Book launch — you're invited!

Plus, what I learned about writing the book on CEO succession in startups.

“May I join your table, please?”

I look up from my laptop. For the last twenty minutes, I’ve been staring at an empty screen, thinking about what to write on Substack today and hoping that a good flat white would help. But the café is loud and busy, and I can’t focus. I try to think about a quote I’ve got on my kitchen table, but apparently, I’m trying too hard not to try too hard.

I close the laptop. A young woman with a literary magazine in Portuguese in one hand and a coffee in the other sits down across the table. We strike up a conversation; it turns out that she works at this very café, but it’s her day off, so she came just for a coffee.

I nod at the literary magazine. Turns out that Ana’s passion is literature. Reading books, and writing, too, but she hasn’t published her works yet.

“Have you written a book?” — she asks.

Funny that she asked, I think. In fact, I spent the day before sending invitations to the book launch party for Startup CEO Succession to all my friends!

And, you, my dear Substack subscribers, are invited too. If you enjoy reading this newsletter, I’d love to meet you in person and sign a book copy for you!

Startup CEO Succession is out on 10 June in hardcover and on Kindle. Kindle pre-orders are available now, and the hardcover will be available from 10 June.

What I learned while writing a book

In the meantime, let me share what I learned while writing and preparing to publish it. Maybe the most surprising fact was that cream paper is marginally thicker than white paper, so if I want my book to have cream paper, the size of the spine (where the book title is on the side) needs to be adjusted by a couple of millimetres. Who knew?

On a more serious note, writing it was both easier and more difficult than I expected. Once I got a sense of the book's structure, I could fit my thoughts and interview notes into it, but the structure didn’t reveal itself until I wrote down most of the material.

That was the difficult bit: writing the book while knowing that different chapters and different anecdotes don’t fit together yet. It just felt like a mess for months, as if I were in the middle of a construction site that would turn into a beautiful home with candlelit rooms one day, but for now, it smells of wet paint and has rubbish everywhere.

A pleasant surprise was how easy it was to interview people. The book is a compilation of wisdom from dozens of interviews with founders, investors, lawyers, scale-up CEOs, chairpeople, etc. So many people generously agreed to give me 1-2 hours of their time to share what they learned.

Even more people — another pleasant surprise — agreed to read the advance review copy and share their feedback and endorsements with me. Jerry Colonna, founder and CEO of Reboot and a bestselling author, kindly offered to write a foreword, for which I’m truly grateful.

I also learned how much difference AI tools can make. Otter.ai was transcribing all the interviews, which I then gave to Claude.ai. Then I would ask Claude questions like “What did Jane say about the impact of CEO transition on family life? Back it up with quotes”, and Claude would reply: “Jane shared a story about navigating a busy CEO job and a long-distance relationship, and here are her main lessons…”.

Then, giving subchapters to ChatGPT and asking it to criticise them was helpful in uncovering my blind spots. Finally, DeepL helped me make a present for my Mum by doing an amazing translation of the book!

And then there was a publishing process. Thankfully, my editor

Adele Barlow

did all the hard work of coordinating the book formatter and the cover designer. Still, making choices about the paper type, book size, fonts, buying ISBNs, catching typos, wrangling with Amazon’s customer support, making revisions… a myriad of small tasks kept (and still keeps!) Adele and me busy.

Maybe the biggest surprise was the response to my invitations to the book launch! I reached out to my friends and everyone who helped me with the book, and within hours, dozens of people promised to come! Someone promised to come from Scotland and Bath. Someone said they would fly from Barcelona. Someone — from Geneva. One CEO promised to move a board meeting to accommodate this and fly in from Norway. Wow!

A public conversation on a taboo topic

Another pleasant surprise was the response from the investor community. I want this book launch to start a public conversation about CEO succession in startups. It’s a topic that every CEO and their investors think about at some point, but few people talk about it in public.

It’s particularly hard for investors to talk to founders about it (and vice versa!). So it was nice to see several VCs and CEOs volunteer to be on stage to have a frank conversation on the topic, given how busy they all are (especially during London Tech Week!). One VC, Molten Ventures, kindly offered to host the book launch at their amazing offices!

So I’m very excited for the event. There will be no “the author reads the book from the stage while others politely pretend to listen” part; it’s all about the subject matter. We’ll be talking about if, when and how founder CEOs should choose to step down (or be asked to leave by their boards), sharing hard-earned lessons.

I hope that writing this book will help the tech community to start talking about this difficult topic. A decade ago, it felt like everyone was pretending that they were “killing it”, and no one admitted that it was actually hard to run a startup at times. This started to change. Today, we speak more openly about mental health challenges, bringing our whole self to work, work-life balance, structural inequality and other difficult topics — that’s a step forward. Likewise, we need to start normalising the topic of CEO succession.

Staying as a CEO of your startup until the exit is an option, but it’s not the only one. Taking the startup from an idea to the point when it makes sense for someone else to take over is success, not failure as many founders imagine it to be. I know; I’ve been there.

Are you in?

So, will you come to the launch party? It’s on 10 June at 17:30 in central London. I’d love to see you there!

And while we’re all waiting for the book launch, don’t forget to:

As I was saying goodbye to Ana after we finished our coffees, I thought that I’d be back. Working from that café can be difficult, but their speciality coffee is to kill for, so I’ll return — this time without my laptop.