Zero to IPO

Over $1 Trillion of Actionable Advice from the World's Most Successful Entrepreneurs

By: Frederic Kerrest

Narrated by: Tom Parks

Length: 8 hrs and 3 mins

Publisher's summary

From the cofounder of a $40 billion software company comes an invaluable guide packed with $1 trillion worth of advice from some of the world's most successful and recognizable entrepreneurs.

Over the past twenty years, as he first worked as an early employee at Salesforce and later cofounded Okta, a publicly traded software company now valued at over $40 billion, Frederic Kerrest met hundreds of business leaders and investors in Silicon Valley and beyond. In Zero to IPO, he's collected a trove of nitty-gritty tips for each stage of a company's growth and assembled them into a clear blueprint for how to build a business. The book represents the distilled wisdom of his fellow visionaries and leaders who have collectively built over $1 trillion worth of wealth for themselves and their investors: people like Marc Andreesen and Ben Horowitz (Andreessen Horowitz), Eric Yuan (Zoom), Stewart Butterfield (Slack), Aneel Bhusri (Workday), Julia Hartz (Eventbrite), Aaron Levie (Box), Fred Luddy (ServiceNow), Melanie Perkins (Canva), Patty McCord (Netflix), Sebastien Thrun (Udacity), and dozens of other business luminaries.

Organized by topic in roughly the order that leaders will encounter them as they scale their businesses, this book is the ultimate guide to taking a company all the way from founding to IPO-and beyond.

©2022 Jacques Frederic Kerrest (P)2022 McGraw Hill-Ascent Audio

practical step by step tips

I really loved the practical nature of this book.
Even though there may be industry and regional nuances, it is definitely recommended reading for anyone planning to build a startup

Must read for anyone interested in startups!

Excellent, well rounded and fun listen on everything you’d want to know about startups! The cast of people interviewed by the author is A list of SV entrepreneurs (including the author himself)!

Great current book with tons of practice real life advice!

This is a must for technology founder with aspirations to launch and build a hyper growth company. I also recent finished Amp it Up. I mush prefer this book as it comes from a founder (a missionary) vs an operator (mercenary.)

Useful stuff for any entrepreneur

Useful stuff for any entrepreneur. You’ll want to keep dipping into this again and again.

ahh! Clarity

This is one book I had to get physical to really make sure all the main highlights are mentally digested. Good information chapter to chapter , I only wish the IPO as the section was more extended. Otherwise still a good book

Good for founder

Loved the chapter about board management - as a founder it’s very beneficial to learn how to manage a board properly.

Good stuff

Good stuff to constantly come back to if you’re starting a company. Nothing mind blowing or what isn’t already in other books, but the author offers his unique journey and overall, valuable to listen to

Worst startup advice you could ever hear, give all cofounders the same amount of shares

I was really loving this book up until it made THE single worst startup advice of all time; give all cofounders the same percentage of the company. As an experienced and very well connected entrepreneur, this is the absolute worst advice someone can give. But don’t take my word on this, go read the myriad of accounts and warnings about catastrophic consequences in startup teams with a 50/50 split. While everyone may be on the same page on day 1, life happens. Some people contribute more, some less. Life gets in the way for others (kids, partners, divorces, moving, sickness, family struggles, etc), and for others, their passion dies off and they only put forth 60% effort. An equal split is extremely unfair to the founders who stay committed through and through. Not to mention, if no one has the final say, how will you solve disagreements and log jams (they will happen)? I’ve seen people lose their entire companies and years of progress because they couldn’t solve a disagreement with a cofounder. 50/50 is absolutely terrible… do not do it! Just because it may work out occasionally, the vast majority of the time it will not.

We can do better than this.

This is just another liberal spin off of Ben Horowitz book, the hard things about hard things, I swear they used the same outline of this book just wrote along while reading Ben’s book. Choose one or the other. No need to go with both.