May 2015
Intermediate to advanced
322 pages
7h 26m
English
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Preface
Anointed in the Elevator
I became the CEO of my first startup in an elevator. I didn’t seize the reins of power in a bloodless coup. There was no passionate discussion or debate. I wasn’t even planning to discuss the topic when it happened. My cofounder merely informed me that we were being stupid as the doors were about to open, and I was going to be the CEO from that moment forward.
When Charles and I first decided to found Ontela, we were unclear about who exactly was going to do what. My background was as a “program manager” and my cofounder’s was as a “developer.” Neither of us had ever managed more than a handful of people. So we decided on what we thought was a perfect compromise: I would be the President, and Charles would be CEO.
Needless to say, neither one of us had any idea how to do these jobs.
But from the start, we had a ridiculous amount of work to do. We knew little about startups—I’d worked at one, but not as a founder; Charles had been a part of Expedia since its inception as a division within Microsoft, but that wasn’t exactly seed-stage territory. Besides doing familiar things like writing specs and code, we had logistical (“Should we rent furniture or buy it?”1), operational (“Which bank should we use?”2), legal (“Should we incorporate in Bermuda? My uncle is a lawyer and says it’ll save on taxes.”3), and other conundrums of startup life to solve.
Charles was an accomplished software developer. I was a marginally competent software dabbler. So I ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.