StartUp not StartDown is NOT a typical textbook.

It is NOT 500 pages. It does NOT require a loan to buy it. And it is NOT written by a professor who mandates it with his course. Instead it is an interactive manual meant to be read in 20 minutes and applied for a lifetime. It brings principles of entrepreneurship to life, delivering the “minimum viable content” just-in time. What you need, when you need it.

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“This world was created by people who challenged assumptions and realized everything around them was a hypothesis, a hypothesis meant to be challenged and disrupted by those who can identify, create, and capture value in extreme uncertainty.” - Matthew R. Mottola

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ORIGIN STORY

For Matthew R. Mottola, Author & Entrepreneur currently building the Future of Work at Microsoft, his first business was a total yard-sale. He thought he would revolutionize investing. Instead he blew threw his savings & had to hear everyone say “I told you so”. He made cool pitch decks, somehow persuaded executives to join his team, yet didn’t create any real value.

Through his trials & tribulation, what Matthew could not understand was how he could be led so astray. He took all the right steps, graduating magna-cum-laude in Finance & Accounting, working for a leading Big 4 financial services firm. Yet he wasn’t a master of business, he was a failure, a broke and embarrased failure.

After buying a $15 book on Amazon called the Lean Startup, he cringed with every word as he realized he did absolutely everything wrong. It wasn’t that his training led him astray, rather it taught him the fundamentals of business 15 years ago. It taught him how to optimize supply chains. How to cut margins. How to account for revenue. And how allocate capital through complicated financial modeling. In essence, it taught him how to optimize for environments of known certainty. Environments where knowledge is power, consumers are rational, and competitive advantage could be won through a spreadsheet. Unfortunately that’s not the world of business today.

In wake of this epiphany, he synthesized the leading literature on lean/agile methodologies and applied them to his subsequent ventures.

The result of these insights have led him to become one of the foremost thought leaders on the Future of Work. He drove thought leadership & built the signature go-to market offering for one of the fastest growing players powering the gig economy. He founded & grew InnoGeek, a research technology firm that built businesses of tomorrow by leveraging a proprietary research engine that wrapped future trends around business models. And currently he builds the Future of Work at Microsoft, guest lectures at Georgia Tech, and invests in & advises on early stage ventures creating disruption through the Future of Work.

Matthew has built his career off these principles, and he hopes this toolkit can do the same for you.