Writing Survival To Thrival
The book is finally here!
Over the last several years, Bob Tinker and I have been writing a book about building enterprise startups. Sometimes, it meant writing on family vacations.
Survival To Thrival isn’t a hero’s journey.
The book hopes to help enterprise entrepreneurs make sense of the chaos and anticipate what’s next.
The book is a mind meld of a 15-year entrepreneur-investor team and dozens of enterprise entrepreneurs who all struggled through the journey to build enterprise startups. Over 15-years together with help from many others, we built two successful enterprise startups; the first (Airespace) was bought by Cisco for $450 million, and the second (MobileIron) went public in 2014.
We started writing down stories of what worked, what didn’t work, what we saw others do and what we wished we had known. Then, we sat down with other entrepreneurs, such as the founders and CEOs of Box, Citrix, Engagio, Marketo, RallyTeam, SendGrid, Veritas, and Zuora. They pitched in and shared their stories and lessons learned. Many of the stories paralleled our own, others illustrated unique differences.
The stories spanned the stages of the enterprise startup journey — founding, finding product market fit, unlocking growth, acceleration, and beyond. Two problems kept recurring: 1) Why do so many enterprise companies reach Product-Market Fit and get stuck? and 2) Why does moving from stage to stage unleash so much pain for startups and their teams? Those questions became the pillars of the Survival to Thrival series.
Writing the books was harder than we both anticipated. We tested and re-tested the book with many enterprise entrepreneurs. It was just like building and releasing a product! Surprisingly, one of the hardest tasks was reconciling our points of view. Given we worked together for 15 years, we thought we had very similar perspectives and takeaways from the enterprise startup journey. While that was often the case, we were surprised at how often we had different takeaways from the exact same situation. Part of it is our personalities. Bob is a practical midwesterner and “punch-line guy.” Tae Hea is an applied math major who sees patterns and frameworks across his portfolio. Another is a real reflection of the different perspectives from each side of the entrepreneur-investor relationship: Bob is the three-time enterprise entrepreneur and CEO, and Tae Hea is a long-time enterprise venture capitalist and board member.
We hope you like the book!