Nothing is more inspiring than a big vision that becomes a triumphant, new reality. Think of how the Empire State Building went from a sketch to the jewel of New York's skyline in twenty-one months, or how Apple’s iPod went from a project with a single employee to a product launch in eleven months.

What passes for strategy in too many businesses, government agencies, and military operations is a toxic mix of wishful thinking and a jumble of incoherent policies. Richard P. Rumelt’s breakthrough concept is that leaders become effective strategists when they focus on challenges rather than goals, pinpointing the crux of their pivotal challenge—the aspect that is both surmountable and promises the greatest progress—and taking decisive, coherent action to overcome it.

Every iconic tech company was once a startup. And while these companies like to paint an origin story full of surefooted confidence, the truth is usually something different: the early life of most startups is pure chaos. This chaos comes from the vastly different motivations and incentives between those with the vision and those with the money. From fundraising paranoia to boardroom coups, Zalman and Neumann train their inimitable voices on the gulf between what founders and investors promise to do and what they end up actually doing.

They say you shouldn't ask your mom whether your business is a good idea, because she loves you and will lie to you. This is technically true, but it misses the point. You shouldn't ask anyone if your business is a good idea. It's a bad question, and everyone will lie to you at least a little. As a matter of fact, it's not their responsibility to tell you the truth. It's your responsibility to find it, and it's worth doing right.

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.

Learn how to compete against large competitors and structure your pricing for maximum growth. Discover the four SaaS Cheat Codes that can dramatically accelerate your business's success. Learn how to avoid common mistakes that SaaS founders make and identify the right marketing approaches for your business.

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.

This book is for a very small percentage of business people. You see, most people in business are not trying to use Category Design to create a new category that changes the future and generates exponential new value. Instead, many people in business are trying to “not get fired.” Many people want to go to work, make a contribution, and go home.

Tony Fadell led the teams that created the iPod, iPhone and Nest Learning Thermostat and learned enough in 30+ years in Silicon Valley about leadership, design, startups, Apple, Google, decision-making, mentorship, devastating failure and unbelievable success to fill an encyclopedia.

We are approaching a critical threshold in the history of our species. Everything is about to change. Soon you will live surrounded by AIs. They will organize your life, operate your business, and run core government services. You will live in a world of DNA printers and quantum computers, engineered pathogens and autonomous weapons, robot assistants and abundant energy. None of us are prepared.

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.

Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days is a collection of interviews with founders of famous technology companies about what happened in the very earliest days. These people are celebrities now. What was it like when they were just a couple friends with an idea? Founders like Steve Wozniak (Apple), Caterina Fake (Flickr), Mitch Kapor (Lotus), Max Levchin (PayPal), and Sabeer Bhatia (Hotmail) tell you in their own words about their surprising and often very funny discoveries as they learned how to build a company.

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.

Dan Sullivan, the world's leading coach for highly successful entrepreneurs, wants you to know that achieving 10X growth is exponentially easier than striving for 2X growth. Most find this idea confusing at first because simply imagining 10X growth causes them to think they need to do 10X more work to achieve it. However, being a 10X entrepreneur is nothing like what most people think.

From the creator of Valuetainment, the number-one YouTube channel for entrepreneurs, and “one of the most exciting thinkers” (Ray Dalio, author of Principles) in business today, comes a practical and effective guide for thinking more clearly and achieving your most audacious professional goals.

Courtney and Carter Reum have years of experience in the field, from investing in over 130 companies, including Lyft, Pinterest, Warby Parker, and ClassPass, to driving the success of their own liquor brand, VEEV Spirits. The Reum brothers have learned from every triumph and tribulation and over the years have developed an effective and easy-to-understand guide to help entrepreneurs through the startup journey from inception to sale.

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.

Finding the right venture capitalist to back your start-up is a challenge. Even if you manage to get backing, you want your VC to be a partner, not some dictator who will undermine your vision and take control of your life's work. Jeffrey Bussgang is one of a very few people who have played on both sides of this high-stakes game. Now he draws on his unique perspective to offer high-level insights, colorful stories, and practical advice. He reveals how to get noticed, perfect a pitch, and negotiate a partnership that works for everyone.

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.

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.

Eventually every job and every business will become irrelevant. According to Jason Jennings, the past few decades have seen unprecedented shifts: former third-world nations have transformed themselves into high-tech manufacturing powerhouses; technology has democratized business and increased competition in ways never before seen; and customers, used to getting exactly what they want when they want it, are no longer beholden to the corporate giants.

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.

When pioneering business journalist and Inc. magazine editor at large Bo Burlingham wrote Small Giants, it became an instant classic for its original take on a common business problem - how to handle the pressure to grow. Now Burlingham is back to tackle an even more common problem - how to exit your company well. Sooner or later, all entrepreneurs leave their businesses and all businesses get sold, given away, or liquidated.

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.

Big new ideas rarely make great businesses. Laboring on a business plan can be a waste of time. You are going to need dramatically more start-up money than you think you do. Counterintuitive concepts like these have helped the world's best entrepreneurs succeed. Yet most of us only learn them the hard way. Len Green, an experienced investor, entrepreneur, and business professor, shares inside secrets and proven tactics for launching a business.

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

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.

People starting out in business tend to seek step-by-step formulas or rules, but in reality there are no magic bullets. Rather, says veteran company-builder Norm Brodsky, there's a mentality that helps street- smart entrepreneurs solve problems and pursue opportunities as they arise. Brodsky shares his hard-earned wisdom every month in Inc. magazine, in the hugely popular "Street Smarts" column he cowrites with Bo Burlingham. Now they've adapted their best advice into a comprehensive guide for anyone running a small business.

In 1990, IBM had its most profitable year ever. By 1993, the company was on a watch list for extinction, victimized by its own lumbering size, an insular corporate culture, and the PC era IBM had itself helped invent.

The most dangerous move in business is the failure to make a move. Global business celebrity and primetime Bloomberg Television host Jeffrey W. Hayzlett empowers business leaders to tie their visions to actions, advancing themselves past competitors and closer to their business dreams.

In Problem Hunting: The Tech Startup Textbook, Brian Long offers a tactical approach to building a tech company based on his experience growing a multi-billion dollar software business and selling another business to Twitter for nine figures. This is a daily playbook that any budding entrepreneur will return to over and over again as a reference when building their business.

The breakthrough concepts of Pattern Breakers come from the observations of Mike Maples Jr., a seasoned venture capitalist, who noticed something strange. Start-ups like Twitter, Twitch, and Lyft had achieved extraordinary success despite their disregard for “best practices.” In contrast, other startups deemed highly promising often failed, even when they seemed to do everything right. Seeking answers, Maples and coauthor Peter Ziebelman set out to discover the hidden forces that drive extraordinary start-up success.

Every iconic tech company was once a startup. And while these companies like to paint an origin story full of surefooted confidence, the truth is usually something different: the early life of most startups is pure chaos. This chaos comes from the vastly different motivations and incentives between those with the vision and those with the money. From fundraising paranoia to boardroom coups, Zalman and Neumann train their inimitable voices on the gulf between what founders and investors promise to do and what they end up actually doing.

In the tradition of Phil Knight's Shoe Dog comes the incredible untold story of how Netflix went from concept to company—all revealed by cofounder and first CEO Marc Randolph. From idea generation to team building to knowing when it's time to let go, That Will Never Work is not only the ultimate follow-your-dreams parable, but also one of the most dramatic and insightful entrepreneurial stories of our time.

Great startups don't waste time on small stuff. If you study the early days of any great startup, you’ll see that 90% of their growth came from 10% of the stuff they tried. But most needed years of experimentation to find their growth levers. This book aims to shortcut that process. Generic tactics like paid ads, SEO and referral programs will only get you so far. Growth levers are things like the professional photographs that made tens of thousands of customers trust AirBnb when they otherwise wouldn’t—a crucial move that unlocked explosive growth.

Enamorémonos del problema, no de la solución. Ofrece la guía de un mentor de parte de uno de los emprendedores más exitosos del mundo, y nos empodera para construir un negocio de éxito, mediante la identificación de los problemas más serios de nuestros consumidores y perturbar los mercados ineficientes que actualmente les sirven.

In the world of startups and business innovation, the promise of a revolutionary idea is often shadowed by the looming specter of risk. But what if entrepreneurs could systematically diminish that risk, paving a clearer path to success and securing the trust of investors? Zero Risk Startup is not just another business guide for startups. Paulo Andrez, a serial entrepreneur and angel investor, gives you a masterclass in understanding, navigating, and practically eliminating the inherent risks of your entrepreneurial journey.

Learn how to compete against large competitors and structure your pricing for maximum growth. Discover the four SaaS Cheat Codes that can dramatically accelerate your business's success. Learn how to avoid common mistakes that SaaS founders make and identify the right marketing approaches for your business.

You know your product is awesome, but does anybody else? Forget everything you thought you knew about positioning. Successfully connecting your product with consumers isn’t a matter of following trends, comparing yourself to the competition, or trying to attract the widest customer base. So, what is it? April Dunford, positioning guru and tech executive, will enlighten you.

You’ve got big dreams for your business, but the odds are not in your favor. You’re struggling to scale. Sometimes, it’s hard to stay profitable. You know you need expert advice to grow. CEO coach and executive thought leader Adam Coffey has been where you are. He, too, dared to dream of that elusive billion-dollar exit. Then he took his companies to triple digit growth.