Book Review - Confessions of a Serial Entrepreneur

I interrupt this regularly scheduled blog post, for yet another entrepreneur book review. One of the great fringe benefits of blogging about your entrepreneurial experiences is that you get contacted by a lot of other entrepreneurs. Sometimes I'm even lucky enough to be sent a free book written by an entrepreneur in exchange for my feedback on the book (I like getting stuff for free that I'd probably pay for anyway).

Such was the case with Confessions of a Serial Entrepreneur: Why I Can't Stop Starting Over by Stuart Skorman. Skorman is best known to us young entrepreneurs as the founder of the immensely successful movie site Reel.com. In sticking with my cut-to-the-chase book review format, here are the pros and cons of the book:

Pros

• A very easy and entertaining read. It felt like I was sitting in a room hearing Skorman tell his life story. I like to read books that really challenge my mind, the problem with that being the most of the books I read for personal and business are "difficult" reads that you can only process five or ten pages at a time. I regularly found myself reading 20-30 pages at a time without wearing my brain out, a testament to the laid back writing style.
• That's not to say that I didn't learn a lot from the book. Skorman tells his stories and weaves the lessons that he wants to impart into the stories. This works better than the other way around - listing off the lessons and telling the stories that led to you learning them - because you get to experience Skorman's growth as an entrepreneur from his twenties into his fifties as he experienced it.
• By far, BY FAR, the best part of the book was that Skorman "failed" in his most recent venture? Why is that so great? Because we all like to think that we do our failing early on, and that once we succeed we will continue to succeed. Skorman cashed out $17 million from Reel.com. He could have retired - he had all the money in the world. But the serial entrepreneur inside of him couldn't retire, and he lost around $15 million of that in Elephant Pharmacy, a pharmacy the blends western and eastern medicine. I don't know how I would react if I had that kind of money, but I think there's at least a *chance* that I would risk it all again for something I believe in. It led me to the realization that there's a good chance that we are entrepreneurs for the sake of being entrepreneurs, and not for the sake of getting rich - we crave the experience more than the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
  

Cons

• For most books I can rattle off the cons, but I only have one in this case. I was waiting to find out exactly HOW Elephant Pharmacy (a business that still exists today) was able to suck so much of Skorman's money, and then BAM, all of a sudden it just says "Just before I completed this book I signed a legal document that restricts me from writing about events at Elephant after October 31, 2003." Come on...it's like having the movie theater lose power with fifteen minutes left in The Sixth Sense only to leave you hanging (which, incidentally DID happen to me, and we had to come back the next day and watch the whole freaking movie over again just to get to one of the most shocking endings of all time). But I digress - I understand that Skorman probably didn't have a choice, but it leaves the reader hanging. The whole book is very transparent and then the ending is concealed.

Overall, a GREAT read for any entrepreneur. This book is going on my short list of books I recommend to first-time entrepreneurs because of the up and down experience it puts you through. That up and down experience correlates to any entrepreneurial endeavor that you or I will experience, and because of that we can all learn from reading Mr. Skorman's fantastic story.