BURN THE BUSINESS PLAN: What Great Entrepreneurs Really Do

Carl Schramm has been called “The evangelist of entrepreneurship” (The Economist) and here he reveals the true stories about how a range of entrepreneurs created their successful start-ups: hint, many of them never began with a business plan.

Business schools teach that the most important prerequisite for starting a business is a business plan. Nonsense, says Carl Schramm in Burn the Business Plan, who for a decade headed the most important foundation devoted to entrepreneurship in the U.S. Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, and Google are just a few of the companies that began without one.

Schramm explains that the supposed importance of a business plan is only one of the many leading misconceptions about starting a company. Another is the myth of the kid genius—that all entrepreneurs are young software prodigies. In fact, the average entrepreneur is thirty-nine years old and has worked in the corporate sector for at least a decade. Schramm discusses why people with such corporate work experience in have an advantage as entrepreneurs. For one thing, they often have important contacts in the business world who may be customers for their new service or product. For another, they often have the opportunity to strategize with knowledgeable people and get valuable advice.

Burn the Business Plan tells stories of successful entrepreneurs in a variety of fields and clearly shows how knowledge, passion, determination, and a willingness to experiment and innovate are vastly more important than financial skill. Burn the Business Plan is an important, motivating look at true success that dispels the myths and offers invaluable real-world advice on how to achieve your dreams.

Carl Schramm is by leagues the person to write this book. He has founded six major companies and supported twelve start-ups; he knows what he's talking about from very personal experience. Of equal importance, he is renowned as the definitive expert in all facets of entrepreneurship. He co-founded, with Steve Case, President Obama's Initiative StartUp America and chaired a panel for the Bush Administration on innovation. On the global stage, as a small sampling of his activities, Schramm partnered with former U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown to co-found Global Entrepreneurship Week, has given presentations to both the Italian and Korean Entrepreneurship Foundations, organized meetings of the Global Entrepreneurship Congress in China, served as a member of the Singapore Research Innovation and Entrepreneurship Committee and has spoken at the IMPULSA Forum in Spain. He has keynoted the Summit on Innovation and Growth in Riyadh and conferences in Barcelona, Mexico City and Monterey. He participates in such annual economic summits as Davos, Festival of Thinkers in Dubai and Peter Thiel's Dialogue at Sundance. In addition, Schramm is a chaired professor at UC Davis and Syracuse University and a visiting scientist at MIT. (And this is just the very short list of his accomplishments.)