Cashflow, Unit Economics, and Bootstrapping $550M ButcherBox with Mike Salguero | Ep 838

Curious about how Uber and Airbnb grew from seedlings to internet juggernauts?

The Upstarts covers the history of Uber and Airbnb, from their founding in 2008 to present day of 2016. Learn how each company started as just a side project, gathered momentum, and grew exponentially throughout the world. Learn how neither Uber nor Airbnb was the first idea of its kind, but through strategy and will, they came to dominate. Also learn how Uber and Airbnb attracted the ire of government, incumbents, the collaterally damaged, and its own customers.

Reboot explores the rise and fall of Jodie Fox’s global business, Shoes of Prey—an innovative start-up that allowed customers to design their own shoes. Fox offers an honest look into her successes and failures as an entrepreneur, proving that there’s always value in the process of owning a business, even if your business doesn’t work out. She also provides advice on dealing with many of the situations you’ll encounter should you build a global business.

Throughout this guide, we’ll discuss topics such as how to start your business, how to negotiate cultural differences as an international entrepreneur, and how to manage mental health struggles as a business owner. We’ll also use examples from Fox’s time with Shoes of Prey to illustrate her points. In our commentary, we’ll discuss strategies for developing a business idea, offer advice for identifying and navigating cultural differences in business, and explore additional tips for taking care of your mental health.

In Unreasonable Hospitality, hospitality guru Will Guidara details how he transformed Eleven Madison Park from a so-so brasserie in the middle of Manhattan into the World’s Best Restaurant in 2017. Guidara contends that the secret to the restaurant’s success was his commitment to providing “unreasonable hospitality”—a level of dedication to providing guests with a fantastic experience that stretched the limits of what seemed sensible. Guidara believes that anyone with a service-based business should also commit to providing unreasonable hospitality—both to their employees and their customers.

In this guide, we’ll trace Guidara’s career and share the lessons he learned from each stage—from his journey to becoming the general manager of Eleven Madison Park to transforming it into a three-star, a four-star, and then the world’s best restaurant. We’ll also include advice from experts in other industries about how to manage a world-class team and deliver exceptional service to your customers.

Have you ever wondered how the economy works - how millions of individuals can buy and sell goods and services without a master coordinator? Have you wondered why we use money, rather than bartering our services with each other? Why do some nations prosper, while others stay poor despite vast natural resources?

Basic Economics by Stanford economist Thomas Sowell is an incredibly useful, broad introduction to economics. Containing no math, it instead communicates intuitive principles that will help you understand how market transactions work and the effect of policies on the economy. Understand how prices for goods are set, why rent control has bad side effects, and the purpose of brand names.

Mike Michalowicz’s Profit First criticizes traditional business accounting methods by claiming that they are unintuitive, and that their unintuitive nature leads many entrepreneurs to failure. He then outlines an alternate accounting system, which he calls the Profit First method. In the Profit First method, a percentage of income is set aside as profit before any expenses are calculated. This method, he says, allows an entrepreneur to do their business accounting in a simple and intuitive way, and to increase their business’s profitability and stability.

In this guide, we’ll discuss Michalowicz’s criticisms of traditional accounting, as well as his own recommendations for how to set up Profit First accounting and use its guidelines to improve your business. We’ll also provide commentary explaining psychological and economic research related to Michalowicz’s claims, as well as practical advice on how to apply some of his broader recommendations.

Business Model Generation, a contemporary guide to systematic business innovation, provides a template for brainstorming and visualizing the overarching elements that make up a successful, holistic business model.

The authors analyze the different ways you can combine these elements to create the most successful business model patterns. In addition, they provide techniques you can use to generate your own innovative business models, as well as strategies you can incorporate to regularly analyze and optimize your existing business models.

This guide supplements each key concept and strategy with up-to-date examples and commentary, and we suggest complementary processes to effectively incorporate their concepts into your own business models.

Want to know the growth tactics that Uber, Facebook, and Airbnb used to reach massive valuations in record time? Written by LinkedIn founder and Reid Hoffman, Blitzscaling describes the counterintuitive business strategy of putting efficiency and confidence aside for pure speed.

Learn common attributes of today’s most successful tech business models, when it’s appropriate to blitzscale and when it will fail, and the counterintuitive violations of business common sense. While nominally a business strategy book, Blitzscaling is also relevant for investors who want to discover the next big company, employees who want to know how to work in one, and anyone who wants to understand how today’s companies grow at an unprecedented pace.

In Unreasonable Hospitality, hospitality guru Will Guidara details how he transformed Eleven Madison Park from a so-so brasserie in the middle of Manhattan into the World’s Best Restaurant in 2017. Guidara contends that the secret to the restaurant’s success was his commitment to providing “unreasonable hospitality”—a level of dedication to providing guests with a fantastic experience that stretched the limits of what seemed sensible. Guidara believes that anyone with a service-based business should also commit to providing unreasonable hospitality—both to their employees and their customers.

In this guide, we’ll trace Guidara’s career and share the lessons he learned from each stage—from his journey to becoming the general manager of Eleven Madison Park to transforming it into a three-star, a four-star, and then the world’s best restaurant. We’ll also include advice from experts in other industries about how to manage a world-class team and deliver exceptional service to your customers.

In Fix This Next, entrepreneur and business author Mike Michalowicz introduces the Business Hierarchy of Needs, a system for determining which of your company’s problems you should fix next. Michalowicz created this system because many entrepreneurs struggle with prioritization. They’re often overwhelmed by problems, so they focus on fixing the most immediate problem instead of identifying the most impactful approach that’ll fix the problem’s root cause. Since the root cause isn’t resolved, problems continue to appear.

In this guide, we’ll discuss how Michalowicz’s prioritization system works and how you can use it to make your business more successful. In our commentary, we’ll compare his advice to that of other business experts like Simon Sinek and Seth Godin, as well as explore concrete tips for implementing Michalowicz’s ideas.

Warren Buffett is the world’s most successful investor, but he also thinks of himself as a teacher in the field of investing and economics. Compiled from Buffett’s annual reports to Berkshire Hathaway shareholders, The Essays of Warren Buffett provides a glimpse into the mind of a man whose ideas contrast with those of the typical Wall Street mogul. His insights on investing are simple yet difficult to put into practice, while his thoughts on the culture of the wider business world shine a light on the values that shape modern finance.

In this guide, we’ll cover Buffett’s writings on investment, his recommended approaches, and some widely accepted economic practices that he considers to be wrong. We’ll also look at the opinions of other financial experts, both those who agree with Buffett and those who present an alternate view. We’ll place Buffett’s essays in their historical context and look at how well his ideas hold up in the modern world of high finance.

Business Model Generation, a contemporary guide to systematic business innovation, provides a template for brainstorming and visualizing the overarching elements that make up a successful, holistic business model.

The authors analyze the different ways you can combine these elements to create the most successful business model patterns. In addition, they provide techniques you can use to generate your own innovative business models, as well as strategies you can incorporate to regularly analyze and optimize your existing business models.

This guide supplements each key concept and strategy with up-to-date examples and commentary, and we suggest complementary processes to effectively incorporate their concepts into your own business models.