The Idea Is the Easy Part: Myths and Realities of the Startup World

"Innovation & Creativity" winner in the 2023 Porchlight Business Book Awards

"The Idea is the Easy Part is an honest and realistic look at the challenges and rewards of entrepreneurship. I highly recommend this book to anyone considering starting a business.”

—Chris Barton, Founder of Shazam, three-time entrepreneur, inventor, and tech investor

Venture capitalist and former executive Brian Dovey offers readers a personal, humorous, and story-driven compendium of practical and accessible advice for navigating the risky entrepreneurial journey.

Part business manual, part memoir, The Idea Is the Easy Part counters widespread myths of failure and success with lessons learned from Dovey’s decades of hands-on business experience.

Today’s renowned businessmen and entrepreneurs, like Elon Musk, Mark Cuban, Peter Thiel, and more can earn celebrity and billionaire status. Our books, movies, and TV shows seem to say that with a big idea and a jazzy elevator pitch, anyone can quickly earn funding for their own startups and achieve massive financial success. In these stories, a brilliant innovation—and the funding you’ll easily acquire—are all you need for success.

The reality, however, is vastly different. Getting funding is incredibly hard, and success depends on many factors, strategies, and decisions.

Between serving as the president of the company that developed the groundbreaking EpiPen, bringing entrepreneurship to a Fortune 500 company as president, working in venture capitalism for several decades, and being involved in the development of nearly 300 startups, Brian Dovey is well acquainted with entrepreneurship—its reality as well as its mythology. In The Idea Is the Easy Part, Dovey debunks common myths about businesses and lays out an enthusiastic but realistic guidebook for aspiring entrepreneurs guiding them with the right growth mindset to make better decisions at every stage of the entrepreneurial process.

The Idea Is the Easy Part is a reliable guide to navigating entrepreneurial waters, replacing today’s misleading notions with objective and actionable advice.

Brian Dovey was a partner at the venture capital firm Domain Associates—which has invested $2.8 billion in startups—from 1988 until his passing in August, 2023. He was involved in the development of ~300 pharmaceutical and life sciences startups and served on the boards of more than 35 companies (and as chairman of six) with a combined value of more than $50 billion. Dovey also taught business students part-time, including a long-running acclaimed course at San Diego State University called “Managing the Growing Firm.”

A native of New Jersey, Dovey received his B.A. in mathematics from Colgate University and his MBA from Harvard Business School. He is survived by his wife Elizabeth, their three children, and eight grandchildren.