Start. Scale. Exit. Repeat.

April 15, 2024
Brisk yet comprehensive, Campbell’s guide to launching, building, and eventually selling startups offers a wealth of advice, action steps, red flags, and hard-won wisdom for each step of the cycle laid out in its title—a cycle that Campbell has lived, with successes and failures both, as have members of the Startup Club of entrepreneurs whose experiences power the text. Campbell’s guidance is clear, practical, and inspiring throughout, a crucial road map laying out best practices for finding the idea that can power a new business (“The best ideas solve problems”) to building a team (“Do-it-yourself is more of an attitude than it is a skill set”), ramping up (“build your human resources, your funding—everything around the 10X mindset”), and knowing when and why to sell (“once you get some entrepreneurial success, take some chips off the table, then rinse and repeat”).
The result is illuminating, a book that makes no false promises of an easy path to success but instead lays out the processes for incubating an idea into a startup and that startup into a business that beats the odds. Campbell writes with crisp authority, sharing some telling anecdotes from his own career but wasting few words as he points readers to the big questions related to each stage of Start. Scale. Exit. Repeat. The Start section, for example, digs into how to test and nurture an idea, catch a “new technology or regulatory wave,” avoid others’ mistakes, and “build a moat” around a startup so that it has time to succeed first as a business and then to scale up, exponentially.
Crucial to Campbell: working from the start to build systems and teams that can move a startup toward “specific, measurable, achievable, relevant” Stage Gates—and then scale up “in zeros.” The book’s structure is smart and intuitive, with each of the four major sections addressing “Story, “People,” “Money,” and “Systems,” each offering unique insights for macro goals while deftly reinforcing what’s laid out elsewhere. This is a thorough, indispensable tool.
Takeaway: A crucial roadmap to founding, growing, and selling startups.
Comparable Titles: Rand Fishkin’s Lost and Founder, Aaron Ross and Jason Lemkin’s From Impossible to Inevitable.
Production grades
Cover: A
Design and typography: A
Illustrations: A
Editing: A
Marketing copy: A