Surprise Bestseller! "Billion or Bust!" by Lanham Napier offers a gripping perspective on entrepreneurship, cloud computing, and the strategic effort to build a billion-dollar company. Napier, the former CEO of Rackspace, transformed the fledgling hosting company into a global leader in cloud computing services. Employing a customer-centric approach known as "Fanatical Support," he navigated the company through the tech industry's twists and turns. In “Billion or Bust!” Napier explains the strategic and technical aspects that undergirded Rackspace's growth. A strong, customer-focused culture, he argues, drives innovation. Throughout the book, Napier emphasizes the importance of people in Rackspace’s success, highlighting stories of the Rackspace team’s resilience and creativity. Napier gives readers a comprehensive blueprint for building and scaling a successful tech company, blending personal experiences with strategic insights and in-depth analysis. In the process, he examines cloud computing and its evolution, startup scaling, tech industry leadership, and strategic decision-making and risk management. For anyone interested in entrepreneurship, technology, and business leadership, “Billion or Bust!” is an essential read. "BILLION OR BUST! is a lively, thoughtful, and engaging story of a man, a business, and a city, told with a thoroughly Texan degree of vigor and verve." - TheIndieReader

"Sales First!: Growing Our Company the Old-Fashioned Way, the ColorMatrix Story" by John Haugh and Michael Shaughnessy reveals the remarkable journey of two Midwestern chemical salesmen who built a $400 million business without venture capital. In the 1980s, Haugh and Shaughnessy discovered a novel way to add color to plastics, an incremental innovation with enormous potential in the global plastics industry. Lacking the connections and experience to secure venture capital, they turned to a straightforward, old-fashioned strategy: focusing on sales. Driving their beat-up cars around the Ohio River Valley, they committed to a single guiding principle for every decision about customers, capital, or human resources: “Will it generate sales quickly?” This relentless sales-first mindset allowed them to grow their company, ColorMatrix, to over $100 million in revenues. Their dedication paid off when they eventually recapitalized the company and sold it for over $400 million, creating hundreds of jobs in Rust Belt Cleveland along the way. "Sales First!" not only chronicles the business strategies and entrepreneurial spirit that propelled ColorMatrix to success but also highlights the importance of maintaining strong personal relationships in business. John and Mike managed their partnership so well that they never had a significant disagreement, showcasing the power of mutual respect and shared vision. This inspiring narrative offers valuable lessons for entrepreneurs and business leaders on achieving growth through sheer determination and a focus on immediate sales, making it a must-read for anyone looking to build a successful company without relying on external funding. “Sales First!” is part of the Braun Collection, a suite of business education resources that includes bestsellers such as “Billion or Bust!” by former Rackspace CEO Lanham Napier.

Billion or Bust! As president and then CEO of cloud provider Rackspace, Lanham Napier grew the company from $5 million to over $1 billion in revenues and $5 billion in market value while creating thousands of jobs. A lifelong Texan, he grew the company in his home state, overseeing the development of new headquarters in San Antonio and leading the company's IPO. When Microsoft, Amazon, and Google entered the industry in force, everything changed . . . including Lanham's relationship with Rackspace executives and the company's board of directors. Lanham Napier is an entrepreneur, innovator, and investor. He and his team at BuildGroup believe in providing smart capital to passionate entrepreneurs who want to build companies for the long haul. Lanham developed his ideas about risk capital through his work as CEO of Rackspace, a formerly public cloud company headquartered in San Antonio, Texas. He grew up a proud Texan, enamored with the state climate, history, diversity, friendliness, and traditions. In his adolescence, Lanham developed a driving desire to improve the world through creating jobs for people (especially Texans). On a date with the woman he would soon marry, he said about himself, "I want to create jobs." Lanham went to Rice University and then Harvard Business School, and he became knowledgeable about high finance through jobs at Merrill Lynch and a private equity fund. When the internet boom hit in the 1990s, Rackspace.com, a managed hosting company founded by several San Antonio innovators, came knocking at Lanham's door. He joined as CFO, with the main responsibility for taking the company public. He considered this the ideal opportunity to create jobs. Before the company could go public, however, the economic bubble burst. Instead of raising new capital to hire people, Lanham oversaw large-scale layoffs-not at all what he had envisioned. Lanham became president of Rackspace and helped Rackers focus on generating profits and making the company as financially self-sustaining as possible. Under his leadership, and with a dedicated and motivated team, the company gained dominance in its industry-leading Fanatical Support TM offering-a differentiated service that gained Rackspace thousands of small and large-business customers. After Lanham was promoted to CEO, the once-tiny cloud company grew so quickly, it converted a defunct mall into phenomenal new headquarters and underwent an IPO. By the time Lanham left in 2014, Rackspace served over 300,000 customers and had over a billion in revenues and $5 billion in market value. It also employed over 5,000 people, largely in the San Antonio area. Lanham details the replacement of one set of 'managed hosting' competitors (telecom companies) by a new set of cloud competitors-Microsoft, Google, and Amazon. Their aggressive entry into the cloud space beginning around 2006 forced Rackspace to continuously differentiate its high-quality offerings, doubling down on Fanatical Support and developing new products and services. The stresses of this tsunami of competition that collectively held cash stores unrivaled in business history caused a formerly strong partnership among Rackspace executives to pull at the seams. The deterioration of the partnership had repercussions at the board and investor levels, as well. Without leadership consensus, the pressing decisions Lanham needed to make as CEO (and board member) took longer and became harder. Lanham's ability to operate with urgency and clear direction became a daily battle, and he left the company.

"Because time, attention, and resources are finite, wise prioritization lies at the heart of any flourishing organization or meaningful life. Yet there's surprisingly little actionable advice on how to do it well—and many seductive reasons to avoid it entirely. This approachable, psychologically astute, and deeply practical book has the potential to change all that. Reading it is well worth your time." —Oliver Burkeman, author of Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals Managing Priorities is your guide to prioritizing anything—anytime and anywhere. Harry Max digs into the best practices for prioritization at Apple, DreamWorks, NASA, Adobe, Google, Microsoft, and beyond, and brings them together in a single, practical method that you can apply step by step. Who Should Read This Book? Every business person who is even remotely interested in prioritization should read Managing Priorities. Whatever you need to prioritize—tasks, goals, OKRs, projects—this book is for you. Specific chapters are dedicated to what needs to happen and when for individuals, teams, and whole organizations. Takeaways Learn what prioritization is. Gain insight into the costs of not prioritizing intentionally. Explore different methods of prioritization, including the Eisenhower Matrix, the Analytic Hierarchy Process, the Max Priorities Pyramid, Paired Comparison, Stack Ranking, and more (highlighted in the Appendix). Apply the author's DEGAP® method of prioritization with its five phases: Decide, Engage, Gather, Arrange, Prioritize. Identify, understand, and address your current state or lack of prioritization (the context of your problem, the people involved, and the issues surrounding timing). Use a scale to differentiate items to prioritize and arrange them appropriately. Select an approach to prioritization that works for your specific situation.

“An incisive history of the venture-capital industry.” —New Yorker “An excellent and original economic history of venture capital.” —Tyler Cowen, Marginal Revolution “A detailed, fact-filled account of America’s most celebrated moneymen.” —New Republic “Extremely interesting, readable, and informative...Tom Nicholas tells you most everything you ever wanted to know about the history of venture capital, from the financing of the whaling industry to the present multibillion-dollar venture funds.” —Arthur Rock “In principle, venture capital is where the ordinarily conservative, cynical domain of big money touches dreamy, long-shot enterprise. In practice, it has become the distinguishing big-business engine of our time...[A] first-rate history.” —New Yorker VC tells the riveting story of how the venture capital industry arose from America’s longstanding identification with entrepreneurship and risk-taking. Whether the venture is a whaling voyage setting sail from New Bedford or the latest Silicon Valley startup, VC is a state of mind as much as a way of doing business, exemplified by an appetite for seeking extreme financial rewards, a tolerance for failure and experimentation, and a faith in the promise of innovation to generate new wealth. Tom Nicholas’s authoritative history takes us on a roller coaster of entrepreneurial successes and setbacks. It describes how iconic firms like Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia invested in Genentech and Apple even as it tells the larger story of VC’s birth and evolution, revealing along the way why venture capital is such a quintessentially American institution—one that has proven difficult to recreate elsewhere.

A casebook that discusses all the mega mergers and acquisitions in terms of value, that have happened in different industry sectors such as pharmacy, technology, telecommunications, media and entertainment, electrical and electronics, energy, finance, consumer goods, metals, and automobile and airlines.