{"product_id":"the-venture-mindset-isbn-9780593714232","title":"The Venture Mindset","description":"\u003cb\u003eA NATIONAL BESTSELLER \u0026amp; \u003ci\u003eFINANCIAL TIMES\u003c\/i\u003e BUSINESS BOOK OF THE MONTH\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Full of powerful, practical lessons on changing how we think and act.\" –Eric Schmidt, former CEO and Chairman of Google\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e\"A must-read for board members, executives, and investors.” – Amy Bance, investor and Fortune 500 Board Member\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Venture Mindset \u003c\/i\u003eis a playbook on how to adapt to a rapidly changing world, make smarter bets, launch new ventures, and transform traditional organizations into hubs for innovation, from a top Stanford professor and a technology executive.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Venture capitalists are known for their extraordinary ability to spot opportunities. They know how to identify emerging trends, how to bring new industries into being, and when to hold them and when to fold. Their unique mindset has made them the force behind world-changing companies such as Amazon, Google, Moderna, SpaceX, and Zoom.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Stanford Professor Ilya Strebulaev has devoted two decades to studying VCs’ counterintuitive approaches to decision-making and the reasons behind the successes and failures of corporate innovations. Alex Dang has witnessed up close how VCs’ thinking and mechanisms can create successful businesses at companies like Amazon and McKinsey. \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Combining their insight and extensive experience, they present nine distinct principles that will help you make better decisions, transform your business, and achieve remarkable results, no matter your industry. \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e In \u003ci\u003eThe Venture Mindset\u003c\/i\u003e, you’ll learn: \u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e •         One question VCs ask that will change the way you evaluate opportunities\u003cbr\u003e •         Why you should encourage dissent and be wary of consensus\u003cbr\u003e •         The number one killer of innovation in traditional corporate environments \u003cbr\u003e •         Why it’s crucial to learn when to ‘pull the plug’ on initiatives \u003cbr\u003e •         Why failure is not just an option, but a necessity\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e Packed with entertaining stories and scientific precision, \u003ci\u003eThe Venture Mindset\u003c\/i\u003e is a must-read for anyone who wants to be better equipped for the era of uncertainty when industry, company, and career can be disrupted overnight. \u003ci\u003eThe Venture Mindset \u003c\/i\u003ewill teach you more than how to simply survive. It’ll teach you how to win big. | “\u003ci\u003eThe Venture Mindset \u003c\/i\u003edistills how we — as corporations and individuals — can apply tenets from venture capital to our own lives, transforming traditional organizations into hubs for innovation. The book is full of powerful, practical lessons on changing how we think and act. The authors share many of the lessons I learned the hard way over decades in technology. I found this a digestible, propulsive, and insightful read for those within and beyond the walls of Silicon Valley.”\u003ci\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e-Eric Schmidt\u003c\/b\u003e, former CEO and Chairman of Google\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e \"With artificial intelligence shaking up a broad sweep of industries, [Strebulaev's and Dang's] advice — part self-help and part executive coaching, articulated with extended case studies — is well timed.\" \u003cbr\u003e-\u003ci\u003e\u003cb\u003eFinancial Times\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Reserve a spot for this book next to \u003ci\u003eBuilt to Last\u003c\/i\u003e. Together they provide a powerful guide for a new generation of leaders.”\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e-Jerry Porras\u003c\/b\u003e, co-author of bestseller \u003ci\u003eBuilt to Last\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “A compelling playbook for founders of startups and executives seeking to infuse large corporations with the venture mindset. Crisp, practical, and laden with rich examples.” \u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e-Hayagreeva Rao\u003c\/b\u003e, Professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business and \u003ci\u003eWall Street Journal\u003c\/i\u003e bestselling author of \u003ci\u003eScaling Up Excellence\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “Venture investors constantly search for ways to deliver asymmetric impact. This important book will appeal to anyone who wants to apply the VC mindset to their organizations. Insightful, accessible, and important.”\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e-Joel Peterson\u003c\/b\u003e, former chairman of JetBlue\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “Strebulaev and Dang really know their stuff – and they deliver their insights and advice with remarkable clarity.”\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e-Jerry Yang\u003c\/b\u003e, founding Partner AME Cloud Ventures, co-founder of Yahoo!\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “Read this book NOW! It is a very important book for corporations and investors.”\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e-Claudia Fan Munce\u003c\/b\u003e, chairwoman of Global Corporate Venturing, Board Member of BestBuy\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “A terrific insight into what business leaders can learn from the venture capital mindset. Strebulaev and Dang have deep knowledge of the way VCs and corporate innovators think and their impact on the modern economy. Their book is an invaluable guide.”\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e-Lionel Barber\u003c\/b\u003e, former Editor of \u003ci\u003eFinancial Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “Practical, entertaining, and inspiring.”\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e-Sebastian Gunningham\u003c\/b\u003e, former Oracle, Apple, and Amazon senior executive\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “A must read for CEOs on how to launch a successful corporate VC initiative.” \u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e-Carlos Brito\u003c\/b\u003e, CEO of Belron, former CEO of AB InBev\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “Many principles mentioned in the book helped us build Zoom, and they will help you as well.”\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e-Eric S. Yuan\u003c\/b\u003e, founder \u0026amp; CEO, Zoom\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e “It is a must read for board members, executives, and investors.”\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e-Amy Banse\u003c\/b\u003e, investor and Fortune 500 Board Member | \u003cb\u003eIlya Strebulaev\u003c\/b\u003e is the foremost academic expert on venture capital. As the founder of the Venture Capital Initiative and a Professor of Private Equity and Finance at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, where he teaches a popular class on venture capital, his research has been widely published in leading academic journals and featured in the \u003ci\u003eWall Street Journal\u003c\/i\u003e, the \u003ci\u003eNew York Times\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eBloomberg\u003c\/i\u003e and the \u003ci\u003eHarvard Business Review\u003c\/i\u003e. He frequently leads workshops and executive sessions for senior business and government leaders around the world and has consulted for companies and investors on the venture industry trends and corporate innovation. In 2023 he was named a Top Voice on LinkedIn. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAlex Dang \u003c\/b\u003eis a CEO, a senior technology executive, and an advisor on innovation and digital strategy. He has two decades of senior leadership as a Partner at McKinsey and Ernst \u0026amp; Young, and as a product leader at Amazon, where he designed and launched numerous new businesses and solutions for millions of customers across ecommerce, supply chain, and AI. He graduated from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. | \u003cb\u003ePREFACE\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e What is the next big thing that will transform industries, make established companies redundant, and change the world? This book is about the people who answer these questions for a living. They are venture capitalists (VCs), the masterminds behind the most innovative organizations surrounding us. Every day, VCs seek and find innovative ideas. And they do so with extraordinary success. They identify big ideas and amazing teams and help to turn them into Amazon, Apple, Google, Tesla, Netflix, Moderna, or SpaceX. VCs find and fund the future. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBut this book is \u003ci\u003enot \u003c\/i\u003eabout how to be a successful venture investor. It’s about how \u003ci\u003eevery \u003c\/i\u003edecision maker—in \u003ci\u003eany \u003c\/i\u003esector—can up their game and help their company reach new heights by learning from venture investors, those masters of innovation. This book teaches you to spot new opportu- nities, nurture the right talent, foster a culture of innovation, and take calculated risks in order to achieve extraordinary growth. How? By developing and using the Venture Mindset. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe Venture Mindset is a new mental model where failure is a must, due diligence is put on its head, dissent is encouraged, ideas are rejected in their myriads in search of a single winner, plugs are pulled, and time horizons are extended. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWe, a Stanford professor and a technology executive, have studied the Venture Mindset for many years and have identified ways to apply it in organizations that want to leap forward and outrun the competition. Over the last decade we have developed the Nine Principles of the Venture Mindset and created a Playbook to introduce these principles to any organization. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWe wrote this book in Silicon Valley, where the heartbeat of innovation is heard loud and clear, but it is intended for people far beyond this innovation epicenter. Disruptive innovation knows no borders and should not be limited to VC funds and VC-backed companies.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eNow is the time for \u003ci\u003eyou \u003c\/i\u003eto use the Venture Mindset to find and fund the next breakout success, no matter your industry or geography. In a small factory or an office tower. In marketing or in supply chain. What matters the most is the right mindset. The Venture Mindset.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eINTRODUCTION\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e What is Saasbee and why does it matter? \u003cb\u003e \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e It was November 2012, and three venture capitalists, Sachin Deshpande, Patrick Eggen, and Nagraj Kashyap, were facing a decision: Should they invest $500K in a small startup called Saasbee?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Earlier in the year, through the prolific Silicon Valley angel investor Bill Tai, Kashyap was introduced to the founder of Saasbee, who was promising to revolutionize the way people did videoconferencing in the post-PC era. The name Saasbee came from SaaS, which stands for “software as a service,” plus the hardworking insect. Kashyap led Qualcomm Ventures, the investment arm of a large semiconductor manufacturer, charged with putting money into promising startups. At Qualcomm’s headquarters in San Diego, Kashyap and his team invested in more than 300 startups all over the world. One day the team would evaluate nano-technology in Korea; the next, they might be trying to make sense of a Brazilian software startup. Kashyap was accustomed to hearing extraordinary claims of guaranteed success from every single entrepreneur he met. Was this time different?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e In 2012, the competition in video communications was already tough. WebEx, a unit of Cisco, a telecommunications giant, was a mighty incumbent with millions of registered users. Skype had been purchased by Microsoft the previous year. Google was working to improve the Hangout feature of Google Plus. The web-hosted service GoToMeeting had re- cently expanded to accommodate larger audiences. And there were recent startups such as the well-funded BlueJeans Network and Fuzebox to contend with.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Saasbee’s founder argued that his small startup would successfully outdo them all, even WebEx. But as of November 2012, Saasbee did not have a single paying customer. Besides, it was 2012 and people preferred in-person meetings or simply picking up a phone.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e The founder of Saasbee, a Chinese-born engineer with imperfect English, had moved to Silicon Valley a dozen years earlier. After his arrival in the United States, WebEx recruited him, and he stayed on when Cisco acquired the company in 2007. But he left Cisco after management turned down his pitch to develop a smartphone-friendly videoconferencing tool. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWas Saasbee as good as the founder claimed it was? To learn more, Kashyap turned to his colleague Sachin Deshpande. “Could you look into this?” he said. “You’re our video guy. Have a good look.” Deshpande had cofounded a TikTok-style video startup that Qualcomm acquired in 2010, and he had devoted a lot of time and energy to understanding the burgeoning video space, which he was very passionate about.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “I was in love after the first call with the founder,” Deshpande told us in an interview. He flew to the San Francisco Bay Area to meet the founder two days after the call. With his experience in the video space, Deshpande could see how Saasbee differed from the competition. Video was the single hardest application to get working over a mobile interface, and yet as he clicked the button, the video stream was clear and without any interruption or delays. Deshpande then switched to his phone and voilà— the picture was smaller but it was of the same quality as the one on his laptop. The product worked wonderfully. Awed by the founder’s inside-out knowledge of the videoconferencing market, Deshpande flew back to San Diego. “This is beyond special,” he told Kashyap. “We have to put $5 million into Saasbee.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Deshpande was joined in this meeting by his colleague Patrick Eggen. A liberal arts major with no knowledge of finance, Eggen underwent a baptism by fire working 100 hours a week in a large investment bank in London. Afterward, he went back to school for an MBA. Most of his job interviews were with hedge funds and classic investment management companies. Then he was invited to become a junior team member at Qualcomm Ventures, where he became, as Deshpande called him to us, “a creative seed financing whiz.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Qualcomm was based in San Diego, but in 2010 Eggen moved to Silicon Valley, where he quickly became a deal junkie, sourcing startups for his colleagues’ due diligence. Eggen was impressed by the Saasbee founder’s obsession with building a superior product. After their second meeting at a Philz Coffee shop in downtown San Francisco’s SoMa district, Eggen thought the Saasbee founder was a pretty good salesman too. “What a technical virtuoso with natural sales chops,” Eggen exclaimed to us years later.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e In early October 2012, Kashyap and the team flew in from San Diego to Qualcomm’s Silicon Valley office to meet with six startups in one day, Saasbee among them. According to some participants, as the demo was about to begin, the connectivity failed. The founder said, “Hey, I’m just down the road.” So they all went to Saasbee’s small office, where a seamless demo across many devices made Kashyap realize immediately that the total addressable market could be huge.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Now all three were pushing for Qualcomm Ventures to become the lead investor in Saasbee, with a sizable commitment of at least $3 million. Within a week, Deshpande and Kashyap presented the opportunity to the rest of the ventures team, its investment committee. There were no other takers. Every other team member felt uncomfortable investing in Saasbee. Kashyap, Deshpande, and Eggen were disappointed but not entirely surprised by their colleagues’ doubts. They saw too much uncertainty and too many red flags. Not only was the videoconferencing space already crowded, but Saasbee was trying to target small businesses, a tough market to break into. The technical differentiation from other players was not clear-cut. The founder’s imperfect command of English was a distraction. And the proposed valuation of $20 million seemed very high for a startup with one founder, a team of China-based engineers, and not one single customer. The skepticism was buttressed by the uncomfortable fact that at least eight other VC firms had passed on funding Saasbee. Why? They all had expensive Cisco TelePresence rooms with high-speed internet in their offices. If you have a private driver, it’s easy to underestimate the potential of Uber.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e The rejection would have been the end of the story—if not for one distinctive feature of Qualcomm Ventures’ operation: there was a side path- way for unconventional deals of this kind. In 2010, an early-stage fund was created for smaller and often riskier investments. “Of course, it was not legally a real fund per se,” Kashyap recollected to us years later, “but conceptually it was.” The underlying idea was to invest small amounts of money at high velocity without much bureaucracy. Eggen was leading this early-stage fund and was therefore authorized to make investments of up to $500,000 from the preapproved capital pool, all by himself. Of course, this freedom came with greater responsibility should his selected investment fail.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Thus, the three of them had a backdoor way to pursue an unorthodox deal. They could put $500K of Qualcomm’s money into Saasbee despite the opposition from the rest of the team. But was the risk worth it?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Kashyap and Eggen ended up making the bet, supported by Deshpande. It has turned out to be by far the best investment, dollar for dollar, in the history of Qualcomm Ventures, and it helped to transform the daily routines of hundreds of millions of people worldwide. You’re probably one of those people.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003eHere’s Why You Haven’t Heard of Saasbee\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e You know this videoconferencing company, but by a different name. It was initially founded as Saasbee in 2011, but by the time Qualcomm got involved in late 2012, the company’s founder, Eric Yuan, had changed the name to Zoom Video Communications.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Yes, that Zoom. The Zoom that got millions of us through the gray days of COVID-19 lockdowns. The Zoom that—thanks to the trio of perceptive investors—Qualcomm owned 2 percent of when it went public in 2019 at a valuation of more than $9 billion, reaching a market capitaliza- tion of more than $150 billion at one point in 2020.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Zoom has since been touted as one of the greatest innovations of the modern era. Founder Eric Yuan has been glorified as an amazingly ambitious, forward-thinking, and visionary entrepreneur. How could Zoom, a young entrant with a very modest budget and workforce, achieve a series of revolutionary advances in video communications? How could it outcompete giants such as Cisco, Microsoft, and Google, with their huge budgets and hundreds and hundreds of talented engineers? How unique is Zoom’s story relative to other successful innovative companies? What makes them different? Did the Qualcomm VCs just get lucky?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Zoom was indeed a smashing success, but it hasn’t been the only one. Rather, it’s one of a slew of revolutionary young companies that have reached stratospheric heights and substantially transformed the world over the past fifty years. Think of Apple, Cisco, Facebook, Google, Netflix, Amazon, Uber, Tesla, SpaceX—or think of three of Qualcomm’s other investments, Noom, Cruise, and Ring. What Zoom has done to the way people interact and communicate online, these and many other companies have done in other fields, disrupting and revolutionizing industries and traditions around the globe. Many more remarkable companies are no doubt on the way—companies that nobody has heard of yet, but that have already been started in someone’s garage or bedroom.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e All these now famous success stories have something in common. All are private entities created by small entrepreneurial teams. All are quite recent. Apple, the oldest of the companies mentioned thus far, was founded in 1976. And many of them were located in or connected to California’s Silicon Valley during the most sensitive part of their early growth cycle.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e The most important feature of these companies’ trajectories, however, is how they were funded. Generally, entrepreneurs have great ideas and nowhere near enough money to implement them. Eric Yuan is a good illustration. When Yuan founded what would become Zoom, he was by no means a poor man. But to build a product that would have any chance of surviving in a crowded marketplace, much less one that could outcompete the likes of Cisco’s WebEx, he needed to raise far more funding than his personal wealth. That’s easier said than done.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e The financial system offers many options for companies seeking capital. Some companies raise equity in public markets, but the stock market prefers more mature companies with existing cash flows and reasonable expectations of future profit. Zoom had none of this when Deshpande and Eggen first met Eric Yuan. In fact, Zoom didn’t get its first paying customer, Stanford Continuing Studies, a department within Stanford University, until December 2012—and that contract was worth just $2,000. With that kind of revenue (or lack thereof), it’s hard to pass the smell test of many investors. Companies do routinely raise debt from banks and debt markets, of course—and if you, as a bank loan officer, had been ready to sign off on a loan to Zoom, your supervisor would have fired you on the spot. And your supervisor would have been making a wise move. Not only did Zoom have no revenues at the time, but it also had no collateral should it go bankrupt. Banks just can’t lend to such companies without tangible physical assets, revenues, or guarantees. Other companies get grants, and many access initial capital from family, friends, and individual investors (they’re known as “angel investors” for a good reason), as Zoom did in 2011. That capital, though, is insufficient to fund companies through their scaling-up phase.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e In short, very few people would have had both the available capital and the guts to bet on Zoom in 2012. But one type of investor did.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003eEnter Venture Capital\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e After Eggen negotiated a deal to put in $500,000 on behalf of Qualcomm Ventures, in 2014 another Silicon Valley–based firm, Emergence Capital, invested $20 million in Zoom. Two years later, when Zoom was promi- nent but not yet profitable, Sequoia Capital and others invested another $115 million.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Qualcomm Ventures, Emergence Capital, and Sequoia Capital are venture capital, or VC, funds. Until recently, VCs operated largely under the radar. Relatively small in dollar value compared to the gigantic size of the overall financial system, they are overwhelmingly located in California, primarily Silicon Valley. They specialize in investing in small, young, entrepreneurial companies. They are not household names.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e To provide some perspective, in 2014, the year when it invested in Zoom, Emergence managed less than $600 million of capital. Sequoia, one of the largest VCs out there, invested in Zoom from a fund of around $2 billion. By comparison, Vanguard, a mutual fund family, managed more than $2 \u003ci\u003etrillion \u003c\/i\u003ein assets in 2012, or about 800 times as much as the value of the Emergence and Sequoia funds combined. Until a decade or so ago, many professionals and investors had barely even heard of VC funds, a niche sector hidden far away from the world’s financial centers.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Yet VC investors make companies such as Zoom, Uber, and SpaceX possible. They invest early money in seemingly crazy ideas, and sometimes these ideas succeed spectacularly, as did the VCs who backed Google, Cisco, Facebook, Netflix, Amazon, Tesla, and most of the other splashiest new American success stories of the past several decades. Moreover, VC is now a global phenomenon. It has made possible companies such as Canva and Atlassian from Australia, Alibaba and Tencent from China, Shopee from Singapore, Mercado Libre from Argentina, and Gojek from Indonesia. VCs find and fund startup companies that are completely unknown and often consist of just a small management team and a business plan scribbled on a paper napkin.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e And yet even as awareness of VC and its importance, particularly in the tech industry, has grown, most people outside Silicon Valley—and many inside it as well—do not understand how VC firms actually function. Selecting what they consider the most promising startups out of the hundreds or even thousands vying for their money is only the first step. When VCs invest in a company, unlike Fidelity and many other investment firms, they become actively engaged in their investments and work to help the fledgling companies succeed. When Qualcomm Ventures invested in Zoom, Sachin Deshpande joined the Zoom board. In December 2014, Santi Subotovsky of Emergence Capital followed Deshpande onto the board after Emergence invested. In fact, the VCs making the largest investments in a company almost always demand a board seat as a condition of investing. They proceed to play a very active role in the life of those companies. Many attract other investors with even more capital to fuel growth.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Despite a few idiosyncrasies, Zoom’s story is not unique. In fact, it’s typical of startups that succeed. Think of Airbnb, Uber, Salesforce, or Tesla, all of which took on big, successful incumbents even though they initially had less funding, fewer resources, less support, and less experience than their mature, successful, cash-rich competitors.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e So how important has VC been since it first emerged a little more than fifty years ago? Back in 2015, Ilya and one of his PhD students at Stanford, Will Gornall, explored the funding history of every single company that had been founded since the mid-1970s and was publicly traded in the United States at the time of their research. They wanted to find out where each company got its money before its initial public offering (IPO) on the stock market.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e As it turned out, out of every 100 publicly traded firms founded since the 1970s, 50 were backed by VC funds. And using the market capitalization of each firm as our measuring stick, we found that VC-backed companies accounted for three-quarters of the total market value of all these businesses. In this regard, on July 29, 2016, a seismic (though relatively unnoticed) event took place in the business world. On that date, as Face- book surpassed Berkshire Hathaway in total market value, the top five US companies by market capitalization were all VC-backed: Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet\/Google, Amazon, and Facebook. Amid all the market gyrations in the years since 2016, these companies (more recently joined by two more VC-backed businesses, Nvidia and Tesla) were always close to the top.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Ilya and Will also made cross-national comparisons. Have you ever wondered why there are so many new, huge technology companies in the United States? Have you ever heard of a German Google, French Tesla, Japanese Amazon, Italian Facebook, British Apple, or Canadian Microsoft? No. The reason why not: venture capital. Even as the US VC industry has rapidly expanded since the late 1970s, other G7 countries did not have viable VC sectors until recently (and some arguably still don’t have them). After the rise of the US VC sector in the 1970s, the US produced twice as many new companies as all the other G7 countries combined. Ilya and Will’s research indicates that venture capitalists are causally responsible for the launch of one-fifth of the 300 largest US public companies in existence today. Moreover, they estimate that three-quarters of the largest US VC-backed companies would not have existed or achieved their current scale without VC support. This is one reason why the recent rise of global VC is so important to the future of global economies.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e To us, the data suggest persuasively that the VC industry is the leading business growth engine in the United States (and we wish more people in Washington, DC, and Sacramento would take notice!). But this book is not about patting venture capitalists on the back. This book is about how today’s decision makers—including you—can understand and apply the skills that VCs have honed and applied with such world-changing results.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e The world is changing. Before now, the protagonists at the heart of familiar stories—stories about the development of the personal computer, the commercial internet, the smartphone, social networks, plant-based meat, or privately built space rockets—have always been founders. Although we are fascinated by those unique individuals whose entrepreneurial spirit drove them to make their vision of the future a reality, they couldn’t have done it without the investors who funded their vision. VCs did more than fuel the rise of these world-changing companies with their money; they brought with them a unique approach to success and failure that has been baked into the DNA of every company they back. We call this unique way of thinking and working the Venture Mindset.\u003cbr\u003e  \u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003eThe Venture Mindset\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Our experience has taught us how different this way of thinking is from the thinking found at large corporations all over the world. The differences run the gamut of almost every decision a business faces, from hiring processes and selection of investment projects to attitudes toward incubating ideas and decision making. The Venture Mindset approaches decision making in a distinct way from traditional business managers, government leaders, regulators, and nonprofits.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe Venture Mindset didn’t originate overnight; it evolved over several decades through trial and error by generations of decision makers, many of whom were based in Silicon Valley. VCs developed this mindset because they needed a different approach to adapt, survive, and thrive in an environment that requires extreme selectivity combined with extreme flexibility. In this book, we demonstrate the many subtle yet effective ways that VCs’ unique behaviors have flourished in an ecosystem of thousands of startups, some of which went on to disrupt or create entirely new industries. We observe the companies who have successfully adopted the Venture Mindset to find astronomical success and show you how your company can achieve extraordinary results by following in their path. We explain why the traditional mindset does not, and cannot, work in environments with the high levels of uncertainty we are now facing.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Historically, all around the world, from New York to London to Mumbai to Sydney, success has been built on continuity, conservatism, and tradition. Stable growth has been a corporate and political mantra for decades. In the world of small, incremental, step-by-step innovation, sta- bility and continuity are great things. If that describes your business, you don’t need the Venture Mindset—or at least you don’t need it for those \u003ci\u003eparts \u003c\/i\u003eof your business where stability and continuity are the goals. But these can no longer be a business’s \u003ci\u003eonly \u003c\/i\u003egoals. The rapid progress of technology (in large part coming from VC-backed companies) means that no industry can truly be stable any longer. No one is immune from the possibility of disruption.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Corporate leaders know this, of course. In fact, they now overwhelmingly \u003ci\u003eexpect \u003c\/i\u003edisruption to occur in their industries. Their responses have, for the most part, been driven equally by fear and opportunity. Fear because the onslaught of disruption will make many business models and companies redundant; opportunity because people see an excellent chance to get ahead of the competition and cement their industry leadership. However, too often we encounter innovative ideas that have been pursued and built in the same way as any other business unit of a company. That is a recipe for failure. What today’s leaders too often fail to understand is that disruptive innovation must start with a different mindset.\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003e \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003ci\u003eNine Principles of the Venture Mindset\u003c\/i\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e In this book, we show modern decision makers how to apply the Venture Mindset effectively in any organization. In nine chapters, we present nine distinct ways in which the Venture Mindset succeeds where most people fail—or don’t even try. In each chapter, we identify specific takeaways and practical actions that you can implement in a traditional environment with immediate impact (see the Appendix for the list of thirty mechanisms in the Venture Mindset Playbook). We also identify more fundamental approaches that may require rethinking how your organization’s pathways are structured. We’ll even point out ways in which the Venture Mindset is applicable to many of our individual life decisions.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Looking back at Zoom’s story, we can see these principles at work. For Zoom investors, the main concern was how big","brand":"Portfolio","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":48338553929957,"sku":"NP9780593714232","price":34.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780593714232.jpg?v=1769572665","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/the-venture-mindset-isbn-9780593714232","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}