Several weeks back Brad Feld (Foundry Group) and David Cohen (Techstars) started a book tour to promote their book - Brad writes about the process on his blog. One of the first events of the tour was held at Silicon Valley Bank's Palo Alto office - Brad and David talked a little about the writing exercise, answered questions, and passed out copies of the book to attendees. Last week David Cohen made a polite follow up request for reviews, so here is mine.

Brad Feld is a Managing Director at the Foundry Group (Boulder, CO), a venture capital company, and with David Cohen founded TechStars. Techstars is a 13 week mentorship-driven seed stage investment program which runs several times a year, in, now, 4 US cities, having started in Boulder. The book is a lot like a collection of blog posts - it draws on the experiences of the people who attended Techstars, and on the people who mentored and invested in them. If you've followed me @vcwatch on Twitter, the intended audience is the same - people starting companies, people operating small technology companies, people looking for investors, investors looking for teams and ideas, particularly seed-stage companies.

The contents include how to identify ideas which might turn into a product, how to tell when you should change your mind about what you are doing, finding a co-founder and a team, measuring what you are doing, fundraising, legal, and how to have a life as well as start a company. If you intend to apply to TechStars, you should read this book, since the other applicants will have, and it gives you a head start on the process.

TechStars, and this book, are as Brad acknowledged about a very specific kind of business - one where the customers can be reached via the Internet, and where it is possible to get to a point where value is demonstrated in less than 3 months. It's not clear whether the mentorship and small amount of funding model applies to businesses which require a larger scale implementation to tell whether they are viable. Biotech and cleantech businesses, for example, or anything which requires new ASICs, take much more money and much more time to show a return.

If your first books about business were 'A Passion for Excellence', Tom Peters, pub 1984, and or 'Thriving on Chaos', Tom Peters, pub 1987, and you haven't been paying attention to very small startup businesses in the last 5 years, you can catch up by reading 'Do More Faster' - and by thinking about what is implied for the dynamics of business by the kind of companies described here. The ideas are sometimes very limited, and the company lifetime short - some of the companies funded in 2007 at the first TechStars have been acquired and their founders are investing in other newer companies.

Another group who should read this book are people working for governments which would like to see the same kind of small company ecosystem described here in their jurisdiction - and they should notice that the book says nothing at all about government assistance. There's a short section on the choice of state law in the US (found the company in Delaware, not any of the other 50 states), and on picking a lawyer. There's no government support mentioned, nor required. Implicitly, it is fairly straightforward to found and operate a company in the US, and if it isn't at least as easy to do that in your jurisdiction companies will want to move away from you, diminishing tax take and the possibility that successful founders will do the trick again, while employing people who might also catch the company formation bug.

The book has a decent index, and has very few typographical errors - unusual for first time authors.

It is worth the time to read, to get perspective on the kinds of ideas which have been the kernel of new companies, and the accelerated process by which those companies fail and succeed.

Cunning Systems evaluates product and service ideas in computing and communications. If you would like to discuss an idea, contact us at info@cunningsystems.com

References

About Do More Faster
Brad's blog - about the book
About TechStars