The Venture Mindset: How to Make Smarter Bets and Achieve Extraordinary Growth

＂Full of powerful, practical lessons on changing how we think and act.＂ -Eric Schmidt, former CEO and Chairman of Google

＂Many principles mentioned in the book helped us build Zoom, and they will help you as well.＂ -Eric S. Yuan, Founder & CEO, Zoom

Inspired by venture capitalists’ unique way of thinking, The Venture Mindset offers a transformative playbook for delivering results in a rapidly changing world from a top Stanford professor and a technology executive.

Venture capitalists are known for their extraordinary ability to spot opportunities. They know how to identify emerging trends, how to bring new industries into being, and when to hold them and when to fold. Their unique mindset has made them the force behind world-changing companies such as Amazon, Google, Moderna, SpaceX, and Zoom.

Stanford Professor Ilya Strebulaev has devoted two decades to studying VCs’ counterintuitive approaches to decision-making and the reasons behind the successes and failures of corporate innovations. Alex Dang has witnessed up close how VCs’ thinking and mechanisms can create successful businesses at companies like Amazon and McKinsey.

Combining their insight and extensive experience, they present nine distinct principles that will help you make better decisions, transform your business, and achieve remarkable results, no matter your industry.

In The Venture Mindset, you’ll learn:

- One question VCs ask that will change the way you evaluate opportunities
- Why you should encourage dissent and be wary of consensus
- The number one killer of innovation in traditional corporate environments
- Why it’s crucial to learn when to ’pull the plug’ on initiatives
- Why failure is not just an option, but a necessity

Packed with entertaining stories and scientific precision, The Venture Mindset is a must-read for anyone who wants to be better equipped for the era of uncertainty when industry, company, and career can be disrupted overnight. The Venture Mindset will teach you more than how to simply survive. It’ll teach you how to win big.

Ilya Strebulaev is the foremost academic expert on venture capital. As a Professor of Finance at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, where he teaches a popular class on venture capital, his research has been widely published in leading academic journals and featured in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Bloomberg and the Harvard Business Review. He frequently leads workshops and executive sessions for senior business and government leaders around the world and has consulted for companies and investors on the valuation of VC-backed companies.

Alex Dang is CEO and general manager of multiple technology ventures and is an expert in eCommerce and digital platforms. He has eighteen years of senior leadership and product development experience at McKinsey, Ernst & Young, and Amazon, where he launched numerous new benefits for Prime Members and machine learning products at AWS. He is a graduate of the Stanford Graduate School of Business and holds a Ph.D. in innovation management.