A worthy and informative, if familiar, guide to starting a tech company.
A debut business manual shares tips the writer picked up as a tech entrepreneur.
Friedman’s Silicon Valley experience amounted to only three years, but during that time he successfully founded and served as the CEO of his own startup, Loopd, eventually selling it to a larger corporation for millions of dollars. That may seem like a pretty quick turnaround—“It was indeed a best-case scenario,” admits the author in his preface—but brevity is sort of his thing: “This book is short, because your time is limited. My hope is that it can serve as a quick reference of insights from someone who has been there.” After relating his own story—including an itemized timeline of Loopd’s history—Friedman offers insights in the key areas one should consider when developing a startup. From planning on how to grow the company—which includes everything from formulating a business model to “subordinating arrogance and myopia”—to considering various exit strategies, the author breaks down the necessary steps while delivering anecdotes from his personal experience. Friedman presents a nice, round 50 rules in all, divided by category and stage and each with a helpful “months from start” number to let readers know just how early they need to begin thinking about various items. Each section ends with numbered “takeaway” lists, and the author helpfully includes a glossary of relevant startup terminology in the back of the book. Friedman’s prose is direct and accessible, even when he discusses dry business concepts, such as designing a dependable lead-generation method: “For a startup targeting major corporations, the most strategic task is finding the right person inside a company with the authority to buy your products. In our case, we were looking for early adopters willing to buy new, unproven products with a five-figure price tag over the phone.” While there is nothing in this guide that is not available in other entrepreneur-penned manuals, Friedman’s presentation is clean and easily digestible. While no book can guarantee readers a multimillion-dollar sale, the author’s advice will surely be of use to those who find themselves with hot ideas and the will to get them off the ground.
A worthy and informative, if familiar, guide to starting a tech company.Pub Date: May 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5445-0245-8
Page Count: 322
Publisher: Rolling Thunder Ventures, LLC
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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