In our jobs as business professors, we have seen many entrepreneurs start new ventures. Some of these entrepreneurs failed, others thrived, and a few of them were more successful than they (and we) had ever imagined. We studied them over many years, trying to understand what explains their successes and failures. As academics, we dove deeply into their problems and challenges. Many answers we gained from our studies were complex and difficult to explain to others, including the entrepreneurs we studied.

In this book, we focused on easy-to-understand answers. We distilled them from our many studies and infused them with insights from our colleagues’ work. The result is 66 simple rules, each including several subrules. These simple rules cover the entire entrepreneurial journey.

We started by explaining simple rules for recognizing new business opportunities. These rules emphasize the premise of starting the entrepreneurial journey and illustrate how you should consider finding a creative idea as the basis for your potential venture.

In the subsequent chapter, we presented simple rules for selecting markets and making decisions related to market entry. These rules introduce you to approaches that will help you gather and act on information that you need for these decisions. They also illustrate how to advance your venture if your first business model fails.

You must make many important decisions at different steps of the entrepreneurial journey. Therefore, we presented simple rules that entail easy principles and tools for making decisions under typical entrepreneurial circumstances—namely, high uncertainty and resource scarcity. An essential part of these rules also illustrates that you—like everybody—may be fooled by decision-making biases, so we also provided advice for what you can do to minimize these biases.

We also offered simple rules to help you develop plans and strategies to advance your venture. These rules demonstrate how you can convert your personal goals and preferences into a plan for your venture. They also tell you how to make your venture more robust and resilient in the face of obstacles.

The following chapter considered that entrepreneurship occurs in a social context and thus provided simple rules for managing stakeholders. These rules address how you can engage with others to develop your opportunity and venture. We focused on who you should engage with and how you should interact and communicate to ensure you can access the knowledge and resources you need for building your venture.

The next chapter then focused on one particular group of people that is key for venture development: the entrepreneurial team. In another set of simple rules, we introduced you to building a strong team and how to interact with your cofounders to make the most out of your team’s competencies.

Further, we presented simple rules for managing your employees. We discussed who you might attract to your venture and how you can lead them to build a strong culture as a critical asset for your venture.

For many entrepreneurs, growing their ventures is an important goal. Therefore, the subsequent chapter introduced several simple rules that will help you maximize your venture’s growth potential. In particular, the rules will help you prepare for the growth journey. Again, the rules emphasize the importance of culture for venture development and growth.

During the entrepreneurial journey, all founders experience emotional ups and downs. Thus, the subsequent chapter presented simple rules that will help you manage and channel your emotions. These rules also offer some advice for coping with the high stress levels you will likely experience during challenging times.

Not all entrepreneurs are alike, and some emphasize developing the social aspects of their ventures. Therefore, we presented simple rules that illustrate the many good things you can do for others with your venture. These rules also acknowledge, however, that engaging in a social mission can drain your energy and lead to fatigue. We thus offered advice on how to avoid fatigue from social venturing.

Given the high uncertainty of the entrepreneurial journey, all entrepreneurs make mistakes and experience errors and failures. Accordingly, we offered some simple rules that can help you learn from these mistakes and failures, which is neither automatic nor easy.

Finally, one day, every entrepreneurial journey comes to an end. Therefore, we concluded this book with simple rules for exiting your venture and ensuring succession goes smoothly.

Driving Route 66 is an adventure. Going on the entrepreneurial journey is an adventure. Just as simple traffic rules help you navigate perhaps the most famous road in the world, we hope the simple rules offered in this book prevent you from getting lost along your entrepreneurial journey but instead reach the successful outcome you want to achieve.