Customer Reviews

Engineering Your Start-Up: A Guide for the High-Tech Entrepreneur (2nd Edition)

5 star:		(33)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

More substantive and more "specific" then any other such book I have read. Much more useful then "High Tech Startup" by Nesheim. Very enjoyable read without constantly reminding you that you might lose your house <so what ?>. One negative: very much written as a guide for engineers with an idea and no business knowledge; this means it lacks some depth when it comes to marketing issues.

This book's special expertise is about designing the financing of your startup!

A few years ago when I did a business plan for a technology start-up, the first edition of this book was my source for planning for equity participation for founders, employees, VCs, and the public from founding through IPO. When this second edition came out, I bought it to pass along to a friend in the early stages of a startup.

If you are a technical member of a startup, you must read this unless you are already sophisticated in the financing of startups. Don't talk to a VC until you have studied this book.

The title is the key. "Engineers" and other technical types will find this a quick and interesting book. And if you are going to play "Monopoly," you must at least know the basic rules first. This is how the game is played in Silicon Valley! If you don't, you will not pass GO and will not collect $200.

This book is a complete waste of time for anyone seriously attempting to start their own business. I have a hard time understanding why this book is so highly rated. It offers very little usable information, in fact some of it might be damaging.

Let me try and be a little more specific. There is not much actually written in this book as to the CORE aspects of developing a business. I think a lot more time could be spent talking about developing a business model, finding the right product-market fit, gathering real data to support whether you are actually on to something or whether your business idea is just a figment of your imagination... Technically speaking there is SOMETHING written in the book about the core development of your business, but it is so piecemeal as to really be useless (perhaps 10 pages of this sort of material tops).

By comparison, the author spends over 100 pages (!) of material talking about stock options, vesting schedules, compensation, valuing your particular equity portion of the company, etc etc. No wonder the author's personal attempt a start up failed. He was far more concerned about his own particular equity stake in the company than actually building a business!

Realistically this sort of information is almost useless to most people. Why? Because most people starting companies are not going to get venture capital, do not have 50 - 150 employees, do not have boards of directors and CFOs, etc. This was really a book written for a very particular scenario - a scenario where you get a large amount of venture capital.

Even then its mostly useless. For example there is a chapter on Intellectual Property that covers IP in an almost utterly useless fashion. The wikipedia entries on patents, copyrights, trademarks, etc. are much better than this. (Seriously though, if patents are a part of your game plan definitely do yourself a favor and get a copy of "Patent It Yourself" - best book on patents imaginable for high-tech entrepreneurs). Similarly another chapter on incoporating (LLCs, S-Corps, Partnerships) was also covered in a fairly piecemeal fashion.

The only reason why I gave this book 2 stars even is that I thought it covered business plans in a reasonable fashion (although they are much less important than you might think, especially if you are not going after venture capital) and because a few of the earlier sections talking about how there are life trade-offs to starting a company are true, and are rarely discussed in many other books. Nonetheless, almost every book on entrepreneurship will cover business plans, and I still would not recommend this book to other people.

I particularly don't like how the author explicitly states in the book that bootstrapping a company (or starting with little or no money out of a garage) is impossible. Quite frankly he is 100% wrong in this advice, in fact I know of numerous examples of companies that have started with basically no outside cash that are doing quite well now - 37signals, sparkfun, and a few others that are smaller but that are grossing $1 million+ in revenues. Growing a company organically (without outside funding) is perhaps the *best* way to start a business.

Of course it is difficult to write a book that would assist everyone in starting a business, but I read another entrepreneurship book that actually had case studies that compared initial business plans to actual results - Entrepreneurship by Dollinger. That book was ok, not amazing, but perhaps worth reading.

Anyway, this book is terrible. Really, its not worth reading, there is no rational explanation for why it is rated so high.

if you're only going to buy one book, get "High Tech Start Up" by John Nesheim. Baird's book has useful information, but it's more like a guide than a manual. Nesheim's book is very explicit with many real-life detailed examples from companies like Netscape, Sun, Microsoft and Oracle.

well, I may've expected a bit too much given the prior overly-generous reviews. This book isn't a five-star. It contains a lot of useful information at a 30,000 foot level. A lot of statistics are from the late 80s and early 90s when capital was more limited. My biggest gripe is the lack of chronology of a start-up. For instance, the book correctly emphasizes the need for a good management team to acquire funding, but then talks about establishing a management team during start-up phase (after seeding phase). Huh? I got almost no sense about what happens when from this book, other than 2 charts. The rest of the info is lumped together. I couldn't tell, for instance, exactly when to write the business plan and what potential round of investment this would be targeted at. I'm looking for a book which lays out the phases of start-up more precisely. Other than that, I'll say it is a good read with a lot of good information, and I finished it in one night.

I have read several books on high-tech entrepreneur "how-to" I find this book probably the most helpful. Especially impressive are several chapters on handling equity issues, various stock plans, what's at stake, and how best to protect your and your employees' interest. No other book that I read had such a thorough discussion on these subject matters.

An excellent guide for software and hardware engineers planning to start their own business, particularly with venture capital. My entrepreneurial dreams have been centered on my dog-eared, oft-read copy of Mr. Baird's book. Just recently, I pulled the book out once again, this time to actually use the advice. So far, everything has confirmed his facts...I'll let you know if I find any holes :-)

In a bold marketing experiment, Professional Publications, Inc., once made available online at eysu.org the entire contents of this all-new 2003 2nd Edition of "Engineering Your Start-up." Every page was searchable in PDF files.
Michael Baird (co-author)

Baird provides a fantastic mix of practical information and advice. The explanations are easy to understand and as the sub-title indicates, this really is a "Guide." From helping you determine whether founding a startup is right for you, to understanding the differences between ISO's and NQSO's, Baird has it all.

I got some excellent gems of advice from this book, but don't be fooled by its 1999 copyright, there's no information dated after 1992.