MECHANICAL BULL

An ideological and procedural handbook for aspiring entrepreneurs.

In her nonfiction debut, Silicon Valley entrepreneur Contee, the CEO of tech company Do Big Things, aims to instruct and encourage people who hope to find similar success. (The book also contains contributions by her colleague Roz Lemieux.) Contee says that she “was never particularly strong in math and science” and describes herself as “the worst coder in the world”; as a result, she says, she had to learn creativity and tenacity in the world of tech startups. It’s a system that, intentionally or not, “has been optimized for upper-middle-class white males,” she says, and she crafts her advice to help demystify the world of entrepreneurship, which she asserts has been highly glamorized in American culture: “it’s a lot of hard work, sweat, blood, and tears,” she writes. “Unless you want to literally eat, breathe, and sleep your business every hour of every day for the next year to three years, you might as well just stop.” This type of plain-talking, blunt truth recurs throughout the book; at one point, for instance, Contee tells her readers that there are three types of jobs: thinking, talking, and doing. “If you can do two at the same time,” she goes on, “you’re likely to be successful.” She outlines simple concepts like the “MVP” (“minimum viable product”) and a variation on it, the “MVBP” (“minimum viable business plan”), and she provides clear and very helpful explanations of the process of making pitch presentations on slides and reading term sheets. Liberally sprinkled throughout are the kinds of smart observations that one can only accumulate over the course of a career, as when she notes that “Investors…want to see four key positions covered in a tech startup: the visionary, the geek, the sales person, and the advisor.” Contee’s prose style is smooth, her well-organized text imparts a deceptively large amount of information, and her encouraging tone is consistently uplifting. Entrepreneurs of all levels of expertise will find much of interest here.

A brisk and richly detailed overview of starting a business.