Informed Success: A Bibliography for Student Entrepreneurs

A WALL STREET JOURNAL BESTSELLER Do you know the best way to drive your company's growth? If not, it's time to boost your Growth IQ.

Trying to find the one right move that will improve your business's performance can feel overwhelming. But, as you'll discover in Growth IQ, there are just ten simple--but easily misunderstood--paths to growth, and every successful growth strategy can be boiled down to picking the right combination and sequence of these paths for your current context.

Tiffani Bova travels around the world helping companies solve their most vexing problem: how to keep growing in the face of stiff competition and a fast-changing business environment. Whether she's presenting to a Fortune 500 board of directors or brainstorming over coffee with a startup founder, Bova cuts through the clutter and confusion that surround growth.

Now, she draws on her decades of experience and more than thirty fascinating, in-depth business stories to demonstrate the opportunities--and pitfalls--of each of the ten growth paths, how they work together, and how they apply to business today. You'll see how, for instance:
* Red Bull broke Coca-Cola and PepsiCo's stranglehold on the soft drink market by taking the Customer Base Penetration path to establish a foothold with adventure sports junkies and expand into the mainstream.
* Marvel transformed itself from a struggling comic book publisher into a global entertainment behemoth by using a Customer and Product Diversification strategy and shifting their focus from comic books to comic book characters in movies.
* Starbucks suffered a brand crisis when they overwhelmed their customers with a Product Expansion strategy, and brought back CEO Howard Schultz to course-correct by returning to the Customer Experience path.

Through Bova's insightful analyses of these and many other case studies, you'll see why it can be a mistake to imitate strategies that worked for your competitors, or rely on strategies that worked for you in the past. To grow your company with confidence, you first need to grow your Growth IQ.

Winner of the International Book Awards for General Business Winner of the Readers' Favorite International Book Award for Non-Fiction Business It's been over a decade since Verne Harnish's best-selling book "Mastering the Rockefeller Habits" was first released. "Scaling Up" (Rockefeller Habits 2.0) is the first major revision of this business classic which details practical tools and techniques for building an industry-dominating business.
This book is written so everyone -- from frontline employees to senior executives -- can get aligned in contributing to the growth of a firm. "Scaling Up" focuses on the four major decision areas every company must get right: People, Strategy, Execution, and Cash. The book includes a series of new one-page tools including the updated One-Page Strategic Plan and the Rockefeller Habits ChecklistTM, which more than 40,000 firms around the globe have used to scale their companies successfully -- many to $10 million, $100 million, and $1 billion and beyond -- while enjoying the climb!

One of the greatest challenges for startup teams is scaling because usually there's not a blueprint to follow, people are learning their function as they go, and everyone is wearing multiple hats. There can be lots of trial and error, lots of missteps, and lots of valuable time and money squandered as companies scale. Matt Blumberg and his team understand the scaling challenges--they've been there, and it took them nearly 20 years to scale and achieve a successful exit.

Along the way they learned what worked and what didn't work, and they share their lessons learned in "Startup CXO". Unlike other business books, "Startup CXO" is designed to help each functional leader understand how their function scales, what to anticipate as they scale, and what things to avoid. Beyond providing function-specific advice, tools, and tactics, "Startup CXO" is a resource for each team member to learn about the other functions, understand other functional challenges, and get greater clarity on how to collaborate effectively with the other functional leads. EOs, Board members, and investors have a book they can consult to pinpoint areas of weakness and learn how to turn those into strengths. "Startup CXO" has in-depth chapters covering the nine most common functions in startups: finance, people, marketing, sales, customers, business development, product, operations, and privacy. Each functional section has a "CEO to CEO Advice" summary from Blumberg on what great looks like for that CXO, signs your CXO isn't scaling, and how to engage with your CXO. "Startup CXO" also has a section on the future of executive work, fractional and interim roles. Written by leading practitioners in the newly emergent fractional executive world, each function is covered with useful tips on how to be a successful fractional executive as well as what to look for and how to manage fractional executives.

"Startup CXO" is an amazing resource for CEOs but also for functional leaders and professionals at any stage of their career." --Scott Dorsey, Managing Partner, High Alpha

You're only a startup CEO once. Do it well with "Startup CEO", a "master class in building a business." --Dick Costolo, Former CEO, Twitter

Being a startup CEO is a job like no other: it's difficult, risky, stressful, lonely, and often learned through trial and error. As a startup CEO seeing things for the first time, you're likely to make mistakes, fail, get things wrong, and feel like you don't have any control over outcomes. Author Matt Blumberg has been there, and in "Startup CEO" he shares his experience, mistakes, and lessons learned as he guided Return Path from a handful of employees and no revenues to over $100 million in revenues and 500 employees. "Startup CEO" is not a memoir of Return Path's 20-year journey but a thoughtful CEO-focused book that provides first-time CEOs with advice, tools, and approaches for the situations that startup CEOs will face.

You'll learn:
* How to tell your story to new hires, investors, and customers for greater alignment
* How to create a values-based culture for speed and engagement
* How to create business and personal operating systems so that you can balance your life and grow your company at the same time
* How to develop, lead, and leverage your board of directors for greater impact
*How to ensure that your company is bought, not sold, when you exit

Startup CEO is the field guide every CEO needs throughout the growth of their company.

The must - read guidebook for entrepreneurs looking to get into accelerator programs and to build and scale their startups with speed Accelerator programs have become one of the most powerful and valuable resources for entrepreneurs seeking to learn rapidly, build powerful networks, raise capital, build their startups and do this at speed and scale. In recent years, the number of accelerator programs around the world has grown at an incredible rate, propelling startups such as AirBnB, Uber, DropBox, Reddit, and others -- many to billion-dollar valuations. The number of accelerators, the differences in accelerator program offerings and the unique benefits and costs of different accelerator locations makes choosing the right accelerator a challenge. Selecting the wrong accelerator, failing to be accepted in the right one, or not fully taking advantage of all the accelerator has to offer can be costly, sometimes fatal. With the stakes so high, entrepreneurs need to understand all their options, choose carefully and do the right things to maximize their chances of success.

"Startup Accelerators" is the go to guide for any entrepreneur, providing a firsthand look into the acceptance criteria and inner workings of different accelerator programs. Written by entrepreneurs for entrepreneurs, this indispensable resource explains what different accelerator programs offer, how to get accepted, what to do during the program, how to raise money during accelerators, what to do after the program ends, and much more. Packed with real-world case studies and advice from leading experts on startup accelerator programs, this one-stop resource provides step-by-step guidance on the entire accelerator process.

Why is profitable growth so hard to achieve and sustain? Most executives manage their companies as if the solution to that problem lies in the external environment: find an attractive market, formulate the right strategy, win new customers.

But when Bain & Company's Chris Zook and James Allen, authors of the bestselling Profit from the Core, researched this question, they found that when companies fail to achieve their growth targets, 90 percent of the time the root causes are internal, not external--increasing distance from the front lines, loss of accountability, proliferating processes and bureaucracy, to name only a few. What's more, companies experience a set of predictable internal crises, at predictable stages, as they grow. Even for healthy companies, these crises, if not managed properly, stifle the ability to grow further--and can actively lead to decline.

The key insight from Zook and Allen's research is that managing these choke points requires a "founder's mentality"--behaviors typically embodied by a bold, ambitious founder--to restore speed, focus, and connection to customers:
* An insurgent's clear mission and purpose
* An unambiguous owner mindset
* A relentless obsession with the front line

Based on the authors' decade-long study of companies in more than forty countries, "The Founder's Mentality" demonstrates the strong relationship between these three traits in companies of all kinds--not just start-ups--and their ability to sustain performance. Through rich analysis and inspiring examples, this book shows how any leader--not only a founder--can instill and leverage a founder's mentality throughout their organization and find lasting, profitable growth.

Is your "big idea" worth pursuing? What if you could test your business model earlier in the process--before you've expended valuable time and resources? You've talked to customers. You've identified problems that need solving, and maybe even built a minimum viable product. But now there's a second bridge to cross. How do you tell whether your idea represents a viable business? Do you really have to go through the whole cycle of development, failure, iteration, tweak, repeat?

"Scaling Lean" offers an invaluable blueprint for mod­eling startup success. You'll learn the essential metrics that measure the output of a working business model, give you the pulse of your company, communicate its health to investors, and enable you to make precise interventions when things go wrong. You'll also learn how to:
* Ballpark the viability of a business model using a simple five-minute back-of-the-envelope estimation.
* Stop using current revenue as a measure of progress (it forces you to fly blind and, often, to overpromise to your shareholders) and instead embrace the met­ric of traction--which helps you identify the leading indicators for future business model growth.
* Set progressive goals that set you up for exponen­tial long-term success by implementing a staged 10X rollout strategy, like one employed by Face­book and Tesla.
* Stop burying your breakthrough insights in failed experiments, but rather illuminate them using two-week LEAN sprints to quickly source, rank, and test ideas.

Ash Maurya, a serial entrepreneur and author of the startup cult classic "Running Lean", pairs real-world examples of startups like Airbnb and Hubspot with techniques from the manufacturing world in this tacti­cal handbook for scaling with maximum efficiency and efficacy. This is vital reading for any startup founder graduating from the incubator stage.

Well known technology executive and angel investor Elad Gil has worked with high growth tech companies like Airbnb, Twitter, Google, Instacart, Coinbase, Stripe, and Square as they've grown from small companies into global brands. Across all of these break-out companies, a set of common patterns has evolved into a repeatable playbook that Gil has codified in High Growth Handbook. Covering key topics including the role of the CEO, managing your board, recruiting and managing an executive team, M&A, IPOs and late stage funding rounds, and interspersed with over a dozen interviews with some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley including Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn), Marc Andreessen (Andreessen Horowitz), and Aaron Levie (Box), High Growth Handbook presents crystal clear guidance for navigating the most complex challenges that confront leaders and operators in high-growth startups. In what Reid Hoffman, cofounder of LinkedIn and co-author of the #1 NYT bestsellers The Alliance and The Startup of You calls "a trenchant guide," High Growth Handbook is the playbook for turning a startup into a unicorn.