Rules for Renegades

Starred review from July 23, 2007
High school dropout turned self-made multimillionaire and five-time CEO, Comaford-Lynch presents an upbeat, irreverent business book for entrepreneurs, free spirits and eponymous renegades. Focusing on passionate young people who have grit and vision but limited experience and/or resources, the author presents practical, step-by-step advice for starting a company, making it in a cutthroat environment and reaching life goals in record time, while recounting her entertaining, often hilarious life story. “To some extent, all first-time CEOs are making it up as they go along,” she says. Sure enough, she's found herself brazening her way through plenty of bizarre and touching situations: hiring employees before she actually has a firm; posing as a man to score a programming job in the macho world of '80s Microsoft; dating Bill Gates to learn confidence; making (and losing) millions of dollars through guts, sales know-how and force of personality. Emphasizing visualization and self-confidence, she tackles the spiritual issues of prosperity as well as the down-and-dirty details of payroll and writing a killer business plan. Entrepreneurs and leaders at all levels of their careers will find this inspiring, rags-to-riches story as pleasurable to read as it is thought provoking.

August 1, 2007
As an entrepreneur, Comaford-Lynch has built and sold five of her own businesses and served as a board of director or advisor to 36 start-ups. She has also invested inmore than200 start-ups as a venture capitalist, counseled 700 of the Fortune 1000 and the Clinton White House, all without either a high-school diploma or college degree. With a background as a teenage runaway, Buddhist monk, and software engineer for Microsoft and Apple, her unique vision allows for a seat-of-the-pants style of management that is both refreshing and invigorating. The book combines humorous, fast-paced anecdotes with practical advice obtained from a whirlwind career building several million-dollar businesses from scratch before the age of 40, including an $8 million business loss and other failures and rejections that provided important life lessons. With an irreverent style all her own, Comaford-Lynch forges ahead with a stream of inspirational advice that readers will want to turn to often in times of both struggle and success.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2007, American Library Association.)