Book Review: Be Smarter than your Lawyer and Venture Capitialist

I won't spent to long on this, but if you are the CEO of an early stage startup, I would highly recommend reading: Be Smarter than your Lawyer and Venture Capitialist by Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson.  They go through a platonic term sheet with very practical explanations and commentary.  Once you start down the financing path and someone says they want participating preferred, you don't want your response to be a Donald Trumpian:"I know what that is, but give me more."  You want to have a thought out, principled, response.  Well worth educating yourself on the more common "Gotcha's."

The Five Dysfunctions of a Team

When I was at Turner, my friend and colleague, Karen Painter, said that I absolutely had to read "The Five Dysfunctions of a Team."  I had the best of intentions.  About halfway through and I wish I had read it earlier.  The notion of your peers being your primary team is one construct that I think is right and needs to be set from the start.  Also, that the team has the same goals.  Obvious, but I have not seen in practice.  Regardless, food for thought.

Hard Thing about Hard Things

The current book list is pretty analytics focused, but I have ben reading some of the startup books that folks recommend.  First one:  Joe Zawadzki (founder of x+1 and MediaMath) called out "The Hard Thing about Hard Things" by Ben Horowitz.  Ben is a founder in the VC firm  Andreessen/Horowitz.  He was the CEO of LoudCloud and Opsware and has great experience building big companies, relatively quickly.  

I liked the book, but Ben has a perspective that is obviously driven from his experience.  And  Ben's experiences are a bit rarified.  He was running B2B infrastructure companies and talks about needing to raise (and then spend) $100MM to ramp the businesses.  Also, he had enviable advisors.  Micheal Orvitz, Bill Campbell to name drop a two.  But he also had to deal with serious threats to the business.  Regardless, I would recommend the read.  Short version, don't give up.  There are going to be very hard times.  As a CEO you need to be prepared for the hard times.  He leaves the "how" as an exercise for the reader (I think he would say that every situation is different and you need to find your own path for your particular hardship), but the book provides plenty of food for thought.

I will also say that this is the only business book I have read twice.  I aspire to build not just a company, but a team, as influential as Ben.  I have promised myself that when we hit 50MM in revenue, I will read it again.  And I read Ben's blog.  He just did a piece on "The Prophets of Rage" as a prototypical personality in a company.  I know several PoR from both Turner and AOL.  Given my time as a sound engineer with Public Enemy, this piece resonated with me in both name and content.  

As an aside, I saw an Amazon reviewer ding the book on use of the female pronoun.  I did the same thing for my dissertation.  One comment: Be the change you want to see.

Dan's book is making the news

Here is a link to a NYT article about Predictably Irrational. Fuqua is doing something very smart. While Dan is on his book tour, they are scheduling Alumni and recruiting events around his schedule. I went to one of the talks. If you have a chance to hear him talk about his research, you should go. The research on deception is fascinating...

Predicatably Irrational

My friend, Dan, just wrote a book called Predictably Irrational. Dan is a Behavioral Economist and is the person I know who is most likely to win a Nobel Prize. Fascinating guy. How interesting? Check out this interview of him talking about his new book. Here is the link to the book. Predictably Irrational