Build the Damn Thing: How to Start a Successful Business If You're Not a Rich White Guy - Hardcover

Finney, Kathryn

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593329260 ISBN 13: 9780593329269

Verlag: Portfolio, 2022

Inhaltsangabe

The Wall Street Journal Bestseller featured in Bloomberg, Fast Company, Masters of Scale, the Motley Fool, Marketplace and more.

An indispensable guide to building a startup and breaking down the barriers for diverse entrepreneurs from the visionary venture capitalist and pioneering entrepreneur Kathryn Finney.

Build the Damn Thing is a hard-won, battle-tested guide for every entrepreneur who the establishment has left out. Finney, an investor and startup champion, explains how to build a business from the ground up, from developing a business plan to finding investors, growing a team, and refining a product. Finney empowers entrepreneurs to take advantage of their unique networks and resources; arms readers with responses to investors who say, “great pitch but I just don’t do Black women”; and inspires them to overcome naysayers while remaining “100% That B*tch.”

Don’t wait for the system to let you in—break down the door and build your damn thing. For all the Builders striving to build their businesses in a world that has overlooked and underestimated them: this is the essential guide to knowing, breaking, remaking and building your own rules of entrepreneurship in a startup and investing world designed for and by the “Entitleds.”

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Tech pioneer and investor Kathryn Finney is the founder and CEO of Genius Guild, a venture capital fund and studio. As the founder of social enterprise digitalundivided and its groundbreaking ProjectDiane report, Kathryn has invested in dozens of startups and venture funds led by founders and investors of color. Kathryn started digitalundivided after selling her company The Budget Fashionista, and she was one of the first Black women to have a successful seven-figure internet startup exit. A Yale-trained epidemiologist, she has been recognized for her pivotal work by the Aspen Institute, The Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, Forbes, Entrepreneur, Marie Claire, EBONY, Inc., Black Enterprise, and more.

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Step 1
 
Get Your Mind Right: How to Build Your Internal Foundation
 
As a Builder, you are the head of your company. If you're not good, then the company will not be good either. It doesn't matter that you've invented a way to make your cat's litter box smell like cinnamon donuts or that you have so much money that your bank has its own bank. Taking time to mentally prepare yourself for the daunting task of building a company will give you a much bigger return on your investment than just jumping in.
 
Those of us who are moms have a saying: "If mommy ain't good, then no one is good." Moms are often the people who keep the wheels turning in a family, serving as the comforter and moral center. If the hub-the center of the wheel-is broken, it's impossible for the spokes to turn and propel the family forward. As a mom, your self-care is also your family's self-care.
 
The same is also true as the CEO of your company. Your self-care is also your company's self-care. You are the hub of your company.
 
You bring your full life experiences to everything you do, especially building a company. You can't build anything-a company, a family, or even a fence-if you're not in a good place internally. And if you're not in a good place internally, there is no shame in stopping now.
 
Not everyone can or should be an entrepreneur. You could even say that choosing to be an entrepreneur is an exercise in bad judgment. Most new companies fail. Entrepreneurship is an extremely lonely endeavor, and it involves a great deal of risk, both personal and financial. Not everyone can or should assume this level of risk.
 
And that is okay.
 
But if you do want to embark on the quest for a creative life you control through entrepreneurship, preparation is key. Taking time to get yourself in a good place is the single most important thing you can do to ensure the success of your company before you build it.
 
Building Your Internal Foundation
 
There's a tendency to define success as something outside ourselves. We say, "If I just get this job/investment/partner, then I will be successful." While these types of achievements can help you along the path to success, they are external. The path to success is internal. As a Builder, there will be times when the only person who can see your vision will be you. You are your own boss, and any boss worth their weight in stock options understands that self-awareness-knowing who you are and acknowledging your strengths and weaknesses-is an extremely important part of being a great leader.
 
In order to build your company, you will need to get comfortable with uncertainty, risk, and failure. You must be able to manage the stress and challenges that come from the realities of building a startup. Of the hundreds of companies I've encountered throughout the years, the ones that succeeded were the ones whose founders built a strong internal foundation before executing their ideas.
 
Smart, successful entrepreneurs have no problem spending time on their mental and spiritual health. My dear friend Kendra Bracken-Ferguson, co-founder of the health company r¥spin with Oscar winner Halle Berry, has a formal yoga practice that she does every day. I'm a member of a group of exceptional women entrepreneurs and leaders called TheLi.st. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the CEO of the group gave its members a free month of a meditation app. Getting your mind right is crucial to getting your company right.
 
Builder Trap: Fear of Failure
 
I've missed more than nine thousand shots in my career. I've lost almost three hundred games. Twenty-six times I've been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.
 
Michael Jordan
 
As you set out to build your company, know that failure is part of the journey. Failing isn't fun, and most people quit when things don't immediately start working out.
 
But not you . . .
 
It can be even harder when you're a Builder because some people expect you to fail. There's a big difference between having permission to fail and the expectation that you will fail. Permission means that failure is part of the journey, not the end result. Expectation assumes that the journey, no matter what you do, will end in failure. It assumes the path you take is rigged and so full of sinkholes, land mines, and bear traps that no matter how carefully you walk it, you'll lose your way.
 
However . . .
 
I know from personal experience that you can turn the expectation of failure on its head to become wildly successful. I watched my father do exactly that. The key is to give yourself permission to have a big vision of who you want to become and not let expectations (whether internal or external) influence your ability to make that vision a reality.
 
The Power of Fearlessness: Defying Expectations
 
Long before the TV show Happy Days, serial killers, and dudes with bedazzled pianos, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, was a beer factory town of proud, hardworking German, Polish, and African American citizens living in the shadow of its bigger sister to the south, Chicago.
 
It's in this environment that my grandmother Anna Mae gave birth to my father, Robert "Bob" Finney. While my grandmother's family wasn't impoverished-they owned a house in 1940, a pretty amazing feat for people of any race-my grandmother was very rebellious and became pregnant with my father at age sixteen. Consequently, my father was raised by her parents, my great-grandparents, Walter and Lucille. In fact, he didn't know my grandmother was his mom until he was in his early teens.
 
Now imagine having your life turned upside down at a time when you have hormones raging through your body. The people you thought were your parents aren't really your parents. The person you thought was your sister is really your mom. This culture of silence to protect "respectability" was prevalent throughout American society in both Black and white communities, and more common than most of us would think.
 
However, my dad was a young Black man in mid-twentieth-century America who wasn't given permission to mourn and struggle with life-changing information. There was no child psychologist available in his blue-collar, working-class community. A straight-A student at a racially mixed high school, he wanted to be a surgeon. When he told his white high school guidance counselor, the counselor instead explained to a young Bob Finney that his goal was beyond his reach. He should focus on learning a trade and working in the brewery.
 
My dad, like most young Black men in 1960s America, was expected to fail.
 
So my dad, too, started to rebel. He stole a car and found himself on the wrong side of the law. The judge who decided his fate gave him a choice: go to jail or go to war. This was in 1964, right in the escalation of the Vietnam War. My father, who had only ever been as far as Chicago, enlisted in the army at sixteen years old. Imagine being a teenager leaving everything and everyone you've known to travel to literally the other side of the world. Imagine the fear of the unknown, of war, of the very real possibility of never coming back home.
 
After serving two tours in Vietnam he returned to Milwaukee and did what every good Milwaukeean did: went to work at one of the city's many breweries (in his case, Schlitz). Working at the brewery was a great job-you could make $50,000 a year in the 1970s without a high school diploma. However, spurred on by my well-educated mom, my dad went back to school while working the third shift. He got his GED,...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Portfolio
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2022
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593329260
• ISBN 13: 9780593329269
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 272
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: M.E.G Cards & Gifts; 443000000000; paula@megcards.com; ; 48 Cloyfin Road; Unit 4, 48 Cloyfin Road; Coleraine; Londonderry; BT52 2NY; Irland