The Power of Unfair Advantage: How to Create It, Build It, and Use It to Maximum

Yes, there is an element of CEO / Venture Capitalist / etc. in this book, and while that crowd may constitute a large SEGMENT of the audience, there is valuable information here for sole proprietors, small business owners, and others. PERFECT example: Page 122, "Flanking." Nesheim discusses the need to roll out your product or service in an "uncontested area," stating "If there is an entrenched leader of the market you are planning on dominating, you are too late and have nothing to flank into...The only thing left is to try a better, faster, cheaper product for the existing market. But that has virtually no chance of winning." Anyone who passes this book by on the premise that it is for CEOs and their ilk is making a big, big mistake if they want to succeed in their own business. There are additional chapters on business development, marketing, sales...all written by a guy who witnessed "Silicon Valley" from the ground up. If more small business owners read well-written business books like this one, fewer small businesses would have "going out of business" sales.

John Nesheim captures the essence of the foundation for success in high growth companies typical of the venture capital industry. "Unfair Advantage" is all about attractiveness to the customer and competitive advantage. In our VC investing practice at Canaan Partners, we constantly evaluate our current and prospective portfolio companies in terms of uniqueness and value proposition. John flushes out those notions and is right on the money. Required reading for all aspiring entrepreneurs.

John's latest book is a must read for any CEO or senior executive of an early stage company. It encompasses the most comprehensive recipe for an organization to gain a competitive advantage. I found the concepts covered to be very practical, actionable, and applicable to organizations of any size. Of course, one of John's passions has been eary stage companies, and therefore the book is the best I've read covering the process from founding of the enterprise, to developing of a busines plan, to securing funding, to executing the business plan - with a focus on building a competitive advantage from the ground up.

After reading this book it is very apparent that the concept of 'Unfair Advantage' is the single most important concept for anyone starting anything; whether it be a start up or a new product/project within an existing organization. If John's first book successfully maps out what needs to be accomplished to successfully take an idea to an IPO, this book reorganizes all this info and more around the important concept of Unfair Advantage. His book is also a must read for anyone attempting to write a world class business plan. Implementing what I learned from Nesheim, I was able to get comments such as "one of the best business plans I've ever seen" from a top silicon valley VC partner. I would like to personally thank John Nesheim for instilling in me the spirit of entrepreuneurship, and what I have learned from his teachings and books have been an invaluable help in taking me as far as I have in the world of high tech start up.

I am a long time fan of John Nesheim, and I highly recommend this book. I was a student of his at Cornell, and this book does a great job detailing his lectures. In the early days of founding SightSpeed, I sought out John's advise with some cool new technology developed at in Cornell's engineering department. He listened to what we were looking at, and said (paraphrasing) "A technology is not a business, use the great technology as a way to build a business". That advice is was extremely important to getting our company off the ground and developing our business model. John expands greatly on that concept (page 163) and others in this book. Reading his book has been a wonderful reminder of the fundamental elements of developing our business. Now that I have finished reading it, I am making it mandatory reading for the rest of my management team.