When Elon Musk was a kid in South Africa, he was regularly beaten by bullies. One day a group pushed him down some concrete steps and kicked him until his face was a swollen ball of flesh. He was in the hospital for a week. But the physical scars were minor compared to the emotional ones inflicted by his father, an engineer, rogue, and charismatic fantasist.

After founding or co-founding over 15 start-ups and investing in another 50 early stage ventures as an angel investor, author Howard Love came to understand that a start-up unfolds in a predictable pattern. The more aware entrepreneurs are of this pattern, the better able they will be to capitalize on it.

This book contains the playbooks that took me from sleeping on my gym floor to owning a portfolio of companies that generate $200 million per year in less than a decade. Want to know the biggest difference between those two time periods? How many leads I was getting.

Although software has become easier to build, launching and scaling new products and services remains difficult. Start-ups face daunting challenges entering the technology ecosystem, including stiff competition, copycats, and ineffective marketing channels. Teams launching new products must consider the advantages of “the network effect”, where a product or service’s value increases as more users engage with it. Apple, Google, Microsoft, and other tech giants utilize network effects, and most tech products incorporate them.

Most startups don't fail because they can't build a product. Most startups fail because they can't get traction. Startup advice tends to be a lot of platitudes repackaged with new buzzwords, but Traction is something else entirely. As Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares learned from their own experiences, building a successful company is hard. For every startup that grows to the point where it can go public or be profitably acquired, hundreds of others sputter and die.

Paul Jarvis left the corporate world when he realized that working in a high-pressure, high profile world was not his idea of success. In Company of One, Jarvis explains how you can find the right pathway to do the same, including planning how to set up your shop, determining your desired revenues, dealing with unexpected crises, keeping your key clients happy, and of course, doing all of this on your own. Company of One is a refreshingly new approach centered on staying small and avoiding growth, for any size business.

By cutting out the noise and providing a clear and proven plan, this road map helps even brand-new entrepreneurs make decisions quickly, get their product up for sale, and launch it to a crowd that is ready and waiting to buy. This one-year plan will guide you through the three stages to your first $1 million: the Grind (months 0-4), the Growth (months 5-8), and the Gold (months 9-12). If your goal is to be a full-time entrepreneur, get ready for one chaotic, stressful, and rewarding year. If you have the guts to complete it, you will be the proud owner of a million-dollar business.

What entrepreneur or founder doesn't aspire to build the next Amazon, Facebook, or Airbnb? Yet those who actually manage to do so are exceedingly rare. So what separates the start-ups that get disrupted and disappear from the ones who grow to become global giants? The secret is blitzscaling: a set of techniques for scaling up at a dizzying pace that blows competitors out of the water.

Ali Tamaseb has spent thousands of hours manually amassing what may be the largest dataset ever collected on start-ups, comparing billion-dollar start-ups with those that failed to become one - 30,000 data points on nearly every factor: number of competitors, market size, the founder’s age, his or her university’s ranking, quality of investors, fundraising time, and many, many more. And what he found looked far different than expected.

Business owners want growth but fear it will take over their lives. Surprisingly, the only way to truly grow your company is to reduce its reliance on you - to scale. Jeff Hoffman and David Finkel offer a blueprint to rapidly grow your business while also gaining more freedom. Based on their own experiences starting, scaling, and effectively exiting from multiple successful companies, they provide seven clear principles that will help you determine the best strategy for growth in your company.

Innovations rarely come from “experts.” Elon Musk was not an “electric car person” before he started Tesla. When it comes to improbable innovations, a legendary tech VC told Sebastian Mallaby, the future cannot be predicted, it can only be discovered. It is the nature of the venture-capital game that most attempts at discovery fail, but a very few succeed at such a scale that they more than make up for everything else. That extreme ratio of success and failure is the power law that drives the VC business, all of Silicon Valley, the wider tech sector, and, by extension, the world.

It’s hard to be successful without a clear understanding of how business works. These 60 daily entries from New York Times best-selling author Donald Miller focus on the tangible skills it takes to offer extreme value to your organization while building your company, your career, and your legacy.

Whenever you hear someone speak personal finance, do you feel like you’re learning a foreign language? Do you feel lost when reading or hearing financial terminology from your bank, insurance, investment agent, or the IRS? You’re not alone! If you cannot comprehend basic financial concepts, such as interest compounding and financial risk diversification, you're paying higher transaction fees, you pile up unmanageable debts, and you also end up paying higher interest on loans.

ALL IN is the pinnacle book in Mike Michalowicz's Entrepreneurship Simplified series, setting the standard for building high-performing teams in today’s challenging work environment. Whether dealing with remote work, flex schedules, or generational divides, ALL IN provides a proven framework for recruiting top talent, transforming underperformers into superstars, and cultivating a culture where every employee is as dedicated as an owner.

From Thomas Edison to Steve Jobs, the "nail it then scale it" method is based on pattern recognition of the timeless principles and key practices used by successful entrepreneurs to repeatedly innovate. These processes and principles have now been distilled into a handbook to guide entrepreneurs and innovative product managers to victory. Stop following conventional wisdom, and join the few entrepreneurs that can consistently take their innovative idea all the way to a successful company launch.

Paul Jarvis left the corporate world when he realized that working in a high-pressure, high profile world was not his idea of success. In Company of One, Jarvis explains how you can find the right pathway to do the same, including planning how to set up your shop, determining your desired revenues, dealing with unexpected crises, keeping your key clients happy, and of course, doing all of this on your own. Company of One is a refreshingly new approach centered on staying small and avoiding growth, for any size business.

From the ABC hit show Shark Tank, this book - filled with practical advice and introductions from the Sharks themselves - will be the ultimate resource for anyone thinking about starting a business or growing the one they have. Full of tips for navigating the confusing world of entrepreneurship, the book will intersperse words of wisdom with inspirational stories from the show.

The best companies in the world discover what their customers desire - and then deliver it in memorable and deeply human experiences. How well do you know your customers? What Customers Crave examines how the hyper-connected economy is radically changing consumer expectations, and reveals what companies need to do to stay on top. The solution rests on two simple questions: What do your customers love? What do they hate? Find the answers, and you're well on your way to success

Business owners want growth but fear it will take over their lives. Surprisingly, the only way to truly grow your company is to reduce its reliance on you - to scale. Jeff Hoffman and David Finkel offer a blueprint to rapidly grow your business while also gaining more freedom. Based on their own experiences starting, scaling, and effectively exiting from multiple successful companies, they provide seven clear principles that will help you determine the best strategy for growth in your company.

An inspiring case study for the next generation of start-ups by the unconventional founders of Method. Founded ten years ago by childhood pals Eric Ryan and Adam Lowry, Method has been making headlines and profits with a revolutionary blend of culture and commerce, style and substance. Today, Method's ecofriendly soaps, detergents, and cleaners are ubiquitous in stores, capturing valuable shelf space long dominated by the tired old products of giants P&G and Unilever.

The lean entrepreneurship movement has captivated Silicon Valley and entrepreneurs across the country. It provided an agile framework to develop the right product solution for a given target market and is now used by almost every fledgling company to do just that. The next challenge is growth - to achieve the financial returns and, more importantly, the impact they dreamed of when starting off on their adventure.

Imagine what Atari might have achieved if Steve Jobs had stayed there to develop the first massmarket personal computer. Or what Steve Case might have done for PepsiCo if he hadn't left for a gaming start-up that eventually became AOL. What if Salomon Brothers had kept Michael Bloomberg, or Bear Stearns had exploited the inventive ideas of Stephen Ross? Scores of top-tier entrepreneurs worked for established corporations before they struck out on their own and became self-made billionaires.

Whether you're an entrepreneur, an intrapreneur, or a not-for-profit leader, there's no shortage of advice on such topics as writing a business plan, recruiting, raising capital, and branding. In fact there are so many books, articles, and websites that many startups get bogged down to the point of paralysis, or they focus on the wrong priorities and go broke before they discover their mistakes.

Based on an acclaimed professor's legendary strategy course at Harvard Business School, The Strategist offers a radically new perspective on a leader's most vital role. "Are you a strategist?" That's the first question Cynthia Montgomery asks the business owners and senior executives from all over the world who participate in her highly regarded executive education course. It's not a question they anticipate, but by the time the program ends, they cannot imagine leading their companies to success without being - and living the role of - a strategist.

Selling is tougher than ever before. Potential customers are under extreme pressure to do more with less money, less time, and fewer resources, and they're wary of anyone who tries to get them to buy or change anything. Under such extreme conditions, yesterday's sales strategies no longer work. Sales strategist Jill Konrath tells you how to overcome obstacles, get more appointments, speed up decisions, and win sales with today's short-fused, frazzled customers.

Over the past decade, Inbound Marketing has changed the way companies earn buyers’ trust and build their brands - through meaningful, helpful content. But with that change comes unprecedented access to information in a few quick keystrokes. Enter the age of the empowered buyer, one who no longer has to rely on a sales rep to research their challenges or learn more about how a company’s offering might fit their needs. Now, with more than 60 percent of purchasing decisions made in the absence of a sales rep, the role of the rep itself has been called into question.

This book stitches together a complete design journey from beginning to end in a way that you've likely never seen before, guiding listeners (you) step-by-step in a practical way from the initial spark of an idea all the way to scaling it into a better business. Design a Better Business includes a comprehensive set of tools (over 20 total!) and skills that will help you harness opportunity from uncertainty by building the right team(s) and balancing your point of view against new findings from the outside world.

“What would Jeff do?” Since leaving Amazon to advise start-ups and corporations, John Rossman has been asked this question countless times by executives who want to know “the secret” behind Amazon’s historic success. In this step-by-step guide, he provides 50½ answers drawn from his experience as an Amazon executive - and shows today’s business leaders how to think like Amazon, strategize like Bezos, and beat the competition like nobody’s business.

The small-business guru behind Duct Tape Marketing and The Referral Engine teaches listeners how to establish lasting commitment in their employees, customers, and businesses. Why are some companies able to generate committed, long-term customers while others struggle to stay afloat? Why do the employees of some organizations fully dedicate themselves while others punch the clock without enthusiasm?

Companies need high potential leaders (Hi-Pos) more than ever before to help them adapt to today's tumultuous, digitally-driven business environment. If you meet the Hi-Po criteria, you're in high demand - and this book explains how to fast-track yourself.