Unleash Your Inner Company

Book excerpt: Unleash Your Inner Company distills John Chisholm’s four decades of successful entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley into ten steps to discover, launch, and scale the ideal business for you. You will learn how to: • Mobilize your passions and perseverance to reinforce each other and achieve your goals • Discover unsatisfied human and customer needs in those areas where you have natural advantages • Match those needs with your resources and strengths (your “STARS”) to assess which needs fit you best • Improve those fits by acquiring and developing the right resources and strengths; differentiate yourself by being not better, but different, from competitors, even well-established ones • Innovate by combining things you already know in novel ways • Partner with firms and individuals so you and your business can focus on what you do best • Evaluate your options and choose the best one for you • Launch and scale up your successful business, uniquely tailored to you and your strengths. Along the way, you will discover: • That you have many more resources and advantages for success than you realize • How and when to choose a co-founder and team members • How to avoid competitors, and thus gain time and space to get established • How to find, nurture, and ride positive feedback loops within yourself, with your team members, and among your customers • How to build and maintain your self-confidence despite setbacks • If, when, and how to raise money • How to evolve and scale your business, no matter how modest, into a large enterprise, if you so desire • When to comply with, or circumvent, or oppose regulations that impede the formation or growth of your business • What you can learn from Apple, Google, Facebook, and Uber. You will learn from the author’s mistakes—as many as he was able to squeeze into the 400 pages of this book—so you don’t make the same ones. Regardless of your background, location, interests, and passions, the timeless and universal insights, principles, anecdotes, and exercises of Unleash Your Inner Company will inspire and guide you from your first steps, through every kind of obstacle, to the ultimate success of your venture.