The Venture Mindset: How to Make Smarter Bets and Achieve Extraordinary Growth - Hardcover

Strebulaev, Ilya; Dang, Alex

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593714237 ISBN 13: 9780593714232

Verlag: Portfolio, 2024

Inhaltsangabe

A NATIONAL BESTSELLER & FINANCIAL TIMES BUSINESS BOOK OF THE MONTH

"Full of powerful, practical lessons on changing how we think and act." –Eric Schmidt, former CEO and Chairman of Google

"Many principles mentioned in the book helped us build Zoom, and they will help you as well." –Eric S. Yuan, Founder & CEO, Zoom
 
Inspired by venture capitalists’ unique way of thinking, The Venture Mindset offers a transformative playbook for delivering results in a rapidly changing world from a top Stanford professor and a technology executive.
 
Venture capitalists are known for their extraordinary ability to spot opportunities. They know how to identify emerging trends, how to bring new industries into being, and when to hold them and when to fold. Their unique mindset has made them the force behind world-changing companies such as Amazon, Google, Moderna, SpaceX, and Zoom.
 
Stanford Professor Ilya Strebulaev has devoted two decades to studying VCs’ counterintuitive approaches to decision-making and the reasons behind the successes and failures of corporate innovations. Alex Dang has witnessed up close how VCs’ thinking and mechanisms can create successful businesses at companies like Amazon and McKinsey.
 
Combining their insight and extensive experience, they present nine distinct principles that will help you make better decisions, transform your business, and achieve remarkable results, no matter your industry.
 
In The Venture Mindset, you’ll learn:
 
•         One question VCs ask that will change the way you evaluate opportunities
•         Why you should encourage dissent and be wary of consensus
•         The number one killer of innovation in traditional corporate environments
•         Why it’s crucial to learn when to ‘pull the plug’ on initiatives
•         Why failure is not just an option, but a necessity
 
Packed with entertaining stories and scientific precision, The Venture Mindset is a must-read for anyone who wants to be better equipped for the era of uncertainty when industry, company, and career can be disrupted overnight. The Venture Mindset will teach you more than how to simply survive. It’ll teach you how to win big.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Ilya Strebulaev is the foremost academic expert on venture capital. As the founder of the Venture Capital Initiative and a Professor of Private Equity and Finance at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, where he teaches a popular class on venture capital, his research has been widely published in leading academic journals and featured in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Bloomberg and the Harvard Business Review. He frequently leads workshops and executive sessions for senior business and government leaders around the world and has consulted for companies and investors on the venture industry trends and corporate innovation. In 2023 he was named a Top Voice on LinkedIn. 

Alex Dang is a CEO, a senior technology executive, and an advisor on innovation and digital strategy. He has two decades of senior leadership as a Partner at McKinsey and Ernst & Young, and as a product leader at Amazon, where he designed and launched numerous new businesses and solutions for millions of customers across ecommerce, supply chain, and AI. He graduated from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

PREFACE


What is the next big thing that will transform industries, make established companies redundant, and change the world? This book is about the people who answer these questions for a living. They are venture capitalists (VCs), the masterminds behind the most innovative organizations surrounding us. Every day, VCs seek and find innovative ideas. And they do so with extraordinary success. They identify big ideas and amazing teams and help to turn them into Amazon, Apple, Google, Tesla, Netflix, Moderna, or SpaceX. VCs find and fund the future. 

But this book is not about how to be a successful venture investor. It’s about how every decision maker—in any sector—can up their game and help their company reach new heights by learning from venture investors, those masters of innovation. This book teaches you to spot new opportu- nities, nurture the right talent, foster a culture of innovation, and take calculated risks in order to achieve extraordinary growth. How? By developing and using the Venture Mindset. 

The Venture Mindset is a new mental model where failure is a must, due diligence is put on its head, dissent is encouraged, ideas are rejected in their myriads in search of a single winner, plugs are pulled, and time horizons are extended. 

We, a Stanford professor and a technology executive, have studied the Venture Mindset for many years and have identified ways to apply it in organizations that want to leap forward and outrun the competition. Over the last decade we have developed the Nine Principles of the Venture Mindset and created a Playbook to introduce these principles to any organization. 

We wrote this book in Silicon Valley, where the heartbeat of innovation is heard loud and clear, but it is intended for people far beyond this innovation epicenter. Disruptive innovation knows no borders and should not be limited to VC funds and VC-backed companies.

Now is the time for you to use the Venture Mindset to find and fund the next breakout success, no matter your industry or geography. In a small factory or an office tower. In marketing or in supply chain. What matters the most is the right mindset. The Venture Mindset.

 
INTRODUCTION
What is Saasbee and why does it matter?


It was November 2012, and three venture capitalists, Sachin Deshpande, Patrick Eggen, and Nagraj Kashyap, were facing a decision: Should they invest $500K in a small startup called Saasbee?

Earlier in the year, through the prolific Silicon Valley angel investor Bill Tai, Kashyap was introduced to the founder of Saasbee, who was promising to revolutionize the way people did videoconferencing in the post-PC era. The name Saasbee came from SaaS, which stands for “software as a service,” plus the hardworking insect. Kashyap led Qualcomm Ventures, the investment arm of a large semiconductor manufacturer, charged with putting money into promising startups. At Qualcomm’s headquarters in San Diego, Kashyap and his team invested in more than 300 startups all over the world. One day the team would evaluate nano-technology in Korea; the next, they might be trying to make sense of a Brazilian software startup. Kashyap was accustomed to hearing extraordinary claims of guaranteed success from every single entrepreneur he met. Was this time different?

In 2012, the competition in video communications was already tough. WebEx, a unit of Cisco, a telecommunications giant, was a mighty incumbent with millions of registered users. Skype had been purchased by Microsoft the previous year. Google was working to improve the Hangout feature of Google Plus. The web-hosted service GoToMeeting had re- cently expanded to accommodate larger audiences. And there were recent startups such as the well-funded BlueJeans Network and Fuzebox to contend with.

Saasbee’s founder argued that his small startup would successfully outdo them all, even WebEx. But as of November 2012, Saasbee did not have a single paying customer. Besides, it was 2012 and people preferred in-person meetings or simply picking up a phone.

The founder of Saasbee, a Chinese-born engineer with imperfect English, had moved to Silicon Valley a dozen years earlier. After his arrival in the United States, WebEx recruited him, and he stayed on when Cisco acquired the company in 2007. But he left Cisco after management turned down his pitch to develop a smartphone-friendly videoconferencing tool.

Was Saasbee as good as the founder claimed it was? To learn more, Kashyap turned to his colleague Sachin Deshpande. “Could you look into this?” he said. “You’re our video guy. Have a good look.” Deshpande had cofounded a TikTok-style video startup that Qualcomm acquired in 2010, and he had devoted a lot of time and energy to understanding the burgeoning video space, which he was very passionate about.

“I was in love after the first call with the founder,” Deshpande told us in an interview. He flew to the San Francisco Bay Area to meet the founder two days after the call. With his experience in the video space, Deshpande could see how Saasbee differed from the competition. Video was the single hardest application to get working over a mobile interface, and yet as he clicked the button, the video stream was clear and without any interruption or delays. Deshpande then switched to his phone and voilà— the picture was smaller but it was of the same quality as the one on his laptop. The product worked wonderfully. Awed by the founder’s inside-out knowledge of the videoconferencing market, Deshpande flew back to San Diego. “This is beyond special,” he told Kashyap. “We have to put $5 million into Saasbee.”

Deshpande was joined in this meeting by his colleague Patrick Eggen. A liberal arts major with no knowledge of finance, Eggen underwent a baptism by fire working 100 hours a week in a large investment bank in London. Afterward, he went back to school for an MBA. Most of his job interviews were with hedge funds and classic investment management companies. Then he was invited to become a junior team member at Qualcomm Ventures, where he became, as Deshpande called him to us, “a creative seed financing whiz.”

Qualcomm was based in San Diego, but in 2010 Eggen moved to Silicon Valley, where he quickly became a deal junkie, sourcing startups for his colleagues’ due diligence. Eggen was impressed by the Saasbee founder’s obsession with building a superior product. After their second meeting at a Philz Coffee shop in downtown San Francisco’s SoMa district, Eggen thought the Saasbee founder was a pretty good salesman too. “What a technical virtuoso with natural sales chops,” Eggen exclaimed to us years later.

In early October 2012, Kashyap and the team flew in from San Diego to Qualcomm’s Silicon Valley office to meet with six startups in one day, Saasbee among them. According to some participants, as the demo was about to begin, the connectivity failed. The founder said, “Hey, I’m just down the road.” So they all went to Saasbee’s small office, where a seamless demo across many devices made Kashyap realize immediately that the total addressable market could be huge.

Now all three were pushing for Qualcomm Ventures to become the lead investor in Saasbee, with a sizable commitment of at least $3 million. Within a week, Deshpande and Kashyap presented the opportunity to the rest of the ventures team, its investment committee. There were no other takers. Every other team member felt uncomfortable investing in Saasbee. Kashyap, Deshpande, and Eggen were disappointed but not entirely...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Portfolio
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2024
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593714237
• ISBN 13: 9780593714232
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 368
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Portfolio; https://www.wetones.co.uk/; ; 105 Golborne Rd; London; W10 5NL; Vereinigtes Königreich
• Verantwortliche Person: M.E.G Cards & Gifts; 443000000000; paula@megcards.com; ; 48 Cloyfin Road; Unit 4, 48 Cloyfin Road; Coleraine; Londonderry; BT52 2NY; Irland