I’ve been talking to Dan online for a while now, mostly about women in tech stuff, and I have frequently thought that he (being a 4x startup CEO, and having made this really cool game) is the kind of person who I could get a lot of useful advice from… if I knew what to ask.
Thing is, I didn’t know what to ask. So I had this vague idea that eventually I would stop by Seattle again, grab coffee and hopefully pick up a bunch of insight.
But thankfully he wrote a book! And sent me a preview copy! So now I don’t need to go to Seattle. Because it contained all the wisdom and answers to questions that I didn’t know to ask.
So the book is Hot Seat (Amazon). And it’s about being a startup CEO, although I think it’s useful for anyone who wants to understand what goes on in the startup world, or who works at a startup.
It’s really good. So good that I read it in a 6 point font (PDFs on Kindle – ai!) in about a week. It’s full of information – like what is a cap table? Where should you incorporate? (DELAWARE) What is convertable debt? What does a CEO actually do? Most of all it is full of stories, some of them Dan’s, some about other people. And, I love this, many of these stories are about women.
I loved the Hard Thing About Hard Things (Amazon) [my review], and noticed the effort that was gone to to use “she” throughout, but also noticed that almost no women featured in the book, and then not in a professional context (e.g. he writes a bit about his wife). Dan included some wisdom from his mom about communicating (and it’s really good) but also a ton of stories of female founders, and co-founders, and CTOs, doing their thing and being awesome.
Finally, masterful use of footnotes. I was so inspired by this that I have actually started using them.
The best book I have read in quite some time, I totally recommend it, and you should absolutely buy it and read it. Unless you’re on the long list of people I have made a note to buy it for…
5 replies on “Book: Hot Seat”
I read @danshapiro’s Book: Hot Seat and I totally loved it – http://t.co/bKbl4X1qpz
RT @catehstn: I read @danshapiro’s Book: Hot Seat and I totally loved it – http://t.co/bKbl4X1qpz
[…] writing about men and male allies. We became twitter friends, and so I got to read a preview of his book – which is great, because I’d realized that Dan was someone I could get a lot of useful […]
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[…] Burnout (mostly interesting as it intersects with other things I think about), and re-reading Hot Seat (I loved this book so much the first time! And now I have a physical copy with a full sized font). […]
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[…] Finished Hot Seat again (loved it even more this time). Read Mindy Kaling’s new book Why Not Me (loved it!) and Slack (eye opening!), now reading Yes Please. […]
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