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

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Came at an opportune time for me while I was navigating and making important choices from my own startup. 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. I love his transparency, but I tend to think he just sees stuff in a somewhat pessimistic way, most of the time.

The book includes some very valuable perspectives on different kinds of investors and the pros and cons from a founder's perspective. The empathy shown comes across hugely in many situations in the book - where taking care of people is top of his agenda, ahead of growing his own business / keeping shareholders happy. Those who can't compete without a broad product line will disagree, however he makes his case for his business story well. The book highlights the softer parts of running a tech startup - parts that are usually ignored as they fall behind more urgent tasks.Raising and spending capital, hiring and firing, and launching and removing products were all tricky balancing acts.

The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. Reading this book is like spending a day with Rand and having him tell you about his journey with Moz.May have been helpful for author to put lessons he's taking into his next start up in beginning as well, so we could look out for red flags with traditional VC backed approaches from start. Rand's book is a practical, transparent guide into building a startup and the responsibilities and unsuspected challenges it comes with. 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. Everyone knows how a startup story is supposed to go: a young, brilliant entrepreneur has an cool idea, drops out of college, defies the doubters, overcomes all odds, makes billions and becomes the envy of the technology world. but Rand can be very proud of what he's stood for, often against what others more purely business-focused would likely advise against.