Book Review: The Startup Checklist, by David S. Rose

The book The Startup Checklist: 25 Steps to a Scalable High-Growth Business is unique among the thousands of books on how to start your own company. It is written for the entrepreneur that wants to start up a company that can attract investors, scale up quickly, become part of the fabric of our times and make many people millionaires and billionaires by going public or becoming acquired by a Fortune 500 company.

Like a personal mentor and guide for your business adventure, this book details the steps you need to take to arrive at the destination you desire. Considering that this particular path has evolved extensively since Microsoft and Apple pioneered it, this book describes every tactic important to create a state-of-the-art startup. The education you will receive from this book will enable some and enhance others, but everyone will be enriched by reading it. It’s the kind of essential volume of knowledge that you'll want to read thoroughly and then keep on your office bookshelf forever as a quick refresher reference book.

David S. Rose is undoubtedly the perfect person to create this book. His enormous depth of experience following this path himself, and on behalf of literally hundreds of startup companies, makes this THE authentic guidebook. More than ten years ago, Mr. Rose created the New York Angels, which has funded hundreds of startup companies and invested tens of millions of dollars in them. Currently, the New York Angels consists of more than 140 angel investors that invest startup money into new deals every month, and David S. Rose has personally invested in well over 100 of these.

Mr. Rose is also a serial entrepreneur himself. He’s formed and run businesses that have disrupted several industries. He’s had some enormous successes and some that didn’t make it, as any authentic entrepreneur has. From his personal experience he’s not only a prolific entrepreneur but also an active angel investor; in fact, Forbes Magazine dubbed him “New York’s Archangel”.

One company he has formed and personally runs is Gust, a SaaS platform for entrepreneurs that guides founders from their initial incorporation, through establishing the business, scaling up, hiring employees, and managing the process of taking in investor funding. Along the way it includes over $50,000 in credits for services including lawyers, accounting, WeWork, SendGrid, and even Amazon Web Services.

Once your venture is ready to look for funding, Gust helps to match your startup with angel investor groups and accelerator programs. It’s an efficient way for startup entrepreneurs to upload their pitch deck and documents to attract investors that want to browse new company formations in search of opportunities. Investors get to learn about your startup and you get to pitch investors online. This platform is used by some top tier angel networks to source and manage the offerings they present to their members, including the New York Angels. In fact, NYA (and many other angel networks) require every startup to apply via Gust.

Once you thumb through this book for the first time, you'll agree with me, and you'll quickly realize that you're going to spend some quality time underlining sentences, making notes in the margins and bending over the upper corners of the pages to bookmark essential tips.

It’s available on Amazon, of course!