A summary of things you should know about Do Cool Sh*t according to Miki Agrawal: Introduction In this episode Miki Agrawal takes a deep dive into her book, Do CoolRead More
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]]>In this episode Miki Agrawal takes a deep dive into her book, Do Cool Sh*t, where she reveals her insights on starting a successful company and living happily ever after.
In her book Agrawal teaches you fresh yet effective tactics for starting a new company from brainstorming to raising money to getting quality press coverage without having any connections. The goal of the book is to provide you with a quirky yet honest look into the life of a serial entrepreneur and give you the confidence to quit your job, start your own business, and live a happy life.
This book is perfect for aspiring entrepreneurs who are currently working for someone else and are ready to make a move into the world of self-employment.
My book is one that you want to finish and finish fast so that you get all the answers to the thrilled adventures I take you on.
You can go in and out because each chapter holds their own, but it does have a story art if you read it from front to back.
Put your running shoes on a walk out that door! The minute you walk out that door and put one foot in front of the other things will start to fall into place.
When I was 24 years old I started by going to these one on one interviews with potential investors. Sitting across from these investors I found myself very nervous and not feeling like myself. So for six months I just sat in meeting after meeting, feeling very uncomfortable, and raising no money. I knew that I need to figure out what I was doing wrong and that’s when I realized I wasn’t authentic. It became very clear that if you can’t be confident in a meeting they aren’t going to invest in you. I started hosting fundraising dinner parties where I would invite anyone I knew with extra change in their pockets. I knew free food and a nice evening would get people in the door. When it came to introducing the business idea I realized at the time that I was not confident enough and had someone else pitch it for me. From those dinner parties I was able to raise $250,000 for my first restaurant business. This is just one of the examples that I share in the book and I share every bit of the detail of hosting these dinner parties.
NOTE: That was just a summary. To get the full deep dive, play the audio clip at 07:10
“Iteration is perfection.” – Unknown
I started off working in Investment Banking when I graduated from Cornell University. 9/11 happened just a few days after I moved to New York, I was supposed to be at the World Trade Center that day but it was the first time in my life that I slept through my alarm clock. That was sort of my wake up call. I played professional soccer for a couple of years; I worked in the film business and worked my way up in production. I had my first stomach ache when I decided to start my first business which was a gluten free farm-to-table pizza concept in New York City. My newest project is called THINX which is a women’s empowerment apparel company that provides a sustainable underwear solution for women to wear doing their time of the month.
When you are in college entrepreneurship is really not something that you study and there wasn’t an entrepreneurship course. And so I began to read books by entrepreneurs and walked away so inspired but with so many questions. I wanted to find a book that I could read and one that gave me the step by step system to go from step zero to step one in business and life.
Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins
Losing My Virginity by Richard Branson
Buy Do Cool Sh*t by Miki Agrawal on Amazon today
Visit MikiAgrawal.com to learn more about Miki and her story
Visit DoCoolShit.org to learn more about the book
Follow Miki Agrawal on Twitter
Download the full transcript here (coming soon)
Listen on iTunes, Stitcher , and SoundCloud
Related books:
Startupland by Mikkel Svane
Startup Mixology by Frank Gruber
The Freaks Shall Inherit the Earth by Chris Brogan
Relevant advice and tips:
5 Important Things That Every Entrepreneur Needs To Know About Starting a New Business
7 Signs That You Have What It Takes To Be An Entrepreneur
What did you like and not like about this episode? Fill out this one minute survey here.
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]]>A summary of things you should know about Startupland according to Mikkel Svane: Introduction In this episode Mikkel Svane takes a deep dive into his book, Startupland, where he tellsRead More
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]]>In this episode Mikkel Svane takes a deep dive into his book, Startupland, where he tells the inspirational story behind creating his tech startup, Zendesk.
In the book Svane shares how he and his friends bravely left secure jobs to start something on their own, how he almost went broke several times, how they picked up themselves and their families to travel across the world. The goal of the book is to debunk the myths about startups and inspire and empower you to follow your own dream to create your own success story.
This book is perfect for aspiring entrepreneurs who are new to entrepreneurship and are thinking about starting their own online venture, but worried about failure.
This is not a guide to how to build a startup but it’s something that can give you some perspective and inspiration for your own journey.
It’s definitely designed to be read from front to back.
When you are in a situation to build a company like this you must understand what a privilege situation you are in because so few people actually get the opportunity to do that and to scale it. Make sure that you really appreciate what you’re doing and try to enjoy it. Building real relationships with your investors, partners, and customers is so critical for how you can grow yourself but also how you can grow your company. We are a company that is all about the relationships and we have seen how critical is it that you build real relationships even with their community around them.
The book starts off by giving a little bit of my background of how I’ve had a startup before and even how I started working with software when I was a kid. I had a company in the .com days that unfortunately didn’t turn out that well. It was during those days that I met my two co-founders for Zendesk. After some years the three of us got together and decided on building Zendesk. Two of us had some experience from the customer service software industry for a few years and was underwhelmed by that industry in general. By the lack of innovation and by how companies thought about customer service. We got the third founder involved and we tell the early days of us trying to build this product and all the difficulties there are with bootstrapping a company.
We then go on describing how we try to raise money and how that was a terrible thing to do in Denmark. We didn’t have a lot of success with that and we were even very close to take money from somebody but realized that they were not the right people to take money from. We ended up doing a round of family and friends investing and they helped us get over the initial bump. Right after that we got a German angel investor and suddenly we had momentum to start building and taking things a little bit more seriously.
In 2008 the whole credit crunch happened and that changed the whole investment and environment a lot. We started pitching in the US at that point and I traveled back and forth a lot. I also describe some of the heartbreaking experiences we had during this time. I explain how traveling back and forth can be tough on you and it makes you grow older in a non-positive way. We were very lucky that suddenly we met this investor out of Boston and he really gave us a chance and helped us move to the US. Even though San Francisco is fantastic compared to any other entrepreneurial environment, when you come here and start to hire an organization that can be very challenging. We go on to describing some of the initial building of the company in the US which has been a fantastic journey.
Now we are in the process of building a new company, this is the beginning of a very new journey, and it’s going to be very interesting too.
“We still feel that we are just in the very early days of the company and we are still feeling that we are just in to a new part of our journey. We are not ready for any of it to be over yet and I am much more excited about what is in front of us than what is behind us.” – Mikkel Svane
I am originally from Copenhagen Denmark and I moved to San Francisco five years ago. We moved my company Zendesk out of Copenhagen for two years before moving here and it’s been a fantastic journey building and growing this company together with my two cofounders. I’m also married, I have a bunch of kids, and we are happily situated here in San Francisco.
In my role I met a bunch of entrepreneurs and it’s always been hard for me to give advice but I found that they found some kind of inspiration in how we did things. I think that having something that tells the original founding story of the company is something that gives everybody a little bit of inside and confidence in our company.
The First $20 Million Is Always the Hardest by Po Bronson
Buy Startupland by Mikkel Svane on Amazon today
Visit Startupland.com to learn more about the book
Follow Mikkel Svane on Twitter and LinkedIn
Download the full transcript here (coming soon)
Listen on iTunes, Stitcher , and SoundCloud
Related books: The Everything Store by Brad Stone | Zero To One by Peter Thiel and Blake Masters | Startup Mixology by Frank Gruber
Relevant advice and tips: 5 Important Things That Every Entrepreneur Needs To Know About Starting a New Business
What did you like and not like about this episode? Fill out this one minute survey here.
The post A Preview of Startupland with Mikkel Svane appeared first on The Entrepreneurs Library.
]]>A summary of things you should know about Startup Mixology according to Frank Gruber Introduction In this episode Tech Cocktail’s own Frank Gruber takes you inside his book Startup Mixology.Read More
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]]>In this episode Tech Cocktail’s own Frank Gruber takes you inside his book Startup Mixology. His book is the perfect all-in-one strategy for serial entrepreneurs who plan on creating multiple businesses over time.
I wanted to create a book that had, start to finish, the ingredients or elements that go in to starting up. I tell the story about the harsh reality so that as you are starting up you realize that you’re going to hit those ups and downs. I explain how to get out of those dips and using celebration to help push you through and guide you as you continue to propel towards your goal.
The point of this book is to help inspire people that may be on the fence about applying some of these things to either their startup journey or internally in their company. My goal is if they have an idea that they want to launch, hopefully this is a good guide to start. It won’t be an easy path but this book will help you understand that. It should be a great starting point for anyone who has an idea and doesn’t know where to start or maybe is afraid to.
Part one is getting started and how to think like an Entrepreneur. The first four chapters are about thinking like an entrepreneur, coming up with ideas and turning those into actions. Also, how to formulate a company by getting all your documentation in place, business documents, everything filed and ready to go with both the accounting and legal side.
Part two is about the product. You start with coming up with a marketing fit, take that idea and launch it to your audience. You can start with a simple launch, with a small group of enthusiastic people and build from there. I also talk about how you measure success and how important it is to know what you need to build a business. I give the example of how Uber has done really well and grown very quickly.
Part three is about team and people. Team is crucial with starting and running a business. I show you how to find those people and what you should be looking for. We focus a lot on culture in this chapter. Culture is really everything when it comes to building a team that can execute and make sure everyone continues to move ahead. We also focus on celebration and being able to acknowledge the fact that something happened and how important that is. It’s also important to treat everyone with respect along the way and I think it’s something we sometimes forget.
Part four is sales and marketing. One chapter is sales and the other is marketing. Figuring out your marketing and sales is very important and these two chapters talk about that.
Part five is about money, bootstrapping and funding. We bootstrapped for seven years, didn’t pay ourselves for a long time and you can go pretty far with that. And we also talk about the different aspects or raising money as well. Both viable options, it just depends on your business and what your goals are.
Part six is about growth and change. Chapter 16 is about failure and failure is a big part of starting and running a business. No one wants to fail but if you do you need to learn from it, grow and go figure out what the next step is. If the company doesn’t make it, that’s not you, that’s the company. You will be fine and you need to move on from that. Managing expectations are very important and that’s why this chapter is in the book.
The final chapter is about success and it covers what success looks like, how to scale and gives a story on success. In the conclusion we share about what the path has looked like for us and talk about other resources that are available through the book.
“The best day to start is today. Not tomorrow, not the next day, today.” “Get it going and you’ll figure it out along the way.” – Frank Gruber
I am the CEO and co-founder of Tech Cocktail. Tech Cocktail is a news and events organization that is focused on startups, technology and entrepreneurship. I try to help better connect both online and off as well as connecting brands with that audience. We try to make the startup journey more memorable and fun.
It took me ten years to figure out how to jump off the entrepreneurial diving board and I wanted to jump start this for other people. It tells a little about my story but also tells the stories of companies like Uber, Zappos and WordPress and uses their stories to illustrate the ingredients that go in to starting and running a business.
How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie
Buy Startup Mixology by Frank Gruber on Amazon today
Visit Startupmixology.Tech.co to get extra exclusive content
Visit FrankGruber.co to learn more about Frank
Follow Frank Gruber on Twitter
Download the full transcript here
Listen on iTunes, Stitcher , and SoundCloud
Related books: All In Startup by Diana Kander | Traction: A Startup Guide to Getting Customers by Gabriel Weinberg | Zero to One by Peter Thiel and Blake Masters
Relevant advice and tips: 5 Mistakes Entrepreneurs Make With Marketing and Branding | 5 Important Things That Every Entrepreneur Needs To Know About Starting a New Business
What did you like and not like about this episode? Fill out this one minute survey here.
The post A Preview of Startup Mixology with Frank Gruber appeared first on The Entrepreneurs Library.
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