PREFACE

Throughout our careers, we’ve received hundreds of inquiries from entrepreneurs, universities, research institutes, and enterprises asking a series of questions. How did you go about launching a company from breakthrough technology or breakthrough business models? What was the methodology you used? How did you get investment? How did you decide whether to take a venture public or accept an acquisition offer?

We wrote this book to answer those questions and more, and to help you create and build your own successful company. This book will lead you from your initial concept of a venture, to your first funding meeting with a top investor, to your decision to go IPO, to maintaining a culture of innovation in your public company. Our experiences have enabled us to recognize and distill the patterns that breakthrough companies followed and to share these patterns with you. Great entrepreneurs and venture capitalists will likely recognize these patterns, so in that sense this is not a new methodology, special sauce, or fad of the day. Instead, it is a compilation and crystallization of tried and tested practices.

Venture capitalist Vinod Khosla has notably said that creating a great company can be like climbing Mount Everest. No one would ever attempt such a climb without first knowing the routes and the weather, establishing a base camp, and laying out the stages of the climb, or without Sherpas, who have made the climb many times before, guiding and helping the novice through every stage. Yet every day, entrepreneurs attempt to create great companies with only the most rudimentary information. Our book will be your Sherpa—to help you establish your base camp, learn the routes, and get to the top of Mount Everest.

Equally important, we want to counter a pernicious trend that has taken over the start-up community. Let’s call it the culture of failure. The idea seems simple enough: you have a broad venture concept but not a clear understanding of the market and product. You put together a team, start the venture, and keep trying to succeed by a process of pivoting (trial and error). You expect repeated failures on the way, but you hope to get to a state where the product you develop actually meets the market need. This is not a good model for creating great ventures, and is not what this book is about. This book is about giving you a guide to the process that we—and others—have used to create and build companies that have become a permanent part of our landscape.

Our combined background provides a unique vantage point. Norman has experience in creating and building companies with breakthrough technology, and Henry’s experience is in investing in, building, and sustaining companies from breakthrough technology or new business models. We both have had the benefit of a first-class scientific and technical education, followed by successful careers that merged our technological and business backgrounds.

As a result, we both believe in cause and effect—building businesses is not a random process—and, as scientists, we’ve worked together to understand what drove success and what caused failure. We’ve concluded that what people sometimes call good luck in building successful businesses is rather success based on a series of wise decisions, leaving room for serendipity to make its contribution. We hope this book will help you make these wise decisions as well.