Shoveling $h!t
A Love Story About the Entrepreneur’s Messy Path to Success
NO ONE SHOVELS MORE $H!T THAN ENTREPRENEURS. DIG IN!
In 2023, entrepreneurs started a record 5.5 million new businesses in the United States, lured by the siren call of life-changing wealth.
But entrepreneurship is hard. Brutally hard. And instead of swimming in seas of cash, many founders find themselves buried under mountains of crap.
In Shoveling $h!t: A Love Story, Kass and Mike Lazerow share hard-learned lessons from decades of shoveling as cofounders and early investors in startups that have generated more than $10 billion in realized gains. As the cofounders of Golf.com and Buddy Media, which Salesforce bought for $745 million, they’ve lived what they call the “Imbalanced Life” and have the scars and gains to prove it.
Whether you are deciding to leap or have already lept, Shoveling $h!t: A Love Story will teach you how to embrace the beauty of the struggle and use the tools and entrepreneur’s mindset to overcome the misery and uncertainty that awaits. Inside Kass and Mike’s raw and deeply personal stories are universal strategies for choosing cofounders, greenlighting and funding ideas, building high-performing teams, creating the right culture, and pivoting businesses before it’s too late.
Kass and Mike Lazerow
Mike and Kass Lazerow are serial entrepreneurs and investors best known as the cofounders of Golf.com and Buddy Media, a software company that sold to Salesforce.com for $745 million. With a lifetime of stories from decades of building businesses and helping others as investors and advisors, they are in high demand as public speakers, writers, and podcast guests.
Their journey began as friends growing up in the suburbs of the nation’s capital. They started dating after reuniting at a mutual friend’s wedding in 1996. Two years later, they did what all new couples deeply in love do cofounded a company, Golf.com, before marrying in 1999. After selling Golf.com to Time Warner in 2006, Mike and Kass cofounded Buddy Media, which would become the world’s leading social media marketing platform. And since selling Buddy Media to Salesforce in 2012, they have focused on providing capital and advice to the world’s most innovative founders.
Mike and Kass have supported close to 100 early-stage startup founders. They served as angel investors and advisors to Scopely, which sold to Savvy Games for $5 billion in 2022, and Liquid Death, the canned water company whose “evil mission” is to make people laugh and get more of them to drink healthy beverages more often, all while helping to kill plastic pollution.
Mike was named New York’s Ernst & Young Entrepreneur Of The Year®, and together they were ranked number one on Business Insider’s Silicon Alley 100, received the Cycle for Survival Game Changer Award for their leadership in helping to raise $375 million for cancer research, and were recognized with the Leader of the Future Award from the Frances Hesselbein Leadership Institute.
Mike and Kass live in New York City and the Hudson Valley and have three grown children (Myles, Cole, and Vivian) and two rescue dogs (Cece and Gizmo).