August 2020
Beginner
480 pages
10h 33m
English
Content preview from Startup CEO, 2nd Edition
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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.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.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.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.
Chapter 49A Note on Exits
When I started Return Path in the froth of the Internet boom in 1999, someone told me I should hire a writer to follow me around and record everything that happened in the formative weeks and months of the business. The person actually said to me, “You can publish a book about how quickly you built and sold the business – it will be called Ready, Set, Exit.”
One of the most unfortunate stereotypes about startup CEOs is that we're only in it for the exit: the business equivalent of real estate investors who flip a dozen properties a year. That may describe some startup CEOs but it shouldn't describe you.
There is no such thing as an exit strategy for a great company. There are only growth strategies, customer development strategies, and global expansion strategies. There is a difference between being bought and being sold, which I will discuss in one of the later chapters in this section, but great startups are always ones where the management team focuses on building the business to the best of their abilities, without specific regard or aim for an outcome.
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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.