This announcement, like so many in the blogosphere, is probably premature. I will not start really writing it until after Naked Conversations is launched and is on its way and after interest in the blog begins to wane--which has not yet happened.
But I am a writer. I have stalled being a writer for a great many years and now it's what I want to do with a majority of my waking hours and I'm in a hurry. So part of my mind has already transitioned to the new work.
My next book has the working title of "StartUps--Going from Zero to Greatness." It will be about a subject that has been central to the work I have done since the late 1970s. I have worked with well over 100 startups, and have been in a position to get an inside view of hundreds more. I have known, and maintain relationships with hundreds of people--entrepreneurs, investors, journalists, Silicon Valley insiders. I also have contacts all over the world who are close to this subject thanks to my blogs.
Unlike Naked Conversations, at least when we started, there are a great number of books that have been written on this subject. They have profiled single companies, offered the how to and the why to. I think many of them are good and a few of them are excellent.
StartUps will be different, because it will focus on the collective first-hand insights of the people--mostly in the tech sector--who have been doing it. It will be different also because, I will use the same process for writing it that Robert and I used to write Naked Conversations. There will be a blog in which I present early chapter versions, interviews and thoughts and get feedback from the blogosphere. Like Naked, I expect the end product to be vastly improved over the earlier versions.
StartUps will be divided into two major parts. Part One will look at what has remained constant during the years I've worked with entrepreneurs. It will look at the characteristics I find in the people who start companies and the teams that succeed once assembled. Part Two will examine what has changed. What's new and it will take a particularly long look at how blogging and other social media are impact startups. I will talk to quite a few people who were interviewed for Naked, but from the perspective of people driving startups, rather than people blogging. This of course will create some small overlap.
Because of the responsibilities of launching Naked Conversations, I will not make this my central focus for a while yet, no sooner than February. I will begin a StartUps book blog then, and I'll have a publisher's proposal started by then. In a great many ways, the process will be the same for the new book as it has been for the old one with some refinements I've learned along the way.
I'm announcing this now for a few reasons. First it is where my mind is going and I had a need to share it. Second, my friend Buzz Bruggeman is staying here and he became the third close friend to ask me this week and I tend to answer questions better in written words than verbally. So I can send him this link and wait for his response.
Needless to say, I want blogosphere feedback. Is this new book a good idea? If you followed this blog so far, will the new book project interest you? Do you have some stories for me that will be suitable for the next book (I've already started a list)? Who should I interview?
Please tell me what you think.
