#1 Amazon Best Seller in Entrepreneurship
This book is for anyone who has ever dreamed of starting something. Thinking about starting your own company? Curious about what startup life is really like? Looking to commiserate over the brutality that is the road called entrepreneurship? This book is for you.
In Startup Stories, serial entrepreneur Jordan Raynor gives an honest look at what it takes to launch a company, grind through startup life, and grow a business from the ground up. Using stories from his most recent endeavor (Citizinvestor – the largest crowdfunding platform for government projects in the U.S., currently valued at $3,500,000), Jordan shares a series of lessons that are critical for any entrepreneur to learn.
In this short book, you’ll hear Jordan share stories about:
How he met his “startup spouse” and learned what makes a great business partnership
Why his team wrote stories about their product before registering a domain name or hiring a developer
Raising capital from Silicon Valley and friends and family
The wild emotional roller coaster ride startups put you through
How he gets meetings with amazing people simply by having the audacity to ask
How to be content regardless of the success or failure of your startup
This won’t feel like another “how to” book. Raynor’s casual style will make you feel as if the two of you are swapping stories over your favorite cup of coffee. If you’ve ever been interested in starting something, you’ll want to start reading Startup Stories today.
An excerpt from Startup Stories:
In a few minutes, I was to take the stage following an amazing “fireside chat” with Chris Hughes, a Co-founder of Facebook and the leader of the Obama campaign’s historic “My Barack Obama” social network. If that wasn’t cool enough, the rest of the lineup of speakers at the event included the CEOs of The New York Times, The Guardian, and Tumblr; the CTO of Amazon.com; a General Partner of Andreessen Horowitz, and a former United States Senator.
And then there was me, Jordan Raynor, a Co- founder of a company no one could properly pronounce. To say I was out of my league would be an epic understatement. As a friend of mine said to me a few days before the speech, “Dude, I think you’re great and all, but you have no business being on that stage.”
My friend was right. So how did this happen?
Mostly through grace. In my short career as an entrepreneur, I have been blessed immeasurably with amazing opportunities I did not earn or deserve. But as I inched closer to the edge of my seat, ready to charge the podium, I couldn’t help but think that one of the reasons I was there was because the team at our young startup had decided to solve a real problem.
By focusing on a problem of such great importance, we have gained access to more amazing people and opportunities in two years than most people get in a lifetime. We have been invited to The White House to talk about what implications crowdfunding might have on the federal government; we were featured alongside a movie with Matt Damon; we were flown to France to address the Council of Europe; we had tea with the Lieutenant Governor of California. Even if Citizinvestor were to fail, the experiences we have had along the way would have made it all worthwhile. I believe these experiences are a direct result of us tackling a significant problem.
