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Smartups: Lessons from Rob Ryan's Entrepreneur America Boot Camp for Start-Ups

Average customer rating:

This is worth at least 7 stars. Great book & website
In-your-face Entrepreneur Brainstorming
Boy isnýt Rob Ryan a really smart guy.
Ascend founder and evangelist - who better to ask?
Nothing New - This is a renamed version of 2001 Version

Smartups: Lessons from Rob Ryan's Entrepreneur America Boot Camp for Start-Ups
Rob Ryan
Manufacturer: Cornell University Press
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback

General | Business & Investing | Subjects | Books

Entrepreneurship | Small Business & Entrepreneurship | Business & Investing | Subjects | Books

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ASIN: 0801488311

Book Description

Building successful start-ups was never quite as easy as it seemed, and the changing economic climate has raised the stakes, reduced the margin of error. New entrepreneurs can't stumble into wealth on the power of half-formed ideas, or turn dreams into reality without doing a lot of homework. It's time to get smart. This book teaches would-be entrepreneurs the skills they need to get through the venture capital process with companies that will survive to grow and succeed.

Rob Ryan, a pioneer in the high-tech industry, founded Ascend Communications in 1989, and throughout the nineties provided firms with the infrastructure they needed to keep up with the rapid growth of the Internet. At the beginning of 1999, Ascend was sold to Lucent for $25 billion. Since retiring from Ascend and starting Entrepreneur America, Ryan has helped launch a string of successful companies, including Virtmed, RightNow, and Virtual Ink. All provide electronic solutions to real-world problems, meet existing—rather than manufactured—needs, and save their customers time and money.

In Smartups, Ryan focuses on methods he's developed over the years for building a sustainable business that makes money. He emphasizes the importance of testing ideas on customers and making sure that a product offers something new and important. Recognizing a team's key competencies is crucial, Ryan says. He also finds it necessary to take certain steps at the correct stages of a company's inception. Smartups will show you how to turn your idea into a real product, take it to investors, and get your start-up started right.

Customer Reviews:

This is worth at least 7 stars. Great book & website.......2005-05-09

I discovered Rob Ryan's web site years ago (before this book or its previous 1st edition) when I was searching for information on startups using a web search engine. There I found a well researched set of slides that would-be entrepreneurs could use when presenting to venture capitalists. He had made them free for anyone to reference online.

The concept was that you, the budding entrepreneur who wanted his help, would prepare your presentation to him before you arrived. If he liked your business idea he would help. But he found that too many budding entrepreneurs hadn't thought things through or hadn't taken their new business idea far enough along (like not having any customers and or even a product or its prototype). So this web site with its slides would fulfill this information role, and also fulfill the role of filtering out bad ideas.

Previously the author had a back injury and resigned from his CEO role at Ascend. He had started a ranch in Montana to coach engineers, more than others, wanting to get tech start-ups going. He put the slide presentation online using Microsoft Powerpoint. This was quite novel at that time.

Over time he developed this book (1st and 2nd edition) which included his recommendation for the ideal slide presentation to prospective investors in startups. It now includes much other discussion on how he developed his philosophy on startups as well as detailed discussions on the startups he's been involved with since opening his ranch in Montana. It's filled with rules, opinions, wisdom and commonly-made mistakes by start-ups. This book is particularly informative on what the entrepreneur needs to do in the early startup stage.

The author is biased in the favor of high-technology startups with engineers at its core. His focus is helping these engineers start up a company that requires capital investments from people understanding the technology and from people who demand large results (10 : 1 is a standard expectation for a venture capital deal). This means the big Silicon Valley venture capitalists primarily.

The slides from his Entrepreneur America site are annotated with his discussions about how each slide helps the entrepreneur increase his odds of having a successful startup.

The big reason to read this book is to absorb the author's unique experience and the author's strong opinions on how to put together a startup having a high probability of success. He is very practical and blunt in his advice. This is not a theoretical book, but a book written by someone who has done it before, who has consulted with others who are doing it now, and someone who cares about start-up entrepreneurs as a group.

This should be required reading for all entrepreneurs starting up a high-tech or high-growth business and certainly for all students on entrepreneurial tracks in MBA programs.

John Dunbar
Sugar Land, TX

In-your-face Entrepreneur Brainstorming.......2003-06-21

This is the newly released paperback version of Rob Ryan's earlier Entrepreneur America book. Great basic advice from a guy born in the Bronx and nurtured in the Valley who wnet on to found Ascend. Ryan pulls no punches in leading the reader (and his select entrepreneurs) on asking the hard questions about their ideas, companies and products to determine a core value propostion (and if there is one!). Definitely a must-read for anyone wanting to start a new business regardless of whether you've done it once or ten times! (So where's my autographed edition, Rob?)

Boy isnýt Rob Ryan a really smart guy........2003-04-06

I was ultimately disappointed by this book. It spent too much time emphasizing how incredibly smart a guy Rob Ryan is. It seemed very repetitious. Yes, it is written in a lighthearted style, but overall seemed like it only had enough content for a magazine article. He's been mentioned in Inc. magazine several times, which is what prompted me to buy it, but I didn't really learn that much from the book. One of the least useful of my many books on entrepreneurship. It does have a nice cover.

Ascend founder and evangelist - who better to ask?.......2003-01-30

Joining Ascend in 1991 was a risky move for me. Who the heck were they, anyway?
Then I met Rob.
The rest is history.
I've always enjoyed telling that story (usually a much longer and funnier version) to anyone interested in the Ascend tale.

The book that we are reviewing here is in typical Rob style. I can not imagine anyone else writing it this way. It's just him. "Do the Dogs like the Dog Food" - if you ever spent any time chatting with Rob, you'd easily guess that this was one of his quips.
Even if I had not read this book (which I have done a few times now), I'd probably still recommend it. Rob was, and still is, an entrepreneurs entrepreneur.

I only wish I could find him again in a new guise here in Silicon Valley - and relive those Ascend days.

Nothing New - This is a renamed version of 2001 Version.......2002-11-21

This is nothing more than a renamed paperback version of Rob's 2001 "Entrepreneur America: Lessons from Inside Rob Ryan's High-Tech Start-Up Boot Camp". The origional book gets a 5 star rating from me. (...)this was promoted as a new book, not a new printing with a different name. If you already have the earlier edition, don't waste your money on this one. If you don't, buy it and learn from Rob. My criticism is the lack of disclosure that this is a reprint and the false expectations that were built from the advertising that this actually offered new content from an author I greatly respect and will automatically purchase any of his new books.

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