SBenegaL

Category: Scale up

  • The Hard thing about hard things – Ben Horowitz

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    Simply an amazing book! If you are the CEO of a startup that is scaling and you are looking for a collection of learnings that could help you develop multiple perspectives about what the options that are available are, this is the book.

    Horowitz talks about several dilemmas that run through the minds of the entrepreneurs. In addition to sharing the personal war stories and several of the other companies that you may have heard about, he gets the challenges to the fore. The issues he talks about cover demoting/firing a friend; using titles and promotions; hiring from a friend’s company; managing personal psychology; hiring the smart people and what to do when they are bad employees; when to sell your company; and many more.

    I have recommended this book to several entrepreneurs who I believe are in the stage of looking if they have some right answers. If you are too, get yourself a copy.

    Happy Reading!

  • Voltage Effect – John A List

    One of the rare books that I have read about scaling up of ventures. Written by a behavioral economist and an academician, John A. List, this book integrates the scaling challenges and the experimental rigor in its writing. I loved this.

    Building on his personal experience of working with Uber and then later Lyft, John touches up on several aspects that would be helpful when one is trying to understand the venture scaling from a relative distance. He highlights several key conditions for scaling, like the ingredient’s vs. the chef, the challenge of false positives, spillovers, the role of incentives, knowing when to pull the plug, and many more aspects.

    If you are grappling with trying to understand what some of the conditions could be that could answer if it is the time to scale and what you would need as ingredients before you start, this book will give you some of the answers. 

    Happy Reading!

  • 7 Sutras of Innovation – Nikhil Inamdar

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    This book by Nikhil was sponsored by the Marico Innovation Foundation to study the scaling up of eight organizations to emerge as the top player in their own fields. No, it was not intentional that I went out searching for another book by Nikhil Inamdar the same year. It is just one of the coincidences.

    Given the mandate of talking about these eight ventures, I think Nikhil has done a great job of presenting the stories of the eight ventures. I loved reading the stories of the following eight companies in the book: Tanbo Imaging, Goonj, Rivigo, ISRO, Forus Health, Agastya International Foundation, The Better India, and St Judes.

    The academician in me, however, began asking the question, so what? What could we extract from these eight that we could generalize? This is one layer that I would have loved to see in this book. I understand it may not have been the objective of the book, but I feel it would have given it a sense of direction having read the stories.

    Happy Reading!