The Resilient Founder

Lessons in Endurance from Startup Entrepreneurs

De: Mahendra Ramsinghani, Brad Feld - foreword

Narrado por: Emmanuel Chumaceiro

In The Resilient Founder, Mahendra Ramsinghani gathers insights from more than a hundred founders to deliver an intuitive and insightful guide to understanding our psychology and navigating the psychological pressures of start-up leadership.

Venture-backed companies are expected to grow at high velocity, raise large amounts of capital, and build teams effectively to achieve unicorn - no, decacorn - status. Yet the journey is long, filled with uncertainties, extremities, and black swan events. It can wear out the best and the brightest. The role of a founder can be lonely, frustrating, and filled with high highs and low lows - all of this leading to anxiety, depression, and even suicide.

The Resilient Founder addresses the fundamentals of understanding our own inner workings and explores practical ways of overcoming our inner hurdles. Filled with simple, yet concrete strategies, lessons, and insights, founders and business leaders can work with stress, anxiety, and other mental challenges presented by the life of an entrepreneur.

In this book, listeners will learn to understand the basics of founder psychology and how our inner workings can help or hurt us; the importance of building a healthy ego, leading to resilience; and draw on the lessons of established start-up leaders on how to wrestle with their own mental and emotional challenges.

©2022 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (P)2022 Ascent Audio

Must read for every startup founder

The Resilient Founder touches on a long overdue topic that cuts through the heart of entrepreneurship — rightly so, learning to manage one’s psychology through the ups and downs of any startup journey, along with the stresses, disappointments, and even the turmoils that founders often face, is the single most important trait of any entrepreneur and the single most determining intangible variable between success and failure.

The Resilient Founder will help you manage your inner game well, so you could play the outer game well. Well before MVPs, product-market fit, and scaling, understanding and navigating your own emotions and other psychological factors, both volitional and instinctive, is fundamentally the secret weapon of great entrepreneurs and the hidden hallmark of success. This book is a great eye-opener on this topic, I hope it’s a prelude to many others that follow and dive into this paramount issue so often gets lost in the noise.

Not Just for Founders

Through the lens of Venture Capital and Start-Ups, things are bigger, larger than life, more archetypal, and as a result timeless. Though titled "The Resilient Founder", you don't need to be a Founder to reap the rewards of reading it. If you're in pursuit of capturing lightning, YES there will be more you can get out of it -- but even if you're just trying to get to the end of the week, you will discover things that work for people with very heavy problems.

The book is divided into four parts, kicking off with the perspective of what being on the brink of suicide might look like. It may seem like a dark place to begin, but the arc of the book (though nonfiction) feels almost like a Hero's Journey. Part I might be likened to a tour of "The Pit" and understanding the self-made prison (or hell) we might create for ourselves. Part II (in my opinion) could be likened to taking stock of oneself and realizing there are more opportunities to escape than you may have initially thought -- revealed through a tour of Ego, Super Ego, and Id. What's more? the internal lessons are tied to external ones -- in the context of building start-ups (but, you can probably substitute Start-Up with almost any large endeavor). Going all in on the analogy: Part III is where the prisoner, having taken stock of everything, now plans the escape, and Part IV is the finale.

While the first 3 parts give you perspective on the problem, and the "mechanics" associated with possible solutions, Part IV comes with five prescriptions to help transform yourself into an image of resilience. In a lesser book, you would just get the five prescriptions with a smattering of case studies; here you get the context necessary to view those prescriptions as Named Things for what you will start to conclude on your own.

In other words, the first three parts bring you to a place where you might be able to predict what is generally prescripted (without being able to fully articulate it)... and then in Part IV these giant ideas are distilled into the kind of solution that might just fit in your pocket.

In the context of mental heath this is an epic read -- especially for people that shy away from that sort of thing. Also, the cover of the book is pretty awesome.