Founded: The No B.S. Guide for Student Entrepreneurs

by Melissa Kaufman, Mike Raab

Founded is the go-to reference for first-time entrepreneurs, providing lessons and inspiration to empower anyone starting a new project or business. Melissa Kaufman and Mike Raab, the directors of Northwestern’s renowned student entrepreneurship program, The Garage, show you how to tap into the superpower of thinking and acting like an entrepreneur based on their experience guiding hundreds of early-stage startups.

Founded explains—through the authors’ own expertise and interviews with successful young founders—how to

• make the best possible decisions when launching your business,

• avoid the common mistakes of first-time entrepreneurs,

• take immediate, concrete steps to get started on a new idea.

In this essential book for first-time and student founders, you will learn why entrepreneurship is for everyone, “failure” is inevitable (and why that’s a good thing!), and how to make sure you’re building something people want.

Founded will shatter your misconceptions about starting a business and help you get started turning your ideas into something real today!

224 pages, Kindle Edition

Published January 4, 2022

Reviews

[M · Rating 3 out of 5]

Was gifted this book to read bc the giver knew the author.
It’s a solid introduction to first principles in what starting a company is all about. It flies through many topics in a short period of time, but for the high schooler or freshman in college who is assigned to read this in their E ship class, this is definitely a book that will do the topic justice / give the reader what’s up.

This book does a good job at “warming” a reader up to the topic of Eship. Often, some of the more in depth books will frame startups brutally (which is truth), but at the expense of bringing people on the fence over to the “let’s do it” side. This book is a true “first read” for people who don’t know anything at all about E ship and are exploring if it’s maybe for them or not. Most books aren’t written for this crowd/this purpose.

But what this book gains in breadth it loses in depth, so for a founder or someone involved in startups, this book isn’t for you. Otherwise, a great starter book for the groups mentioned (which is who the book is written for specifically).

Specific piece of knowledge to remember;
- a company with a world class ceo and bad employees will fail, but vice versa can be a successful company
-

3.5/5

[Steph Shields · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is an incredibly comprehensive guide to entrepreneurial best practices. It describes all of the entrepreneurial skills and concepts that I have spent years learning about and cultivating myself in an approachable and digestible format. The ideas that this book introduces are valuable to anyone who wants to be an impactful leader or changemaker in any field. Thank you, Melissa and Mike, for creating such a phenomenal resource for aspiring entrepreneurs like myself!

[Best Indie Book Award · Rating 5 out of 5]

🏆 2022 BIBA® Non-Fiction: Entrepreneurship Winner!

[Jon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Easy, straightforward way to get a business idea going.

[Hannah · Rating 3 out of 5]

read for entrepreneurship class. solid, quick read covering the basics of creating a startup (particularly as a college student), with clear key takeaways and 'challenges' at the end of each chapter to give student founders action steps. a lot of the advice is practical -- would have loved to see more of the content covered in the book in the helpful glossary at the end. overall, part 2 felt more useful / contained less intuitive information about startups but went into less depth compared to part 1; it would have been helpful to see more of the student stories and detail in this latter half.