Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World

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He notes that the median startup founder ends up with 11% of the company, though without attribution so I'm not sure how canonical the source is. He looks back at decisions he might have made differently in retrospect, which offers a lot of experiential insight.

The main reason I'm not giving this a higher rating is I found Rand's attitude a bit obnoxious and not truthful to his own values. The first few chapters of this book reminded me of the type of radical honesty and insight of something written by Derek Sivers. Reading this book is like spending a day with Rand and having him tell you about his journey with Moz. Welcome to the startup world, where a good idea and a convincing pitch can kickstart the path to global dominance.I love his transparency, but I tend to think he just sees stuff in a somewhat pessimistic way, most of the time. No matter what business environment you're in - whether it's a struggling startup or a mature business, this book can help solve your problems. The purpose of Lost and Founder is similar to what a number of other entrepreneurs and Silicon Valley success stories (like DHH) are trying to push, which is that startups don't have to be crazy, massively funded, chaotic and run by tyrants. It's highly addictive to get core insights on personally relevant topics without repetition or triviality. I really enjoyed listening to the audiobook version of this; author was refreshingly frank and emotional at times.

It's not so rosy and always rewarding as it's proclaimed and Rand has done a wonderful job of breaking those stereotypes with this book. The guy seems pretty damn sour about the fact that he didn't accept an early acquisition offer for Moz and is broadly shifting blame onto Silicon Valley culture. What makes the book work is that Rand is super honest and talks openly about his successes, failures and the tough decisions he had to make. On top of his incredible candor, the fact that Rand packages this all together with humility and humor is the icing on my favorite (book) cake of the year.As a story alone this book is a very thoughtful, somewhat detailed review of how they got to where they are today, including the mistakes. He talks about the strengths and weaknesses of different investor categories (VC, speciality VC's, angel, debt, equity crowdfunding, debt crowd funding, etc. Written by the founder of a company that’s already made it and packed with cheat codes and hacks, this is the ultimate insider’s playbook of strategies and tactics for struggling founders and would-be innovators. partly because the book confirms many of my doubts about popular startup quotes about the fake it until you make it mentality, and about the go big or go home mentality, by giving examples based on the author's startup experience as an ex-CEO, partly because the book is written in a very light and personal tone, so it's very easy and fun to read for me. The author’s startup Moz was founded in 2004 and experienced a huge number of ups and downs until it finally found its groove in 2017.