REVIEWS

Martin Warner has done a fantastic job capturing the wildly optimistic atmosphere engendered by the start-ups (and the entrepreneurs who founded them) that colored the second decade of the 21st century. Unlike many authors who accidentally or intentionally capture an era’s zeitgeist, however, Warner’s writing is refreshingly unpretentious. His wry accounts of his successes and slip-ups are anything but self-valorizing: there’s no myth or mystery that he’s trying to create here. Indeed, Warner writes that his book “is anything but a how-to manual. If anything, it’s a how-not-to.” Over the space of a few hundred pages, he comes across as the kind of guy you could accidentally find yourself listening to for six hours at a bar and leaving with a head swimming with ideas.

Warner is clearly talented in the slightly cyclothymic way that a very small number of CEOs and founders are: beyond the ability to see numbers and the bottom line, it’s clear that Warner’s real talent is for spotting opportunities and possibilities. While Warner certainly could’ve – and did, for a while – leverage both of these talents in investment banking (he’d probably have better liked finance if he had joined the buyside, but I digress), his heart and temperament are that of an entrepreneur, which partly explains how a friend’s gift of a 3-D printed pink whistle inspired him to co-found botObjects – his 3-D printer company – which he then sold for $50 million dollars less than a year and a half later.

There are no idiotic business platitudes here; no tedious self-important Business Truths. Instead, Warner embraces the “mad overconfidence” required for any entrepreneurial endeavor, and prescribes a “sense of realism” balanced in his case with a “strong dose of madness, sky-high optimism, and a couple of Cuban cigars” (he has since quit smoking, but his affection for Habanos is evident throughout the book). That said, if you’re hoping for a start-up version of the Wolf of Wall Street, you won’t find one here: Warner and his colleagues simply didn’t have the time for those kind of jejune shenanigans. There are, however, private jets, various intrigues, New York City stories, and surprisingly interesting explanations of the various aspects of 3-D printing (and now I want one). As a start-up survivor and entrepreneur currently fighting the current (and critics, skeptics, and lack of capital), Warner’s chronicle of his ups and downs as he navigates the seas of uncertainty is as inspiring as it is bracing: a rare example of a book on entrepreneurship that doesn’t come across as crass self-marketing or glorify “the hustle” mindset. More than anything, The Startup Story is exactly that: a story told by an inventor and entrepreneur who also turns out to be an unexpectedly adroit and compelling storyteller.