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
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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
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]]>A summary of things you should know about The Everything Store according to Brad Stone: Introduction In this episode Brad Stone shares his national bestselling book, The Everything Store: JeffRead More
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]]>In this episode Brad Stone shares his national bestselling book, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and The Age of Amazon, he unveils the inspiration and the real business lessons learned from creating such a large company. Stone takes you on a journey through the life of Jeff Bezos as he built Amazon from the ground up and is meant to be a story that all entrepreneurs and business owners can relate to. This book is perfect for the entrepreneur who wants to learn the ins-and-outs, the trials-and-errors, and the ups-and-downs of growing a business from average to amazing.
There are a couple other books about Amazon but I feel as if they were incomplete because of the fact they were written in 2001, 2002. There is one called Get Big Fast that offers a pretty good look at the first five years of Amazon but a lot has happened since that time and that is what makes my book different from the others. It shows the rise, the near fall and the rise again of Amazon.
I conceived it as a story and didn’t intend for people to pop in and out. I do think there are a lot of lessons you can takeaway but it is a book you’ll want to read from beginning to end based on how it is written.
The importance of being customer focused and putting the customer first.
I structured my book in three parts.
The first part I call Faith in the Book and it covers the years 1993 to about early 2000 when the stock market collapses. Jeff Bezos is a vice president at D. E. Shaw & Co. and is working with the founder, David Shaw, to brainstorm internet ideas. Among their ideas they come up with this notion for The Everything Store. Bezos decides he wants to be a guy like David Shaw and with his wife he drives across the country to start Amazon.
In this first part of the book I take the reader through the initial fundraising round, the first hired employees and the initial battles of the business. I also talk about Bezos finding his way and creating Amazons culture, driving people relentlessly and it’s something that he still does today.
Part two I call the Literary Influences and the unifying principle of this part of the book is at all these different parts of his life, Jeff found key insight and lessons from books. The first chapter of this section I go back and talk about Jeff’s upbringing. Not a lot of people knew this until my book but Jeff’s dad was not his biological dad, his biological dad who he never knew was actually a circus performer. I tell the story of Jeff’s stepdad who he really considers his father and the story of Jeff’s early years. This chapter covers Amazon recovering from the .com collapse and finding its identity when a lot of people had written it off. It’s the story of an underdog who manages through ingenuity and the relentless motivation of its founder to basically get its house in order, set its traditional business on firm footing and then to build on top of it.
Part three is titled Missionary or Mercenary. Missionaries in companies have high ideas and lofty goals, in Amazons case they want to be the most customer focused company in the world. Jeff believes the missionary employees and missionary employees do better than mercenary companies. Amazon identifies as a missionary company and in part three I identify what might be some mercenary practices.
The last chapter of the book I call the Kingdom of the Question mark. I tell the story of how I went and found Jeff’s biological father. He didn’t even know that his biological son had grown up to be one of the most famous executives in the world. From there I get into the culture of Amazon. I call it the Kingdom of the Question Marks because one of the ways Jeff manages such a huge business is when he see’s something he doesn’t like or hears from a customer about a complaint, he’ll often send it to the executive in that particular area of Amazon with just a question mark on the e-mail. If you are an amazon employee and get the question mark you basically run into panic mode. Jeff demands his employees to think big all of the time, bring their very best to meetings and have the customer in mind always.
“We don’t have a single big advantage so we have to weave a rope of many small advantages.” – Jeff Bezos.
I am a senior writer at Bloomberg Businessweek magazine and author of The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon. It came out last October, won the Goldman Sachs/Financial Times Business book of the year award and just came out in paperback.
I’ve covered Silicon Valley for about 15 years now for the New York Times, Newsweek Magazine and BusinessWeek and in those times I’ve seen a lot of my colleagues write great books about the other technology companies that are changing our lives. And for whatever reason no one had done a really great job on writing a book about Amazon and I thought it was time to take a in-depth look on its history and all the obstacles’ it’s had to navigate.
Any of the works and writings of David Mitchell
Buy The Everything Store by Brad Stone on Amazon today
Visit Brad-Stone.com to learn more about Brad and his book
Check out BusinessWeek to read Brad’s exclusive column
Follow Brad Stone on Twitter and Facebook
Download the full transcript here
Listen on iTunes, Stitcher , and SoundCloud
Related books: Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future by Peter Thiel | Startup Mixology by Frank Gruber | Exponential Organizations By Salim Ismail
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