Build The Fort
By Chris Heivly
In Build the Fort, Heivly breaks down his personal fort-building experiences and uses them as a metaphor to reveal his journey as co-founder of MapQuest, The Startup Factory (a seed-stage investor & mentorship program), The Big Top recruiting platform and many others.
Build the Fort outlines five basic elements that are common to both fort-building, startups and startup communities:
- Socializing Your Idea Without Fear or Inhibition,
- Identifying and Marshaling the People You Trust,
- Gathering the Minimal Resources Closest To You To Build Confidence & Momentum,
- Acting on the Smallest and Simplest Forms of the Idea, and
- Action ~ Building Your Fort.
Whether you are 16 or 60, this book provides the reader a better understanding of the earliest micro-steps of starting your own business by overlaying Chris’s 30 years of experiences in startups, investments, big-company intrapreneurship and community development.
Chapter Previews
Socialize the Idea without Fear or Inhibition →
Partner with Skilled & Trustworthy People →
Gather the Assets Closest to You →
Create a Short-Term Collective Purpose →
Build the Fort →
About the author
I can still remember the day I told my father that I was going to be a geography major. His response was, “what are you ever going to do with geography as a job – you need to get into computers, son”. It was 1980. 15 years later, I co-founded a company that released the first Travel CD-ROM which later turned into MapQuest.
Now 20+ years later, I am an early-stage investor, I ran a $25M corporate venture fund, I co-founded 2 micro venture funds investing in 42 companies, I built a multi-million dollar consulting business focused on startup communities.
I joke that I have career ADHD. Most of these experiences are shared in this book with a very consumable simple parable of building forts. I hope you give it a read and enjoy!
If only Chris Heivly had written this little red book of startup advice years ago. How much time and money I might have saved. How much faster I might have gotten traction.
Denis Mcduff – CEO at eBroselow
Chris’s greatest accomplishment here is in demystifying the startup process giving the reader confidence to proceed.
David Gardner – Founder and Managing parnter at cofounders capital
Follow the advice in this book – you will increase your chances of success and hopefully avoid tons of common, and likely disastrous, mistakes along the way.