I Want to Start a Business

Here is what the research actually says.

A Harvard professor went to the five hundred fastest growing companies in America and asked them how they had started. The median was around ten thousand dollars, most of it personal savings. Five per cent had venture capital. Two thirds began with no business plan at all.

Since 1980, about two companies in every thousand have raised venture capital. Two in a thousand. You have organised your ambition around an exception, and then concluded that you are failing to meet a standard.

This book is eleven chapters. One idea each, and each one ends with something you can finish in a single sitting without buying anything.

It is written by somebody who has run the experiment both ways. Diego Segura started one company on a six hundred and fifty thousand dollar cheque from an investor, and another on a kitchen mixer on a wooden table in his bedroom. The mixer won. In between, he put a construction company into bankruptcy. All three are in here with their numbers attached.

Inside:

- Why the figure in your head is comfort wearing the costume of necessity, and the one page that takes it apart

- How to get paid before you deliver, and the accounting fact that makes that money dangerous

- The gap between collecting and paying that funds a business with no capital at all

- Why you will price too low, and what the anchoring research says about the reason

- Money that is not a loan and not an investment, and why most of it is a trap

- The single division that tells you how many days of cash you have left

Every figure is checked. Where the research contradicts itself, the contradiction is printed rather than the tidier half. Where a famous statistic turns out to have no study behind it, the book says so and then refuses to use it.

Diego Segura is an industrial engineer. He holds an MBA and a master's in Digital Technology from Boston University, and he wrote the international bestseller Everything in Excess Is Good. He has worked with Stanford, Harvard, MIT and Boston University.

His method is research. Read everything published on one subject. Then report what it says, including the parts nobody wants to hear.

You do not need money to start. You need to stop waiting for a permission that nobody is coming to give you.