Reum Carter - Shortcut your startup: speed up success with unconventional advice from the trenches

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Dedication

This book was always going to be very personal for us. Weve never put anything out into the world quite like this, and we may never do so again.

However, shortly after we started writing this book, everything in our lives changed. Our father, W. Robert Reum, passed away very suddenly and unexpectedly. More than anything, he was the patriarch of our family, our oldest friend as well as an incredibly loving father and husband. He was an exemplary human being.

As devastated as weve been, we know that he would want us still to pull it together (as he used to say) and make this book that much better. So thats what weve attempted to do.

Beyond that, the book has given us a chance to reflect on our fathers influence on us as businessmen and entrepreneurs. Over the last decade, we started to share some business ventures with Dad. It was truly special to be able to learn from such a strong and humble leader and, occasionally, to be able to teach him something, too.

Our dad was all about the fundamentals and the universal truths of both business and life. We know what he would say if he read our book: Of course Im proud of you and this new world. Information 2.0 is great, but its irrelevant if you dont get the basics right: strategy, execution, and people.

He was absolutely right. He pretty much always was, and we wish wed told him that more often. If you do everything in our book but get the foundation wrong, everything weve tried to espouse will be for naught. We hear you, Dadand we agree.

This book is dedicated to our dad. We are so grateful and love you so much.

Y ouve picked up this book because youre an entrepreneuror are thinking about becoming one. Welcome to the faster, more complicated, and ever more competitive startup landscape.

Through the Internet, new distribution models, and abundant access to information and capital, the barriers to entry for entrepreneurs have dropped and the floodgates have opened. Its easier and less expensive to start a business in todays market than it has ever been, and entrepreneurs are taking full advantage of this opportunity. Over the last twenty years, the cost of launching a new business has come down by a factor of nearly 100, due largely to the proliferation of open source tools and the Internets many applications to allow entrepreneurs to start some businesses today for as little as $5,000. These same forces are also creating a more crowded environment in which it is more challenging to compete and grow. The old ways of running a business are less impactful. The traditional methods of starting and scaling are too cumbersome, costly, and slow.

Today, the companies that win are those that move more quickly and flexibly than their competitors. This new environment requires new strategies, new mind-sets, and new tactics to shorten timelines, stand out, and win. Thats what this book is about.

Within these pages, we share with you our approach to succeeding in todays sped-up startup world, featuring ten Startup Switchups that flip typical startup advice on its head. One Switchup at a time, we take you through our insights on whats new at each stage of a ventureand show you proven strategies to help you develop a crucial edge over the competition. We hope that what you learn in these pages will open your mind and fundamentally change how you think about starting and growing your company.

Were brothers who know the brave new startup world firsthand. As former Goldman Sachs investment bankers, we first watched businesses get built through the lens of corporate finance and then made our jump, building a business from inception to sale. Now, as operators and VCs at our new venture capital and brand development company, M13, we take a portfolio approach and still get our hands dirty. Weve played various positions in growing great brands and have been fortunate to support notable modern brands, including Bonobos, Lyft, Warby Parker, ClassPass, and more than a hundred others.

In our careers, weve spent the most time as entrepreneurs. Creating VEEV, a consumer spirits company, in 2007 from the ground up, we went from 0 to 60 in less than a decade: seeing the market opportunity for an all-natural, eco-friendly vodka, developing the product, selling the product out of the back of our car, building our customer base, marketing the product nationally, creating brand extensions, and successfully selling the business to a larger company. In doing so, we learned a tremendous amount about launching and growing a consumer products business as well as many of the avoidable pitfalls. In this book, well share with you some of the dos and donts we learned from our firsthand experience.

Whether you are opening an e-commerce store or a physical boutique, the tools and information that you need to get started are at your fingertips. As Steve Case, the former CEO of AOL, put it, The exciting part about living today is that anyone can be an entrepreneur. Were living in a world where information is not just readily available but, in many cases, overwhelming. Building a business from the ground up is not easy; thats why were here: to help you cut through some of the noise and provide some advice garnered from our experience as both operators and investors.

We want you to better understand what the forces of globalization and innovation mean for you and your business, whether your startup is just a thought in your head or a living, breathing entity. To increase your odds of success, well be sharing the unconventional tricks of the trade weve gained both personally and from many of the successful entrepreneurs weve been lucky to work with and learn from.

Though entrepreneurship is uniquely challenging, there may have never been a better, or more important, time to take the leap. Entrepreneurs are world evolvers whom we need to help us progress in all sectors of society. As Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Alphabet and someone we respect very much, says, [Entrepreneurs] are people who somehow believe that they can make the world different and better, and theyre willing to take their own lives, their own time, and so forth, and their own risk capital, and put it together to create literally millions of jobs and ultimately trillions of dollars of wealth. Entrepreneurship is by no means easy, but we hope this book will help you overcome the inevitable obstacles and become one of the game changers.

How competitive is it out there? According to a recent survey, an estimated 550,000 new businesses open in the United States each month. Unfortunately, the competition is too fierce for all of those businesses to survive, and many do not. The intense competition is not limited to the startup world. The S&P 500 Index showcases a dramatic fall in the average life-span of even the most well-established companiesfrom sixty years a few decades ago to twenty years today. In other words, competition is rampant throughout todays economy, and it is forcing companies large and small to evolve or die more quickly than ever. Lets do a deeper analysis to understand whats happening and how it impacts your business.