A Dozen Lessons for Entrepreneurs

Tren Griffin

Nov 2017 · Columbia University Press

About this ebook

A Dozen Lessons for Entrepreneurs shows how the insights of leading venture capitalists can teach readers to create a unique approach to building a successful business. Through profiles and interviews of figures such as Bill Gurley of Benchmark Capital, Marc Andreesen and Ben Horowitz of Andreesen Horowitz, and Jenny Lee of GGV Capital, Tren Griffin draws out the fundamental lessons from their ideas and experiences. Entrepreneurs should learn from past successes but also be prepared to break new ground. While there are best practices, there is no single recipe they should follow. By better understanding the views and experiences of a wide range of successful venture capitalists and entrepreneurs, readers can discern which of many possible paths will lead to success.

With insight and verve, Griffin argues that innovation and best practices are discovered by the experimentation of entrepreneurs as they establish the evolutionary fitness of their business. The products and services created through this experimentation that have greater fitness survive, and less-fit products and services die. Entrepreneurs have always experimented when creating or altering a business. What is different today is the existence of modern tools and systems that allow experiments to be conducted more cheaply and rapidly than ever before. Griffin shows that listening to what the best venture capitalists have to say is invaluable for entrepreneurs. Their experiences, if studied carefully, teach bedrock methods and guiding principles for approaching business.

About the author

Tren Griffin works at Microsoft. He writes the www.25iq.com blog and is active on Twitter (@TrenGriffin). He was formerly a partner at Eagle River, a private equity firm controlled by Craig McCaw with investments in telecommunications and startups. From 1999 to 2001 he was vice president of strategy at XO Communications.In 1994, Griffin was the fourth person to join Teledesic, a global broadband satellite communications startup, which raised over a billion dollars at a valuation of more than $3 billion. Griffin previously worked as a consultant in Australia and Korea. He is the author of six other books, including Charlie Munger: The Complete Investor (Columbia, 2015).