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The Startup Story: An Entrepreneur's Journey from Idea to Exit
In The Startup Story: An Entrepreneur’s Journey from Idea to Exit, renowned serial entrepreneur Martin Warner takes a fledgling company all the way from zero to hero, selling it for $50 million after a mere 17 months. It’s a memoir of whirlwind entrepreneurial success, a nonfiction narrative that puts the reader in the CEO’s seat, giving readers the feel of what it’s really like to steer a company around the toughest of tracks and come out with a massive payday.
A mix of Wolf of Wall Street, The Big Short, and The Apprentice, The Startup Story reads like a novel but is strictly a true story packed with entrepreneurial insights. It is a rollercoaster ride through the heaven and hell of the tech business world, populated by geeks, pirates, conmen, tycoons, geniuses, and fools. Forced to do everything at warp speed, Warner chucks all the accumulated wisdom of his own Entrepreneur Seminar out of the window on his way to a holy grail exit.
Along the way, readers piece together an entrepreneurial how-to (and how-not-to) manual, with each chapter traversing the highs and the lows of founding a growing company. It shows the reader how to build a tech company out of pure desire and dogged willpower, combined with some timely expertise.
The short, hilarious and hair-raising history of Warner and his company, botObjects, provides a parable of the quintessential business experience packed with entrepreneurial insights and lessons to be learned.
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ADVANCE REVIEW
"Part cautionary tale, part insider's spin, Startup Story contains both the frenzied work of design, development, funding, and production of an entrepreneur and the practical and linear guidance of a business-school! professor. The conflict and contrast can be a bit boggling in this work that is the tale of a 3-D-printer company, botObjects, as well as a how-to (or not-to} startup guide. It is Warner's awareness of these contrasts that is most instructive, imparting the struggle to remove emotion and employ theoretical understanding while immersed in the risk of innovation. This conflict is most striking as the story of botObjects winds down with the company's sale, revealing that all is not as it should be with substandard recording of the flurry of receipts that results from a sprint from concept to production. An engaging work for budding entrepreneurs looking to learn from others' experiences as well as readers curious about the evolution of the technologies that impact life now and in the future. Recommended for public- and academic-library business collections."
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- Val Edwards