It has been a privilege to become friends with Brett Hurt over the past several years. Not only is Brett extraordinarily intelligent, with exceptional entrepreneurial talents and leadership skills, but he has also created six excellent companies that have all created tremendous value for millions of other people.

As I write this, I’m on the way back from the main TED conference in Vancouver, sitting next to my good friend Dr. Peniel Joseph on a United Airlines flight. Peniel is a terrific leader and founded the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy at the LBJ School at the University of Texas at Austin.

As with any entrepreneurial endeavor, The Entrepreneur’s Essentials is a book of many dimensions. Readers, I hope, will find inspiration in my struggles and successes, along with those of others shared here. I have sought to be as practical and prescriptive as possible; in a sense, this is in part a “how-to” manual.

A company name can be symbolic, like Xerox. It was crafted in a 1958 corporate rebrand from the underlying technology of the firm’s product itself, invented two decades earlier. This was “xerography,” which fused the Greek words for “dry” and “writing” and the company name was spun from that.

During mid-2015, just shy of three years since we had taken Bazaarvoice public, I was on an extended break to catch my breath. To spend more time with my young family. To read broadly. To travel to India to study Vedic wisdom. To see what my parents’ life had been like as entrepreneurs focused on lifestyle, in contrast to the very intense work pace that I’d been living since before I even finished grad school.

A quarter-century ago, though it feels like last week, I was a young, hungry, and earnest entrepreneur in my first semester at the Wharton School. Word circulated that Farhad Mohit, an up-and-coming entrepreneur a couple of years ahead of me, who had founded one of the first online shopping search engines, was giving a talk on campus. I was eager to go, and all-ears when I arrived.

To effectively think about the power of natural networks, a good place to start is with a remarkable experiment by social psychologist Stanley Milgram more than half a century ago. Sometimes his study is called the “small world experiment,” and it not only built on a great deal of earlier research, but it also influenced the making of a 1990 play by John Guare, Six Degrees of Separation, and a 1993 movie of the same name.

If there was a secret to the early success of my fifth company, Bazaarvoice, in its early days, both in building the culture and energizing performance, it was that we were obsessed with recruiting. In retrospect, some 15 years, another co-founded company, and more than 100 startup investments later, our novel approach and process back then seems blindingly obvious today.

Akin to my counsel on recruitment in Chapter 11, The Most Proven Way to Hire Well, the prevailing approach to the related art of reference checking is outdated, broken, and hamstrings many an entrepreneur before they even come off the starting line. But unlike my experience recounted in the last chapter, my insight into reference checking was not learned through a series of early stumbles, but rather by (perhaps) naively getting it right at my first major startup, Coremetrics, beginning in 1999.

There is no aspiring entrepreneur worth their salt who does not harbor an idea for the ultimate “dream team” of advisors broadly defined: engaged investors in general and trusted Advisory Board members specifically. 

No one is born knowing how to found a company or be a CEO. And no one is born knowing how emotional the trek can be. This is a hard-earned, ever-evolving, and constantly demanding role that I hope is clear from the chapters so far. As my friend and CEO coach Kirk Dando has counseled me on more than one occasion, “The path to heaven goes through the road to hell.”