Lost and Founder

A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World

By: Rand Fishkin

Narrated by: Rand Fishkin

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of Lost and Founder written and read by Rand Fishkin.


Everyone knows how a startup story is supposed to go: a young, brilliant entrepreneur has an cool idea, drops out of college, defies the doubters, overcomes all odds, makes billions and becomes the envy of the technology world.

This is not that story.

Rand Fishkin, the founder and former CEO of Moz, is one of the world's leading experts on SEO. Moz is now a $45 million a year business, but Fishkin's business and reputation took 15 years to grow, and his startup began not in a Harvard dorm room but as a mother-and-son family business that fell deeply into debt.

Now Fishkin pulls back the curtain on tech startup mythology, exposing the ups and downs of startup life that most CEOs would rather keep secret. For instance: a minimally viable product can be destructive if you launch at the wrong moment. Growth hacking may be the buzzword du jour, but initiatives to your business can fizzle quickly. Revenue and profitability won't protect you from layoffs. And venture capital always comes with strings attached.

In Lost and Founder Fishkin reveals the mostly awful, sometimes awesome truth about startup culture with the transparency and humour that his hundreds of thousands of blog readers have come to love. Fishkin's hard-won lessons are applicable to any kind of business environment and this book can help solve your problems, and make you feel less alone for having them.

Worth every second of your time!

loved it. he was so honest. thanks a lot your candidness. So much of the book resonated with me that it felt written especially for me!

Better than i expected.

Thanks Rand for the honestly. More people should take the time to organize their thoughts like this. it seemed to be used for Rand and it's helped me ask some useful questions in my business before going too far down the path. high five Rand!

Fantastic candid sharing

Love how Rand shares all the candid lessons learnt, stuffs that you don't usually read about in other books. While most writers try to inspire with generic and common knowledge stuffs, Rand talks about thoughts and experiences that founders would usually be too embarrassed to reveal or admit.

Very good & honest feedback on starting a company

Story was good and engaging, last bit was a bit to techy and less about startups as whole. But very relevant and enjoyable