THE VENTURE-BACKED CEO’S GUIDE TO
Mastery, Influence & Endurance
The ceiling on a company is almost always the person running it—specifically, the parts of themselves they cannot see. This is why three out of four venture-backed companies fail to return investor capital.
The Venture-Backed CEO’s Guide to Mastery, Influence & Endurance is for the founder who has to grow as fast as the company does—from the builder who got it off the ground to the CEO who can lead it at scale. That requires new skills and perspectives, and it also requires letting go of habits that were strengths early on but become liabilities later. It is a systematic guide to the work that raises your leadership ceiling while keeping your edge.
Available June 23, 2026
“Founders learn to scale companies. They rarely learn to scale themselves. Neal Goldman makes the case for why that second work matters—and offers founders a thoughtful framework for it.”
REID HOFFMAN
Co-founder of LinkedIn; author of Superagency: What Could Possibly Go Right with Our AI Future
THE THREE DISCIPLINES
Mastery
The self-knowledge that turns your patterns from invisible constraints into deliberate choices.
Influence
The strategies for engaging your team, investors, board, and market that build durable trust.
Endurance
What it takes to go the distance—often seven or more years from first raise to exit—without losing yourself along the way.
CEOs who do this work become harder to rattle, faster to recover from setbacks, and more effective at attracting and keeping the people they need. They raise their next round from a position of trust rather than defense. They make the calls that needed to be made six months earlier. And somewhere along the way, the work starts to feel less like a fight and more like the most interesting problem they have ever tried to solve.
About the Author
Neal Goldman founded and led Capital IQ, acquired by the Standard & Poor’s division of McGraw-Hill for $225 million in one of the strongest venture-backed outcomes of its vintage, and has built several other venture-backed companies since. He has also worked the other side of the venture relationship—as an operating partner, investor, and board chair and member. For the past decade he has been an executive coach to venture-backed CEOs, through fundraises, board crises, and the quieter patterns that don’t show up in board decks. He is a Henry Crown Fellow at the Aspen Institute, a Young Global Leader at the World Economic Forum, and a former Adjunct Professor at Columbia Business School.