The Startup Owner's Manual

A book review.

The Startup Owner's Manual

The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company

by Steve Blank & Bob Dorf

published: 2012.03.01

ISBN: 1119690684

genre: Autobiography

reviewed:2012.08.03

👍🏼 recommended

This is one of the few books I've ever purchased at the time of its publication. Being a life-long addict/survivor of startups, I was interested in understanding why they're so difficult and prone to failure.

It's a big book, covering in exhausting detail the mechanics of converting contacts with a problem into clients. Note that I don't say converting an idea into a business. Blank & Dorf build the entire business around the realization that a job of a startup is to discover the business idea that will work. Your task is a search, not a build. The build comes from a successful search. And because a startup's job is finite, a startup is not supposed to exist for long - it has to have some form of change within only a few years. Such as an exit, or a transformation into an operating business, or collapse.

Here's a taste of what the author has to say:

Here's another: