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What it argues
The Startup Playbook is David Kidder's collection of firsthand lessons from forty prominent founders, including Reid Hoffman, Sara Blakely, Kevin Plank, and Alexis Ohanian. Kidder, himself a serial entrepreneur, conducted the interviews and organized the material around common inflection points in the startup journey: founding the company, finding the idea, building the team, funding, scaling, and handling failure. The format is part interview collection, part framework, with each founder's story followed by distilled principles.
What distinguishes the book from most startup advice collections is the consistency of the questions Kidder asks. Every founder is pressed on the same core issues: why they started, what almost killed the company, what they wish they'd known earlier, and how they handled money and talent. The repetition reveals patterns across very different businesses and founders. Almost universally, the founders describe early moments of near-failure that required a pivot in strategy, team, or focus — and almost universally, they credit a small group of early believers (first employees, first investors, first customers) with making the difference.
What it gets right
- 1.
Every successful founder in the book describes a period of near-failure. Resilience through adversity isn't a character trait to admire from a distance; it appears to be a structural feature of building anything meaningful.
- 2.
The first ten employees set the company's culture more than any mission statement. Founders who hired quickly and corrected slowly describe paying a cultural tax for years.
- 3.
The founding idea rarely survives contact with the market intact. What matters is whether the team can recognize the gap between their assumption and reality fast enough to adapt.
What it covers
Who wrote it
David S. Kidder is a serial entrepreneur and co-founder of several technology and media companies, including Clickable, an advertising technology firm, and Bionic, a corporate innovation platform. He is also an angel investor and advisor to early-stage companies. The Startup Playbook grew out of his own experience as a founder and his interviews with founders he admired. Kidder is based in New York and is a regular speaker at entrepreneurship and innovation conferences.
