It's start-up basics with plenty of details

Overall:
It's a good book. I've been in building different businesses from scratchs for a while now, and am currently at a point where we're rising the investment. There was a lot info that is simple common sense, but common sense isn't always common practice, so it's important for someone to remind it time to time.

Pros:
1. The thing I liked the most about this book is that my startup idea seems to be very good from all sides - well researched, 10x better than everything else on the market, excellent market opportunities and many other good points. What it requires is a better feedback from users, preferably them being ready to pay for it. Indeed, I reduced my valuation of my company and understood what needs to be done to get to the valuation I strive for.
2. The approach to the subject is very, very correct. It gets people out off their dream worlds and shows them the path that a real startup would need to take.
3. Most problems that a startup will conduct are well noted here. And it starts from the very beginning, the idea, and goes to rising money and operating the business when it’s damn hard.
4. The narrator has an excellent voice, and is easy to listen.
5. The amount of literature references is huge, and when you know what is your weak point - you’re able to go and get a specific book on the subject.
6. There are interviews/quotes from many start-upers and people who funded them, which underlines how the concepts Brad and Sean are telling us about are found important and what influence they can have in real life.

Cons:
1. I’ve read a book of Brad Feld “Venture Deals” before, so I expected it to be same level of in-depth insights and lots of knowledge. Having this level of expectations this book is best described as “introduction to the world of entrepreneurship for women”.
2. I’m a man that stands for equal rights in education, voting, work and plenty other things. I’m married to a very smart woman and she has a free choice of what to do, from my side she has all the support in every beginning. However I don’t think that man and women are totally same or have to do the exact same things. We are different height, different build, different chemistry and hence different strong and weak sides are normal to us. This book made me feel awkward, as in every possible place where gender is neutral or undefined it is changed to female, and it is twice or three times as odd when they speak about programmers and developers, which are over 90% male, but they’re referred as “she”. If you look at the dynamics at Y-Combinator you will also see that naturally less females send applications and get onboard, and not only because of cultural, but also because of biological reasons for it, not taking into consideration all the ancient wisdom about what balance in family is. The fact that one woman stated boldly “Women are going to make more than their male counterparts at some point” shocked me. I felt that soon it will be illegal to pee without sitting down. I think authors should restrain from ultra-feministic position, or add the “feminist edition” on the title.
3. The book at times felt like a bibliographical container. It has some original information that you can’t get from those books, but if you do read them - then there’s little new for you in this book, and then this book can only be read as rehearsal.

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