Finance Secrets of Billion-Dollar Entrepreneurs
Publisher,FIU Business Press
Publication Date,
Format, Paperback
Weight, 420 g
No. of Pages,
“This book delivers clear thinking for entrepreneurs who want to control their own destiny and grow their business without the need for venture capital.” -Joel Cannon, co-founder and president of Cannon Technologies
An analysis of success. Award-winning professor of entrepreneurship Dileep Rao presents readers with a detailed guide to success through his interviews and analysis of billion-dollar entrepreneurs (those who built a venture from startup to more than $1 billion in sales and valuation) and 100 million-dollar entrepreneurs (startup to $100 million).
Build your business without venture capital (VC) funding. Rao is here to show entrepreneurs that it is possible to start a business without outside help. He shares how more than 90 percent of America’s billion-dollar entrepreneurs in the VC era (since 1946) avoided or delayed VC, and instead used finance-smart expertise―skills that combine business-smart, capital-smart, and leadership-smart strategies.
The right mix of internal and external financing. It takes more than one person to grow a business from the bottom up. But that doesn’t mean we have to sacrifice control of the venture in the process. Armed with 23 years of experience as a financer, Rao shows readers how to optimize internal financing so as to attract external financing. By keeping control of the venture, entrepreneurs keep more of the wealth, as well.
In Finance Secrets of Billion-Dollar Entrepreneurs learn about:
- Pre-financing, financing and post-financing skills and strategies of finance-smart entrepreneurs
- The ins and outs of venture finance, applicable to anyone looking to start a business
- Tips on increasing capital productivity and attaining financially sustainable entrepreneurship
Very interesting book. Seeing VC as not the goal but a tool to be cautios about is a pretty novel idea in the literature. Goes into quite a bit of detail about alternative financing sources (Working capital, leases and loans among others) and the perils of VC. It also gives useful tools about business planning.
The main argument of the book is that the long years of large negative cashflows to finance growth is not a viable strategy for 99% of startups and is not even needed to achieve "success", instead ghe book argues startups should focus on building a sustainable business and achieving positive cashflow and only then turning to VCs to finance expansion. Like many other business books, it has a few interesting ideas but repeats them over and over again.