Showing results by publisher "Penguin Audio" in Entrepreneurship

The inspiring, unlikely, laugh-out-loud story of how one woman learned to lead - and how she ultimately succeeded, not despite her many mistakes, but because of them. This is the story of how Kristen Hadeed built Student Maid, a cleaning company where people are happy, loyal, productive, and empowered, even while they're mopping floors and scrubbing toilets.

In his sophomore year of college, Mark Zuckerberg created a simple website to serve as a campus social network. The site caught on like wildfire, and soon students nationwide were on Facebook. Today, Facebook is nearly unrecognisable from Zuckerberg's first, modest iteration. It has grown into a tech giant, the largest social media platform and one of the most gargantuan companies in the world, with a valuation of more than $576 billion and almost 3 billion users. There is no denying the power and omnipresence of Facebook in American daily life.

Conventional accounting uses the logical (albeit, flawed) formula: Sales - Expenses = Profit. The problem is, businesses are run by humans, and humans aren't always logical. Serial entrepreneur Mike Michalowicz has developed a behavioral approach to accounting to flip the formula: Sales - Profit = Expenses. Just as the most effective weight loss strategy is to limit portions by using smaller plates, Michalowicz shows that by taking profit first and apportioning only what remains for expenses, entrepreneurs will transform their businesses from cash-eating monsters to profitable cash cows.

Each year, Americans start one million new businesses, nearly 80 percent of which fail within the first five years. Under such pressure to stay alive—let alone grow—it’s easy for entrepreneurs to get caught up in a never-ending cycle of "sell it—do it, sell it—do it" that leaves them exhausted, frustrated, and unable to get ahead no matter how hard they try. Full of stories of other successful entrepreneurs, The Pumpkin Plan guides you through unconven­tional strategies to help you build a truly profitable blue-ribbon company that is the best in its field.

Entrepreneurs and leaders face big questions every day. How should you be focusing your efforts? What will your idea look like in real life? How do you start? How many meetings and discussions does it take before you can be sure you've got the right solution? Now there's a surefire way to answer these important questions: the sprint.

Hustle culture. Burnout. Quiet quitting. Today we're either sacrificing ourselves on the altar of success or we're rejecting the idea of ambition entirely. But it doesn't have to be all or nothing. There is a way to create meaningful work as part of a balanced life, and it's called 'slow productivity'. Examining the stories and habits of ancient and modern scientists, philosophers, artists and scholars who worked in this way, author Cal Newport reveals just how transformative the slow productivity approach can be to producing a meaningful body of work.

What valuable company is nobody building? The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won't make a search engine. If you are copying these guys, you aren't learning from them. It's easier to copy a model than to make something new: doing what we already know how to do takes the world from 1 to 10, adding more of something familiar. Every new creation goes from zero to one. This book is about how to get there.

The hardest part of launching a product is getting started. When you have just an idea and a handful of customers, growth can feel impossible. This is the cold start problem. Andrew Chen has a solution. As a partner at the pre-eminent VC firm Andreesen Horowitz, he has invested in some of the world's fastest-growing companies. Along the way, he's become one of the most renowned bloggers in tech - hailed by Wired as a 'true Silicon Valley insider'.

Building a successful company is hard. Smart entrepreneurs know that the key to success isn't the originality of your offering, the brilliance of your team or how much money you raise. It's how consistently you can grow and acquire new customers. Traction will teach you the 19 channels you can use to build a customer base and offers a three-step framework to figure out which ones will work best for your business. No matter how you apply them, the lessons and examples in Traction will help you create and sustain the growth your business desperately needs.

In 1999, legendary venture capitalist John Doerr invested nearly $12 million in a startup that had amazing technology, entrepreneurial energy and sky-high ambitions, but no real business plan. Doerr introduced the founders to OKRs and with them at the foundation of their management, the startup grew from 40 employees to more than 70,000 with a market cap exceeding $600 billion. The startup was Google.

Many business owners are frustrated because they feel invisible in a crowded marketplace. They know they are better than their competitors, but when they focus on that fact, they get little in return. That's because, to customers, better is not actually better. Different is better. And those who market differently, win. In his new marketing book, Mike Michalowicz offers a proven method to position your business, service, or brand to get noticed, attract the best prospects, and convert those opportunities into sales.

In 2007 and 2008, Time named Paul Allen, the cofounder of Microsoft, one of the 100 most influential people in the world. Since he made his fortune, his impact has been felt in science, technology, business, medicine, sports, music, and philanthropy. His passion, curiosity, and intellectual rigor - combined with the resources to launch and support new initiatives - have literally changed the world. With honesty, humor, and insight, Allen here tells the story of a life of ideas made real.

The Genius Makers tells the story of AI from pioneering days to current achievements to future potential. At the same time it takes the lid off what has effectively become an arms race between Google, Microsoft, Facebook and OpenAI, in which Google may be the clear frontrunner at present, but Facebook has shown itself to be both nimble and innovative, and OpenAI, the company recently founded by Elon Musk and Sam Altman, has made itself the confident upstart of the pack.

From Mike Michalowicz, the author of Profit First, Clockwork, and The Pumpkin Plan, comes the ultimate diagnostic tool for every entrepreneur.... The biggest problem entrepreneurs have is that they don't know what their biggest problem is. If you find yourself trapped between stagnating sales, staff turnover, and unhappy customers, what do you fix first? Every issue seems urgent—but there's no way to address all of them at once. The result? A business that continues to go in endless circles putting out urgent fires and prioritizing the wrong things.

The Dealmaker is a frank and honest account of how a severely dyslexic child who struggled at school went on to graduate from Oxford and become a serial entrepreneur. It describes Guy Hand's career in private equity, first at Nomura and then as head of his own company, Terra Firma. It looks in detail at the huge deals that Terra Firma has done over the years, involving everything from cinema chains and pubs to waste management, aircraft leasing and green energy.

Every big project – whether it’s technology, sneakers or a neighbourhood café – requires a big investment to get going. Unfortunately, most of them flop. Too many teams waste time, money and opportunity because they follow the wrong strategy and lose sight of what really matters. As designers and investors, Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky have helped hundreds of teams bring new products and services into the world. Click is their proven system for starting projects the right way, to make better decisions and move swiftly towards a solution that clicks with customers.

AI-First companies are the only trillion-dollar companies, and soon they will dominate even more industries, more definitively than ever before. These companies succeed by design--they collect valuable data from day one and use it to train predictive models that automate core functions. As a result, they learn faster and outpace the competition in the process. Thankfully, you don't need a PhD to learn how to win with AI. In The AI-First Company, internationally-renowned startup investor Ash Fontana offers an executable guide for applying AI to business problems.

Simon Jordan made his fortune building a mobile phone company from scratch. When he sold it for £75 million, he bought Crystal Palace FC, the club he'd supported as a boy, and led them into the Premier League. Ten years later, Palace was in administration and Jordan had lost nigh on everything. Be Careful What You Wish For lifts the lid on being the owner of a football club and how the game really works. Hopes and dreams sit alongside greed, self-interest, dodgy transfers, boardroom fights and dressing room dressing downs.

Frustrated by the high costs and difficulty of accepting credit card payments, McKelvey joined his friend Jack Dorsey (the cofounder of Twitter) to launch Square, a startup that would enable small merchants to accept credit card payments on their mobile phones. The Innovation Stack is a thrilling business narrative that's much bigger than the story of Square. It is an irreverent first-person look inside the world of entrepreneurship, and a call to action for all of us to find the entrepreneur within ourselves and identify and fix unsolved problems - one crazy idea at a time.

In a world where wages are virtually stagnant, creative disruption is rocking every industry, global competition for jobs is fierce, and job security is a thing of the past, we're all on our own when it comes to our careers. In the face of such uncertainty, the key to success is to think and act likes an entrepreneur: to be nimble and self-reliant, to be innovative, and to know how to network and stand out from the crowd. And this is precisely what Hoffman and Casnocha show you how to do in a book that is both inspirational and practical.