investors and employees. I’ve done it many times in the last few years like the one Slideshare here, but I had never recorded it. It’s now done:

As archive, the Slideshare presentation…

The other links

600 capitalisation tables: https://www.startup-book.com/2020/04/06/updated-data-in-equity-of-600-former-startups/

Universities and equity ownership in startups : https://www.startup-book.com/2013/11/05/how-much-equity-universities-take-in-start-ups-from-ip-licensing/

Startups and titles : https://www.startup-book.com/2019/12/11/titles-in-start-ups/

Penny Schiffer’s Tweet : https://twitter.com/PennySchiffer/status/718323492006076417

Slicing pie : https://slicingpie.com/

Pie calculator : https://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/fd0n/35%20Founders%27%20Pie%20Calculator.htm

Two additional lists of references I just found thanks to Penny Schiffer: Useful resources for (present and future) investment analysts — Part 1 and Part 2

Whats’s a startup? (part 4)

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I used today again Steve Blank’s marvellous definition of a startup that I had used last time in 2013 here.

You can listen to him giving it in Helsinki in 2011 at Aalto University

or through his Mooc here:

It’s obvious once you heard it and took so many years to be designed!

In these uncertain times of Coronavirus, I can only advise you to relax. One way for me was tonight through Recomposed by Max Richter – Vivaldi’s Four Seasons.

Stanford and Startups

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Stanford is in the top2 universities with MIT for high-tech entrepreneurship. There is not much doubt about such statement. For the last ten years, I have been studying the impact of this university which has grown in the middle of Silicon Valley. After one book and a few research papers, here is a kind of concluding work.

A little less than 10 years ago, I discovered the Wellspring of Innovation, a website from Stanford University listing about 6’000 companies and founders. I used that list in addition from data I had obtained from OTL, the Stanford office of technology licensing as well as some personal data I had compiled over years. The report Startups and Stanford University with subtitle “an analysis of the entrepreneurial activity of the Stanford community over 50 years”, is the result of about 10 years of research. Of course, I did not work on it every day, but it has been a patient work which helped me analyze more than 5’000 start-ups and entrepreneurs. There is nearly not storytelling but a lot of tables and figures. I deliberately decided not to draw many conclusions as each reader might prefer one piece to another. The few people I contacted before publishing it here twitted about it with different reactions. For example:

Katharine Ku, head of OTL has mentioned another report when I mentioned mine to her: Stanford’s Univenture Secret Sauce – Embracing Risk, Ambiguity and Collaboration. Another evidence of the entrepreneurial culture of that unique place! I must thank Ms Ku here again for the data I could access thanks to her!

This report is not a real conclusion. There is still a lot to study about high-tech entrepreneurship around Stanford. With this data only. And with more recent one probably too. And I will conclude here with the last sentence of the report: “How will it develop in the future is obviously impossible to predict Therefore a revisited analysis of the situation in a decade or so should be very intersting.”

An analysis of EPFL’s Spin-offs and its Entrepreneurial Ecosystem

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I usually do not mix my EPFL activity and my blog activity. This is one of the rare exceptions. At EPFL’s startup unit, we just published a short report describing EPFL spin-offs. Here is a short link. By the way you can also visit the pages about EPFL’s support to entrepreneurship.

The report gives data about value creation through fund raising and job creation and also about a known phenomenon, the importance of migrants for entrepreneurship. I am aware that value creation is a sensitive topic, all the more that in Europe venture capital has not proven a real correlation with value. It may even have destroyed more value than created any…

“How I survived the coolitude of startups” by Mathilde Ramadier

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The start-up world is so fashionable that a few clouds should gather above it. The thing is not new. In the past, I mentioned Silicon Valley Fever. There was also the recent Disrupted – My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble by Dan Lyons But, more worrying, the criticisms are more numerous and more serious. For example, the article The evidence is piling up – Silicon Valley is being destroyed about the Juicero and Theranos scandals. Without forgetting the more fundamental transhumanist / apolitical fever …

Here is a new book, fun and serious…In French: Bienvenue dans le nouveau monde Comment j’ai survécu à la coolitude des startups (Welcome in the new world – How I survived the coolitude of startups) by Mathilde Ramadier. Mockery uses language. The “novlangue”, the “coolitude”. But this hides more unacceptable behaviors. Discounted wages, ridiculous working conditions. All this in the tone of humor, or more of chilling irony. Excessive? A little bit in the sense that not all start-ups act as the author describes, but revealing a reality that should not be underestimated … Here are some examples:

“We’re a start-up, so please bring your own laptop.” [Page 24]

“During the end-of-test interview, my CEO tells me that instead of the 1500 euros agreed upon at the start, I will finally be hired with a payroll three times lower. [… He] knows very well what he does and delivers a perfectly honed speech to sweep away my disappointment. […] So I refused a job paid 500 euros because I lacked motivation, belief and ambition. I did not deserve to participate in the adventure.” [Page 26-7] The CEO had previously added that “if I want to make a career, I will have to accept to bend down and give everything. Just like in “the Voice’.”

“But doen’t disruption also mean an acceleration imposed too suddenly on society? […] The sharing economy allows the connection of a client who has a need and a service provider (let’s say a small hand that needs money.)” [Page 28] And then she quotes Bernard Stiegler. How right she is!

“But this tendency, pushed to the extreme, has become the watchword of a despotic regime which does not admit ‘the weakest’, that is to say the refractory, and which relegates them to the bottom of the social pyramid. Because if everyone can, in theory, become a superstar, there is little talk of those for whom “siliconization” does not embody a dream… nor a sinecure.” [Page 36]

“As Orwell has taught us, the manipulation of language is the starting point of any totalitarian discourse. […] The disappearance of the ability to think for oneself can even be the core competence of a company.” [Pages 41-2]

“In many cases, these are bullshit jobs, these new ‘jobs’ in the service sector that pride themselves abotu contributing to the rational organization of the company, but which cannot be described easily because even the first concerned fail to explain clearly what they do neither can they find a real utility. […] Wages were evidently free from all egalitarian considerations and remained confidential.” [Pages 44-5]

“I’ve seen people say ‘never again’ and had to start over again. They had promised that they would not step back behind the counter of a bar after their first internships and still return, for lack of finding a job in their branch. I have seen young women and young men becoming financially dependent on their partner, sublet their car or room to live in their living room (since all aspects of life are now marketable), and knocking at the door of their parents at thirty. Pregnant women put money aside because their maternity leave did not allow them to live decently. These are the people I saw accept a precarious contract with a ridiculous paycheck in a startup because they were promised many things, and offered ‘evolution prospects’ if they agreed to ‘give everything’.” [Page 70]

The author also has interesting definitions. “One of the definitions of start-up might be this: it is a young company with high potential but still not profitable. The objective, from the beginning, is therefore rapid growth.” (Page 94) Mathilde Ramadier even has her own glossary (pages 151-5), often funny… For example:
Disruption: super-powerful innovation that breaks the codes of a whole market. An earthquake, the disruption puts everything flat and does not generally worry about the consequences of the chaos it induces.
Entrepreneur: courageous person with rare talent, who has an idea of genius before everyone, is working to achieve it and succeeds – or not.
Innovation: introduction of a new product or process on the market. A startup is necessarily innovative (for those who launch it anyway).

“During these four years in the startups, I was trapped in an infernal loop, tossed from one absurdity to another, finding here and there the same folklore … Paradoxically, we push the rational to the irrational, originality to conformism, thirst for the new to regression […] The solutions that the startupsphere promises us – to the crisis, unemployment, boredom, repetition of the same and even disuse, old age and ugliness, etc. – are also a deception: one can not pretend to live in the new world before having truly built it.” [Page 143]

The Paris Innovation Review about Start-ups

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Once again the Paris Innovation Review (formerly ParisTech Review) publishes a series of excellent articles, this time dedicated to start-ups. These are:
– Companies like others? A sociological survey of French startup. http://parisinnovationreview.com/2017/03/21/sociological-survey-french-startups/
– Startups Employees Perks & Incentives – 1 – Wages. http://parisinnovationreview.com/2017/03/23/startups-employees-perks-incentives-1-wages/
– Startups Employees Perks & Incentives – 2 – Equity. http://parisinnovationreview.com/2017/03/23/startups-employees-perks-incentives-2-equity/

The article about the sociology of start-ups shows (in fact confirms) interesting things. I will let you read and jump directly to some of their concluding points: “Some of these results can provide pause for thought for public policies aimed at fostering startup creations. The survival of these businesses seems relatively unpredictable, both for the people involved (entrepreneurs, employees, support bodies) and for analysts who observe them from the outside. We have interpreted this unpredictability as the result of two causes. The first is the selection operated by the support agencies, a selection that has largely guided ours, since a claim of technical innovation, which was our main criterion for inclusion in our survey, is generally associated with subsequent monitoring and aid by these agencies. One might think that a number of projects considered very unrealistic could have been excluded by these services, which in fact limits the variety of the companies we studied. The second, more fundamental cause is the very variety of factors that make or break businesses: outlets that emerge and disappear along with the flow of global economic changes, strategies of major industrial groups and initiatives by competitors, internal conflicts, resources which become abundant or scarce depending on the context, financial problems which are difficult to anticipate, etc. This may encourage governments and public agencies to foster a much greater number of projects and not merely be satisfied with those that they consider to be the most promising. Watering a whole field is often more efficient than dumping all the available water on but a few square meters… Securing solid support by authorities, companies that are deemed innovative are doing better than the others if one considers their survival rate. Perhaps it would not be absurd to offer an equivalent support to businesses in other economic circles.”

The incentive topic is one I have covered at length as you may see with my Slideshare link below. On the salary side, I fully agree with their claim: Be as objective as possible: this ensures fairness and acknowledges a basic truth: people talk. On the equity side, know the rules of vesting and cliffs, and build a granting mechanism based on experience of employees and layers of early and late comers, i.e. the same number of stock options could be granted per year (so more shares to early employees as there are more employees per year when the company grows. If it does not, stock options are probably worthless…)