Kathryn Finney

The Bookshelf

Books by Kathryn Finney: Build the Damn Thing and What’s Next

Two decades of writing about how people actually build things, gathered in one place. From early style and money guides to a Wall Street Journal bestseller on entrepreneurship, Kathryn’s books share one through-line: practical, honest, and useful, written for the people the rest of business publishing forgot to write for.

Everybody's an Entrepreneur book cover by Kathryn Finney

The New Book

Everybody’s an Entrepreneur.

The old definitions of entrepreneurship are too small for the way people are actually working now. Everybody’s an Entrepreneur is Kathryn’s argument for a bigger frame, one that includes the builders, operators, conveners, translators, and freedom founders who do not show up on Forbes 30 Under 30 lists but who are quietly running large parts of the real economy.

The book draws on Kathryn’s two decades as a founder, investor, and observer of how real businesses get built. It is the follow-up to Build the Damn Thing, and it picks up the question that book left open: if more people are entrepreneurs than the current system gives credit for, what does that mean for how we work, hire, fund, and live?

Pre-orders open soon. Join the waitlist to be first in line and to get early access to the book’s core frameworks.

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Build the Damn Thing book cover by Kathryn FinneyWall Street Journal Bestseller

Wall Street Journal Bestseller

Build the Damn Thing.

How to Start a Successful Business if You’re Not a Rich White Guy

Build the Damn Thing: How to Start a Successful Business if You’re Not a Rich White Guy is the book Kathryn wrote because nobody else was writing it.

When she founded digitalundivided, a social enterprise focused on Black and Latina founders, she watched brilliant operators get told no by investors who did not understand the markets they were building for. She watched smart business ideas die in pitch rooms full of people who all looked the same. Build the Damn Thing is what she learned, packaged into a usable playbook.

Published by Portfolio, the business imprint of Penguin Random House, the book is a Wall Street Journal bestseller with a foreword by Guy Kawasaki. It has been featured in Bloomberg, Fast Company, Masters of Scale, and Marketplace. The paperback edition released on November 18, 2025.

Inside the book you will find frameworks for funding a company when the standard VC route is not open to you, language for pitching investors who do not look like you, structures for building a team without burning out, and a clear set of decisions every founder has to make in the first two years.

Read this if you are starting a business and the existing business books were not written with you in mind. Buy the book. Build the damn thing.

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Also by Kathryn

How to Be a Budget Fashionista

2006 · Kathryn’s first book

Before the VC fund, before BUILD, before Build the Damn Thing, Kathryn ran a blog called The Budget Fashionista, one of the first style and personal finance sites on the internet. The blog grew into a community, the community turned into a book deal, and How to Be a Budget Fashionista (2006) became Kathryn’s first published work.

It is a snapshot of where the through-line in Kathryn’s writing started: building things on your own terms, with the resources you actually have, and without waiting for permission. The book is still available and is a useful read if you want to see where the story began.

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