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

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The most successful businesses have gone from being headed by a university graduate who’s slogged her way up the corporate ladder for a decade or two, to being the brainchild of a Harvard dropout working out of a garage. Its frank, open, simple and covers a lot of the big areas of the reality of starting and growing a business. Even if you disagree with some of his take-aways he does a great job of intelligently making each case. Now Fishkin pulls back the curtain on tech startup mythology, exposing the ups and downs of startup life that most CEOs would rather keep secret. As a story alone this book is a very thoughtful, somewhat detailed review of how they got to where they are today, including the mistakes.

Came at an opportune time for me while I was navigating and making important choices from my own startup. He talks about borrowing money from venture capital, growth hacking, MVP (Minimum Viable Product), company culture and company code and talks about when you should sell. In this book, he shares the true story of how he successfully started Moz and then at some point failed with its growth, why he recently left the company, and what he learnt during these 16 years.The book introduced about the reality of what it really means to start your own business (mentally and financially), how VCs work, the maybe false beliefs in pivots and MVPs, what types of growth hacks work well, and more importantly to me, about what is important in building a great team. Rand explica, de manera muy honesta, cuáles son las ventajas y desventajas de las inversiones, de no vender tu emprendimiento pronto o tarde, la importancia de los valores fundamentales y por sobre todas las cosas lo valioso que es estar enfocado. His honest account destroy many of the start up myths that perhaps cause many start ups to fail in the first place.

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. With this attitude, you can't help but want him to win - and in the long-term I have no doubt he will. His transparency and knowledge sharing is visible in all of that content, Moz’s software and now this book.Welcome to the startup world, where a good idea and a convincing pitch can kickstart the path to global dominance.