No Experience Necessary

Ronnen Harary was twenty-three, less than a year out of college and still living with his mother, when he co-founded the company that became Spin Master. At the time he didn't see his age as an advantage. Looking back, he argues it was the most valuable thing he had.

Three decades on, Spin Master runs twenty-eight offices worldwide, employs more than 3,000 people and brings in billions of dollars a year. Harary, its co-founder and former CEO, helped build toy lines such as Bakugan and PAW Patrol, and his work has pushed innovation in both toys and children's animation.

The book is built around eleven principles. Each one shows how early adulthood gives people strengths that fade with time: a greater capacity to take and manage risk, a better chance of finding the right business partners, and the goodwill that mentors and older people tend to extend to the young. Harary draws on his own story to illustrate them, so the book works partly as a lively account of how a well-loved toy company grew and partly as a manifesto for young entrepreneurs.

He also writes with the present in mind. With new technology threatening traditional entry-level jobs in many fields, he urges young readers to take charge of their own futures and accept that building something meaningful from nothing is a messy business.