Dileep Rao - Finance Secrets of Billion-Dollar Entrepreneurs: Venture Finance without Venture Capital

Praise for Finance Secrets of Billion-Dollar Entrepreneurs

Dileeps research supports the failure of our venture capital system and the success of bootstrapping! His work reaffirms that the skills needed to be successful as an entrepreneur are learned, and when acted upon, produce real results in starting a successful business.

Ed Flaherty, Founder of Rapid Oil Change

With the voice of an entrepreneur, the insight of a scholar and the wisdom of experience, Rao provides a clear road map for how entrepreneurs can grow successful companies while maintaining control of their ventures!

Dr. Raymond Smilor , Emeritus Professor of Entrepreneurship, Neeley School of Business, TCU

Dileep Raos Finance Secrets of Billion-Dollar Entrepreneurs provides entrepreneurs practical guidance on how to scale their business via finance-smart strategies without giving up unnecessary control. Id consider this a must-read for anyone with entrepreneurial spirit looking to establish a successful, long-term enterprise!

Phil Krump, Head of Strategic Growth & Operations | Expansion Markets, BMO Harris Bank

A good idea with a finance-smart plan is invaluablethats what makes Dr. Raos book invaluable.

Dr. Stephen T. Barnett, Fulbright Specialist, SCORE Mentor, Visiting Professor, Management Center Innsbruck, Austria, and Marketing Professor Emeritus, Stetson University

Finance Secrets of Billion-Dollar Entrepreneurs helps entrepreneurs develop a road map to their start-up dreams. This book shows them how Americas billion-dollar entrepreneurs created wealth and kept more of itwithout losing it all to investors and VCs, and how you can, too. Having financed more than four hundred businesses and real-estate projects and managed five turnaround ventures, Dileep Rao knows venture financing and venture turnarounds first-hand. To write this book, he interviewed and analyzed eighty-seven-billion-dollar entrepreneurs who built their businesses from start-up to more than one billion dollars in sales and valuation (and interviewed twenty-three hundred-million-dollar entrepreneurs). His findings are documented in this book. Read it to learn how to take off without venture capital.

William Rudelius, University of Minnesota marketing professor and coauthor of twenty-four editions of business textbooks

This book delivers clear thinking for entrepreneurs who want to control their own destiny and grow their business without the need for venture capital.

Joel Cannon, cofounder and president of Cannon Technologies and serial technology company entrepreneur

Succeeding as an entrepreneur requires capital-efficient, not capital-intensive, financial management. Among the secrets Rao unveils: Founders rarely benefit by acquiring venture capital early in the lifecycle of their start-up. Finance Secrets of Billion-Dollar Entrepreneurs is a how-to guide for finance-smart innovators, replete with examples from Amazon to Zara.

Tariq Samad, Sr. Fellow, Technological Leadership Institute, University of Minnesota

In his new book, Finance Secrets of Billion-Dollar Entrepreneurs , Dileep Rao breaks an age-old myth that in order to be really successful, entrepreneurs need venture capital. He not only dispels the myth but demonstrates how entrepreneurs can be even more successful by not going down the VC path. Dileeps book is must-read material for every business owner looking to build their empire.

Brian Moran, CEO, Small Business Edge

Rao writes for the entrepreneur for whom extreme wealth and extreme control of his or her business are of equal importance. Raos genius is in his rock-solid understanding of the kind of thinking needed, the kinds of choices that need to be made and the tactics that make it possible to go big but to go it on your own. His approach isnt easy, but his writing makes it all clear and with that clarity provides the path to possibility for the entrepreneur who reads this book.

Jerome Katz, Brockhaus Chair in Entrepreneurship, Chaifetz School of Business, Saint Louis University

[Fastenal] grew with the skills and strategies noted in this book. Dr. Rao has done a wonderful job of analyzing my experience and that of many other unicorn-entrepreneurs in the US. And he has put together a book that everyone should read if they want to know how to build a growth venture, even a billion-dollar venture, and do it with internal cash flow and capital they control. I know the world has changed since I started Fastenal and that there are more venture capitalists today. But as this book shows, very few entrepreneurs get venture capital, and even fewer succeed with it or gain from it. Your best option is to get the skills and use the smart strategies noted by Dr. Rao in this book. Good luck.

Bob Kierlin, cofounder of Fastenal

Venture Finance without Venture Capital

Dileep Rao

Coral Gables

Copyright 2020 Dileep Rao

Cover Design: Roberto Nu ez

Interior Layout Design: Jermaine Lau

Published by FIU Business Press, an imprint of Mango Publishing Group, a division of Mango Media Inc.

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Finance Secrets of Billion-Dollar Entrepreneurs: Venture Finance without Venture Capital

ISBN: (p) 978-1-64250-199-5 (e) 978-1-64250-200-8

BISAC: BUS025000, BUSINESS & ECONOMICS / Entrepreneurship

LCCN: 2020940973

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher. Printed in the United States of America.

Table of Contents

This isnt just another book on entrepreneurship. If you are reading this, chances are you are looking for a how-to on financing your dream enterprise OR you are a successful entrepreneur looking for the right way to grow your venture. Not only does Dileep Rao give entrepreneurs a clear and no-nonsense road map to financing ventures in Finance Secrets of Billion-Dollar Entrepreneurs , but he does so while asking you to look beyond conventional wisdom, using methods aimed at keeping you in the drivers seat.

The road to the pinnacle of entrepreneurship can seem like a steep climb. While it does take a lot of hard work to carry your venture from concept to thriving reality, the wrong decisions in key momentsespecially when you are looking to grow and expandcan result in all your hard work going down the drain. This books key message of delaying or completely avoiding external financing (VC)not only to successfully fund and grow your business, but to do so while staying in controlis one of many smart strategies outlined and explained in detail by Dileep in Finance Secrets that resonates with me.

The road to becoming CEO of a successful multi-million-dollar company started in college. In 2004, with just $375 and a need to pay my out-of-state tuition, I built a merchandise liquidation company. Eventually, I was working with huge companies like Macys and CVS. My business grew with internal financing, and, when I saw the opportunity in the subscription beauty-box business in 2013, I took it. I was able to count on my previous growth to start BoxyCharm. I was not interested in copying what others were doing. As Dileep points out in his study of successful entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, among others, I knew the key to capitalizing on an emerging trend was to stand out by improving what was being offered to the consumer.