Founded is the go-to reference for first-time entrepreneurs, providing lessons and inspiration to empower anyone starting a new project or business. Melissa Kaufman and Mike Raab, the directors of Northwestern’s renowned student entrepreneurship program, The Garage, show you how to tap into the superpower of thinking and acting like an entrepreneur based on their experience guiding hundreds of early-stage startups.
Founded explains—through the authors’ own expertise and interviews with successful young founders—how to
- make the best possible decisions when launching your business,
- avoid the common mistakes of first-time entrepreneurs,
- take immediate, concrete steps to get started on a new idea.
In this essential book for first-time and student founders, you will learn why entrepreneurship is for everyone, “failure” is inevitable (and why that’s a good thing!), and how to make sure you’re building something people want.
Founded will shatter your misconceptions about starting a business and help you get started turning your ideas into something real today!
Melissa Kaufman
As founding executive director of The Garage, Melissa leads the team and is responsible for the overall vision for the space, programs, and community. She brings a decade of experience working for consumer technology companies in Silicon Valley. The culture at The Garage is an aggregation of her professional experiences at Google, YouTube, and consumer startups. Her entrepreneurial spirit runs deep and inspired her to found her own influencer marketing agency. Today, she helps others fulfill their entrepreneurial dreams. Melissa received her BA in computer science from Dartmouth College. This is her first book.
Mike Raab
As the associate director of The Garage, Mike’s mission is to give students the resources, space, and confidence to chase their ambitions without the fear of failure and to empower them to live authentically and do work that is interesting and fulfilling to them.
His unique career has included working in the entertainment industry in Hollywood, taking a brief sabbatical to backpack through Europe for a summer, investing in and working with early-stage startups in San Francisco through Sinai Ventures, and now empowering and supporting student entrepreneurs at The Garage.
In his free time, Mike enjoys writing about technology, startups, and media. His writing has been read by hundreds of thousands of readers and published in Business Insider, OneZero, and HackerNoon, among others.
