Building a business is like playing a video game, the first time it's scary as hell; customers don't pay, employees leave, your investors make your boss the chief operating officer and then fire you. Hence, it is not surprising when first-time founders die at level one.
The author tells us that one of the most valuable things he has learned about startups is that it's dangerous to be alone; you want to have people around you who have been through this before, and want to openly share their experience with you. This book is a really long cheat code, it addresses issues that founders don't usually talk about: money, depression, failures. He wrote it so that you don't have to repeat the same mistakes that he made; the book’s mission is to help through anecdotes, statistics and harsh self-criticism.
Fishkin is not a programmer and his company was not born in Silicon Valley. When he started, he did not know any investors he could turn to to could ask for money, and he had never worked in a technology startup. After several tries and mistakes, false steps, and disappointments, he became the CEO of a thriving software company made up of investors, employees, and clients. Since 2017, his company Moz is a $45 million annual revenue B2B software provider that creates products for professionals who want to help their clients with SEO (Search Engine Optimization), they create software for marketers who use their tools to help websites come out on top in search engines.
The Moz story is not the story of an overnight billion-dollar success, it is halfway between the success of Facebook and the failure of Secret.
