Start-Up City is now available!
“Let me cut to the chase, Gabe Klein’s Start-Up City: Inspiring Private & Public Entrepreneurship, Getting Projects Done, and Having Fun is a delightful book....accessible, narrative driven, and with some keen insights for practice—Start-Up City is worth your time and your money.”
There has been a revolution in urban transportation over the past five years—set off by start-ups across the US and internationally. Sleek, legible mobility platforms are connecting people to cars, trains, buses, and bikes as never before, opening up a range of new transportation options while improving existing ones. While many large city governments, such as Chicago, New York, and Washington, D.C., have begun to embrace creative forms and processes of government, most still operate under the weight of an unwieldy, risk-averse bureaucracy.
With the advent of self-driving vehicles and other technological shifts upon us, Gabe Klein asks how we can close the gap between the energized, aggressive world of start-ups and the complex bureaucracies struggling to change beyond a geologic time scale. From his experience as a food-truck entrepreneur to a ZipCar executive and a city transportation commissioner, Klein’s career has focused on bridging the public-private divide, finding and celebrating shared goals, and forging better cities with more nimble, consumer-oriented bureaucracies.
In Start-Up City, Klein with David Vega-Barachowitz, demonstrates how to affect big, directional change in cities—and how to do it fast. Klein's objective is to inspire what he calls “public entrepreneurship,” a start-up-pace energy within the public sector, brought about by leveraging the immense resources at its disposal. Klein offers guidance for cutting through the morass, and a road map for getting real, meaningful projects done quickly and having fun while doing it.
This book is for anyone who wants to change the way we live in cities without waiting for the glacial pace of change in government.
“Cities are leading the change in America. Start-Up City gives a window into how to align all of the stars to make it happen. Gabe’s playbook provides an inside look at how to integrate private-sector skills and processes while instituting strong, public-oriented management and governance. Start-Up City is a must read for anyone interested in making positive change in our cities.”