Zero to IPO

**Author:** Frederic Kerrest

**Estimated Reading Time:** 45 minutes

**What You'll Learn:**

- What entrepreneurship actually feels like when the glamour is stripped away - How to evaluate ideas, build teams, and raise capital without losing your sanity - The mechanics of sales, culture, leadership, and growth that separate winners from the dead - How to survive near-death experiences and emerge stronger - What happens after the IPO and why it is not the finish line

**Who This Book Is For:**

Aspiring founders who want an honest picture of the road ahead. Early-stage employees trying to understand how startups really work. Investors who want to see the founder's perspective. And anyone who has ever wondered what it takes to turn an idea into a public company.

Most books about entrepreneurship lie to you. They show the founder on stage, ringing the bell at the stock exchange. They show the funding announcements, the magazine covers, the private jets. They compress ten years of struggle into a ninety-second montage and call it a success story. Frederic Kerrest wants you to know something different. He wants you to know that entrepreneurship feels like standing in an Oklahoma blizzard, shivering cold, covered in grime, hoping for nothing more than the chance to convince a stranger to buy your product. That is the real picture. That is what building a company actually looks like. Kerrest is not a theorist. He cofounded Okta, an enterprise software company that grew from an idea in a San Francisco apartment to a public company valued at nearly $40 billion. He has lived through the fundraising rejections, the near-death experiences, the brutal sales cycles, the boardroom battles, and the IPO process itself. He has also watched dozens of other founders navigate the same terrain, some successfully and many not. This book exists because the gap between the mythology of startups and the reality of startups is enormous. That gap destroys people. It leads founders to quit good jobs for bad ideas. It leads them to raise money they do not need for companies that cannot scale. It leads them to hire the wrong people, chase the wrong customers, and build the wrong culture. And when the inevitable storm hits, they are unprepared because nobody told them the storm was coming. The problem is not that entrepreneurship is hard. The problem is that most people enter it with the wrong expectations and the wrong preparation. Kerrest wrote this book to fix that. He wrote it as a field guide, drawn from the trenches, covering every major phase of the journey from zero to IPO. He does not pretend that success is guaranteed. He does not offer a formula. What he offers is…