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Ascend Your Start-Up: Conquer the 5 Disconnects to Accelerate Growth
Ascend Your Conquer the 5 Disconnects to Accelerate Growth
is an industry-defining panacea for start-ups who have stalled out on their journey to the top of the mountain.
Dedicated to her late grandmother, author Helen Yu inhales multiple generations of wisdom and exhales a revolutionary framework for tech founders and CEOs that enables their businesses to scale faster and fearlessly.
From Yu’s 15 years of firsthand experience in tech start-ups, listeners will learn the five fundamental growth disconnects that trap start-ups in the cliffside, keep them from reaching the summit and touching the sky. Ascend Your Start-Up also empowers founders and CEOs to self-reflect and grow, posing a thoughtfully architected set of 26 essential questions you can ask yourself in order to scale your business.
Inspiration flows freely through the book as Helen draws parallels between the journey of growing a start-up and her sacred promise made to her grandmother to climb Mt. Everest.
You will
Industry-specific, highly experienced advice for tech start-ups Fundamental wisdom on the five disconnects that prevent a start-up from ascending Turning an idea into a product and moving it to the market Taking a marketed product to scale Inspirational guidance for tech start-ups facing the emotions and challenges of growing Ascend Your Start-Up is the profound answer to the question every start-up has asked “How do we get to the top?”
Dedicated to her late grandmother, author Helen Yu inhales multiple generations of wisdom and exhales a revolutionary framework for tech founders and CEOs that enables their businesses to scale faster and fearlessly.
From Yu’s 15 years of firsthand experience in tech start-ups, listeners will learn the five fundamental growth disconnects that trap start-ups in the cliffside, keep them from reaching the summit and touching the sky. Ascend Your Start-Up also empowers founders and CEOs to self-reflect and grow, posing a thoughtfully architected set of 26 essential questions you can ask yourself in order to scale your business.
Inspiration flows freely through the book as Helen draws parallels between the journey of growing a start-up and her sacred promise made to her grandmother to climb Mt. Everest.
You will
Industry-specific, highly experienced advice for tech start-ups Fundamental wisdom on the five disconnects that prevent a start-up from ascending Turning an idea into a product and moving it to the market Taking a marketed product to scale Inspirational guidance for tech start-ups facing the emotions and challenges of growing Ascend Your Start-Up is the profound answer to the question every start-up has asked “How do we get to the top?”
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Published May 19, 2021
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
June 5, 2021
Helen Yu’s new book Ascend Your Start-Up: Conquer the Five Disconnects to Accelerate Growth is part of a growing trend of leadership advice books in the nonfiction sub-genre that make their points more efficient and with more emotion to boot by way of the personalized analogy. Specifically in Yu’s case this shows up in her framing the entirety of the book’s contextual fabric around wisdom and perseverance she owes to the influence of her grandmother. This automatically adds a sentimentality that moisturizes the otherwise potentially dry material and pragmatic decision-making into something non-exclusionary to a specific audience. With her wit, candor, and first-person point-of-view examples, Yu gives the work an actual personality of sorts, making the intricately detailed technicalities of the information and observations provided fully immersive for both those well-versed in the corporate fields of industry and those just beginning to dip their toes within such industrial waters. The book also serves as something of a cautionary guide to the potential pitfalls one faces if uninitiated when beginning their startup enterprise. Using the metaphor of Mount Everest, Yu poetically illuminates that with the tenets, signposts, and precepts she highlights within Ascend Your Start-Up’s pages you can see the danger coming long before it hits. Consisting of seven extensive yet succinctly assembled chapters, Yu initiates detailed descriptors covering everything from how to initiate the hypothetical customer base as things continue evolving and being assembled to one of the most important precepts once one’s enterprise has successfully been established. Where do I go from here? With whom do I make professional and maybe even personal connections? And how do said connections not only guarantee my continued success, but evolve my leadership and management for said success?
In the spirit of this, probably one of the book’s best chapters is the seventh. Titled The Summit: A View Toward Your Next Peak, it really feels like a coming full-circle of the rest of the book’s aforementioned contents, but in coming together only serving to bring the reader to a new intellectual precipice to contemplate on. “When I think of the founder’s journey, I believe that growth thrives at the intersection of technology and humanity,” Yu writes. “You need to define what ‘staying special’ means for you, and how you remain close to your ‘why’. This will set you miles from the pack.” She goes on to continue, “Creating a culture of learning to encourage employees to help one another, cultivate gratitude, practice transparency, and understand how each employee can contribute to the overall company success inspires real disruption that leads to a new way of thinking and defines your start-up inside and out. No matter how technologically advanced your company, only 20 percent of your success is attributed to your technology, and 80 percent is overcoming the change management necessary to operationalize your vision.”
It’s this kind of humility that sets Wu apart, changing her from just another person telling you what to do into someone whom you genuinely feel a sense of trust for and a uniqueness about. This only serves to further empower you, the reader, to make your best move on take one…
In the spirit of this, probably one of the book’s best chapters is the seventh. Titled The Summit: A View Toward Your Next Peak, it really feels like a coming full-circle of the rest of the book’s aforementioned contents, but in coming together only serving to bring the reader to a new intellectual precipice to contemplate on. “When I think of the founder’s journey, I believe that growth thrives at the intersection of technology and humanity,” Yu writes. “You need to define what ‘staying special’ means for you, and how you remain close to your ‘why’. This will set you miles from the pack.” She goes on to continue, “Creating a culture of learning to encourage employees to help one another, cultivate gratitude, practice transparency, and understand how each employee can contribute to the overall company success inspires real disruption that leads to a new way of thinking and defines your start-up inside and out. No matter how technologically advanced your company, only 20 percent of your success is attributed to your technology, and 80 percent is overcoming the change management necessary to operationalize your vision.”
It’s this kind of humility that sets Wu apart, changing her from just another person telling you what to do into someone whom you genuinely feel a sense of trust for and a uniqueness about. This only serves to further empower you, the reader, to make your best move on take one…
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July 4, 2021Must have guide for startup founders
What impressed me most about this book was the extent to which the author intertwined her personal story with her business experiences at multiple startups. I have found the stories resonating at both personal and business levels. Helen Yu's book is very insightful and a springboard for further research of companies, their charismatic and transformational leaders, as well as their strategies. There is a really strong message to look deeply into the real potential of your business for your future direction and to never waver from that path. All in all, this was well worth my time to read and I recommended as a veteran investor
What impressed me most about this book was the extent to which the author intertwined her personal story with her business experiences at multiple startups. I have found the stories resonating at both personal and business levels. Helen Yu's book is very insightful and a springboard for further research of companies, their charismatic and transformational leaders, as well as their strategies. There is a really strong message to look deeply into the real potential of your business for your future direction and to never waver from that path. All in all, this was well worth my time to read and I recommended as a veteran investor
June 19, 2021
Ascend Your Start-Up is my new go-to book recommendation for all my start-up clients. My favorite quote, "The biggest obtacle to reaching your summit is not pausing, listening, learning or refelecting." and I love that Helen Yu correlates the journey of a start-up to that of climbing Mt. Everest.
She has validated so many things that I tell my clients on a day-to-day basis and she eloquently wraps it in a framework that's easy to follow. I specifically applaud her for calling out the importance of using experts as sherpas, stopping at the various camps to take stock, and highlighting the Valley of Disconnects. Although this book provides a great "how to" guide, its true value is helping entrepreneurs to use a framework to manage their business as they reach new peaks well as their emotional intelligence as they deal with the ebbs and flows of being a founder, and to understand when, why and how to invest in a Client Success program.
Honestly, there are too many great tips, tools, and thought-provoking questions for me to mention them all. Some of my highlights are:
- Lifetime value of a client, not just cost of acquisition
- Overcoming the loneliness most entrepreneurs feel
- Acknowledging that there are so many valleys of disconnects, each with their own tools
- Recruiting CX experts onto your board
- Client success program, not just marketing speak
- Elevating from a point solution to a product category
Definitely an important read for any entrepreneur at any stage of their company.
She has validated so many things that I tell my clients on a day-to-day basis and she eloquently wraps it in a framework that's easy to follow. I specifically applaud her for calling out the importance of using experts as sherpas, stopping at the various camps to take stock, and highlighting the Valley of Disconnects. Although this book provides a great "how to" guide, its true value is helping entrepreneurs to use a framework to manage their business as they reach new peaks well as their emotional intelligence as they deal with the ebbs and flows of being a founder, and to understand when, why and how to invest in a Client Success program.
Honestly, there are too many great tips, tools, and thought-provoking questions for me to mention them all. Some of my highlights are:
- Lifetime value of a client, not just cost of acquisition
- Overcoming the loneliness most entrepreneurs feel
- Acknowledging that there are so many valleys of disconnects, each with their own tools
- Recruiting CX experts onto your board
- Client success program, not just marketing speak
- Elevating from a point solution to a product category
Definitely an important read for any entrepreneur at any stage of their company.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews