I started my own business a year ago, and that has opened up a new genre of books for me to devour: founder stories. This is one of the best out there, I believe. I had no idea that Nike was born from one man's passion for shoes. I never even thought about how Nike began. Learning about Phil Knight's love of running and shoes and how tiny Nike was when he first started it was inspiring. I loved how his team stayed with him over the years and were a collection of eccentric shoe dogs. It also taught me a lot about the foundations of a great business. It has given me confidence just to get out there and tell people about my own company, Hembury Books, and why I am passionate about self-publishing. It's that simple, and that hard.
'A refreshingly honest reminder of what the path to business success really looks like ... It's an amazing tale' Bill Gates
'The best book I read last year was Shoe Dog, by Nike's Phil Knight. Phil is a very wise, intelligent and competitive fellow who is also a gifted storyteller' Warren Buffett
In 1962, fresh out of business school, Phil Knight borrowed $50 from his father and created a company with a simple mission: import high-quality, low-cost athletic shoes from Japan. Selling the shoes from the boot of his Plymouth, Knight grossed $8000 in his first year. Today, Nike's annual…
This is an amaxing book. It was like visiting a parallel universe, to travel alongside Robert Iger during his years at the helm of a corporate behemoth like Disney. I just found it so eye-opening, and in many ways, terrifying. When a company gets that large, the decision making process can be really centralised - which is something Iger successfully changed. Learning how Iger and Steve Jobs collaborated to fix the fallout between Pixar and Disney was fascinating, and the friendship between Jobs and Iger was beautiful. Iger seems like an incredible person and I am in awe of him.
'One of the best business books I've read in years.' BILL GATES THE #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER A SUNDAY TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR 2019 _____________________________
The CEO of Disney, one of Time's most influential people of 2019, shares the ideas and values he embraced to reinvent one of the most beloved companies in the world and inspire the people who bring the magic to life.
Robert Iger became CEO of The Walt Disney Company in 2005, during a difficult time. Morale had deteriorated, competition was intense, and technology was changing faster than at any time in the company's…
This book features interviews with some of the superstars of Silicon Valley, including Sam Altman and Marc Andersson. They share insights on scaling a startup from 10 to 10,000 people. It fascinates me how a company can grow so fast it can break. There were some terrific insights on hiring and firing (hire slow, fire fast) and I appreciated what felt like very frank insights on what founders need to do during those critical early years. As a founder of a hybrid publishing company, Hembury Books, I soaked up every morsel of knowledge I could, while also wistfully realising that my own pace of growth is a lot, lot slower.
High Growth Handbook is the playbook for growing your startup into a global brand.
Global technology executive, serial entrepreneur, and angel investor Elad Gil has worked with high-growth tech companies including Airbnb, Twitter, Google, Stripe, and Square as they've grown from small companies into global enterprises.
Across all of these breakout companies, Gil has identified a set of common patterns and created an accessible playbook for scaling high-growth startups, which he has now codified in High Growth Handbook. In this definitive guide, Gil covers key topics, including:
The role of the CEO
Managing a board
Recruiting and overseeing an executive…
"Jessica Mudditt's love letter to backpacking has every classic backpacker experience. On the banana pancake trail there are fried tarantulas in Cambodia and bia hoi (fresh beer) in Vietnam, followed by linguistic confusion in China, the odd stomach upset, a touch of altitude sickness and if it gets cold – well, there’s always some hunk to share your sleeping bag with. In fact, as every backpacker is likely to confirm, the kindness of strangers is generally on call.” – Tony Wheeler, founder of Lonely Planet
