Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #138072 in Books
• Published on: 2005-06-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 608 pages

Customer Reviews

Its a "Good Book" but not the "Bible"
This is a book with great strengths and great weaknesses. If you are a seasoned entrepreneur, this is a useful resource at a fair price. If you are just thinking about starting your first company, be wary of this book; if you use it to chart your course, it could drive you onto a reef. In the hands of the naive, it will cause a lot of damage.

Strengths:

- Comprehensive - it covers a very wide range of topics
- Honest - the book tries to be forthcoming and avoid biases
- Based on Experience - Much of the book is based on the real world

Weaknesses:

- Organization - the organization is simply awful and there are few navigation resources to help you find your way through tangled threads of thought
- Myopic - this book assumes that you want to use Venture Capital - the most expensive money on the planet
- Inconsistent Quality - this is the most severe problem (more on this below).
- Ad Hoc - beyond ad hoc organization, much of the content (tables, chapters...) is ad hoc. It's impossible to tell when a list is supposed to be a list of examples, or when it's supposed to be comprehensive.

In the hands of someone who has started companies before, this is a great handbook and could be a good coaching tool to help others. In the hands of a beginner, it would be incredibly dangerous, since the inconsistent quality makes using it a potential disaster.

Inconsistent Quality: The book lacks quality on several levels.

On the elementary level, it's full of typos. No editor is named, either because there was no editor, or because there was not a single senior editor to sign the work.

On the broad level, there are so many examples of inconsistent quality that it's hard to know what to cite. The intellectual property discussion is, for the most part, quite good, and offers valuable advice that is often omitted. But, at the same time, this discussion is very sloppy in its terminology, so the same people who need the advice could be misled.

On the "sophisticated" level, there is an odd mix of truly useful teaching, and vapid babble. This is most evident when the book quotes business schools, like Harvard. Anyone who has actually run a business and then spent time around a business school knows that many of the professors have never actually DONE anything, and they don't know that they don't know. So, you see B-schools publish books and articles that don't say anything and the authors don't seem to know they have not said anything. These are "vacuum publications" because they are void of any real content. In this book, you'd hope that the vacuum publications would be absent, but sadly there are some quoted, cited, and in some cases, even their figures

A new edition could make this a great book - you can see a great book in there somewhere.

WOW! This is a FANTASTIC Guide.
If you are trying to start or already have an early stage high tech or internet company, you REALLY NEED TO GET THIS BOOK! Unlike the others I have read that give general direction with no real guidance, THIS BOOK TELLS IT ALL. Here is a brief list of things this book will describe and even teach you in detail:

(1) How to properly structure your company--getting the vision and mission statement right and forming a business structure from it.

(2) How to understand the complex venture capital industry and how to think like a venture capitalist and angel investor so you can tell them what they want to hear so you can get the funding you need.

(3) All sources of funding with an explanation of the best resources for each stage of the business

(4) Never before seen in-depth description of the due diligence process

(5) How to form competitive strategies and position your company to fight off competitors

(6) How Venture firms value each stage of a company and how you can do it to so you go to the table knowing what you are talking about

(7) How to understand term sheets

(8) How to get the most intellectual property from your ideas and resources and how to get the most from your intellectual property

(9) How to run the business like a CFO--financials explained, forecasting interest rates, etc.

(10) How to determine the best exit strategies

(11) All the legal docs you need

A solid book for those seeking angel or VC financing
There are over twelve thousand books available on the subject of entrepreneurship, ranging from the truly execrable to the really good. But Michael Stathis' The Startup Company Bible is one that I can recommend to every entrepreneur and every early stage investor.

As an active angel investor in the US, I have read dozens of books aimed at entrepreneurs. Usually I end up cringing at the misperceptions, bad advice and third-hand information they contain. The great thing about Stathis' work is that he gets everything right. And to do that over 600 pages of dealing with all the intricacies of starting and financing a business is quite an accomplishment.

If you are an entrepreneur who is considering seeking angel or venture capital financing, this book will help you understand what the picture looks like from the other side of the table, and what things you can do to strengthen your company...and thus improve your chances of getting funded.