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Average Customer Review:
67 of 72 people found the following review helpful:
 Its a "Good Book" but not the "Bible", 2007-03-05
This is a book with great strengths and great weaknesses. If you are a seasoned entrepreneur, this is a useful resource at a fair price. If you are just thinking about starting your first company, be wary of this book; if you use it to chart your course, it could drive you onto a reef. In the hands of the naive, it will cause a lot of damage.
Strengths:
- Comprehensive - it covers a very wide range of topics
- Honest - the book tries to be forthcoming and avoid biases
- Based on Experience - Much of the book is based on the real world
Weaknesses:
- Organization - the organization is simply awful and there are few navigation resources to help you find your way through tangled threads of thought
- Myopic - this book assumes that you want to use Venture Capital - the most expensive money on the planet
- Inconsistent Quality - this is the most severe problem (more on this below).
- Ad Hoc - beyond ad hoc organization, much of the content (tables, chapters...) is ad hoc. It's impossible to tell when a list is supposed to be a list of examples, or when it's supposed to be comprehensive.
In the hands of someone who has started companies before, this is a great handbook and could be a good coaching tool to help others. In the hands of a beginner, it would be incredibly dangerous, since the inconsistent quality makes using it a potential disaster.
Inconsistent Quality: The book lacks quality on several levels.
On the elementary level, it's full of typos. No editor is named, either because there was no editor, or because there was not a single senior editor to sign the work.
On the broad level, there are so many examples of inconsistent quality that it's hard to know what to cite. The intellectual property discussion is, for the most part, quite good, and offers valuable advice that is often omitted. But, at the same time, this discussion is very sloppy in its terminology, so the same people who need the advice could be misled.
On the "sophisticated" level, there is an odd mix of truly useful teaching, and vapid babble. This is most evident when the book quotes business schools, like Harvard. Anyone who has actually run a business and then spent time around a business school knows that many of the professors have never actually DONE anything, and they don't know that they don't know. So, you see B-schools publish books and articles that don't say anything and the authors don't seem to know they have not said anything. These are "vacuum publications" because they are void of any real content. In this book, you'd hope that the vacuum publications would be absent, but sadly there are some quoted, cited, and in some cases, even their figures
A new edition could make this a great book - you can see a great book in there somewhere.
6 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
A "real-world" startup book, for a change. Super!, 2007-02-28
As someone who worked in, worked with, and funded start-ups and now teaches the subject I've found two common categories of start-up books: those by academics that have been written in a vacuum and thus seem clinical and out of touch with reality, and those written by successful entrepreneurs who use the pages to relive their glory days. Stathis, on the other hand, balances the conceptual with the practical, providing prospective entrepreneurs with a thorough, well-rounded, yet technical step-by-step guide to starting a business. From the everyday minutiae - or what Stathis considers the boring, nevertheless crucial details - to more strategic concepts that can help ease the entry path, this book addresses the necessary tools to starting and running a new business. The appendices to the 400+ pages are a great addition, exposing entrepreneurs to what confidentiality agreements, stock option plans, etc. actually look like. This book should be not just a starting point for people considering starting/owning their own business, but a companion throughout the entrepreneurial journey. The title of Startup Company Bible is truly deserving.
4 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
Previous reviewers are spot on, 2007-01-09
This was purchased not to start a company (yet), but to increase my effectiveness in business dealings with startups. As director of business development for a pharmaceutical contract research organization (CRO), I work with VC, PE and Angel funded companies routinely to assure their product development goals are met. This book provides insight into key strategic issues on how these companies, my clients, are structured. Highly recommended.
14 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
A Solid Reference Book for Entrepreneurs, 2007-01-05
This book is a thoughtful and comprehensive summary of most every critical aspect of the start-up process. As an entrepreneur who has started several companies over the years (and as an author of a book on the subject of entrepreneurship myself), I can say that I wish that I had a copy of this book early in my entrepreneurial career. If you studied this book and came to understand its content, you would be well prepared for the start-up process.
In reality, most readers will not plow through 500 pages of material to prepare themselves to be entrepreneurs. Instead, they will get going and reference the material in this book to explore the details of their current activity (whether it's getting started, putting a team together, writing a business plan, securing a round of financing, etc.) The book also helps entrepreneurs to better anticipate next steps. The bottom line is that this is a solid reference book for entrepreneurs and one that nicely complements other books on the subject.
27 of 51 people found the following review helpful:
A solid book for those seeking angel or VC financing, 2006-07-04
There are over twelve thousand books available on the subject of entrepreneurship, ranging from the truly execrable to the really good. But Michael Stathis' The Startup Company Bible is one that I can recommend to every entrepreneur and every early stage investor.
As an active angel investor in the US, I have read dozens of books aimed at entrepreneurs. Usually I end up cringing at the misperceptions, bad advice and third-hand information they contain. The great thing about Stathis' work is that he gets everything right. And to do that over 600 pages of dealing with all the intricacies of starting and financing a business is quite an accomplishment.
If you are an entrepreneur who is considering seeking angel or venture capital financing, this book will help you understand what the picture looks like from the other side of the table, and what things you can do to strengthen your company...and thus improve your chances of getting funded.
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