Startup CEO, 2nd Edition

Introduction

Startup CEO is not a book about how to start a company or find early‐stage financing. While these topics are essential to entrepreneurship, they're well covered elsewhere. This book is also not about sales, marketing, engineering, finance, or other disciplines inside the company. It's not the story of my company, Return Path, though there are a lot of examples from Return Path in it. It's not my blog, Only Once (www.onlyonceblog.com), though my blog posts inspired bits and pieces of the material in this book and I still continue to write it.

I set out here to write the book I wish someone had given me on my first day of work as CEO of Return Path over 20 years ago. There is no instruction manual, no field guide, to being a CEO. If you become the CEO of General Electric or General Motors, you have been groomed for the job for decades. If you're starting your own company – and have never done it before – you don't have the luxury of that level of grooming. I believed I had as good experience as I possibly could have when I started Return Path at the age of 29. Management consulting. Venture capital. General manager of an Internet startup within a larger company, working for a CEO. Then I got into the job and realized that I didn't have a clue what I was doing.

There is a real craft to being a CEO and leading a full organization and there's no substitute for actually being in the job, especially early in your career. I've written a blog called Only Once since May ...