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Coming early 2027
Rich or King?
An Entrepreneurial Journey Blueprint
Thirty years of deals, boards and mistakes — and the one question every founder is already answering.
Free to reserve · No payment · Signed by the author
Kauffman Fellow·30+ private company boards·NASDAQ public company director·Endowed chair in entrepreneurship·Founder, Joseph Advisory
About the book
Rich, or king? Every founder answers it — most by accident.
Every entrepreneur eventually reaches a fork that looks like a hundred small decisions but is really one big one. Do you want to be rich — build something valuable, bring in the partners, capital, and talent it takes to get there, and own a smaller piece of a much bigger thing? Or do you want to be king — keep control, keep the final word, and accept that the kingdom may stay small? There is no wrong answer. There is only a wrong way to answer: by accident, halfway through a term-sheet negotiation.
Rich or King? is a practitioner's guide to that journey, written by an investor-operator who has spent three decades on both sides of the table. Beto Pallares has been a founder, restaurateur, telecom executive, professor, Kauffman Fellow, and director of more than thirty private companies and one public one. The lessons here come from specific deals with specific price tags — the nanofiber royalty that quietly became millions during the pandemic, the material science deal that will revolutionize the flexible electronics display industry, the fourteen taxi-fleet owners who couldn't see Uber coming.
At the center is the Entrepreneurial Life Cycle Model, the framework Beto developed from his doctoral research and refined in hundreds of pitch meetings: a map of how entrepreneurial value is actually created, from who you were before the company existed to the moment a market finally pays you. It is not a weekend framework, a motivational text, or a manual for raising venture capital. It is for the entrepreneur already in motion who wants to know how someone who has been through it actually thinks — mistakes included.
You cannot plan the timing. You can plan everything else.Beto Pallares
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No payment, no obligation. Leave your details, and Beto will sign a first-edition copy for you when the book ships in early 2027. You'll get one email when it's ready and a note on where to pick it up or how it will be sent.
Free to reserve · No payment · Signed by the author
About the author
Ebetuel "Beto" Pallares, PhD, MBA
Investor · Advisor · Founder, Joseph Advisory · Kauffman Fellow
Beto Pallares was born in Ciudad Juárez and crossed to El Paso at the age of four — ten family members, a two-bedroom house, and one truck. His mother sewed the family's clothes; his father was a butcher. Frugality was a mandate and a way of life.
Over the past three decades, he has been a management consultant, telecom executive, startup founder, restaurant owner, nonprofit director, and professor, and holds the Bill and Sharron Sheriff Endowed Chair in Entrepreneurship at New Mexico State University. He is a Kauffman Fellow (Class 18), has served on the boards of more than thirty private companies and eight nonprofits, and was a director of Exagen, Inc. (NASDAQ: XGN).
Today he is founder and managing director of Joseph Advisory, an El Paso investment advisory firm serving families and founders, and general partner of Audaz Capital, an early-stage venture fund backing underrepresented entrepreneurs. He founded the Success Through Technology Education (STTE) Foundation (now 1881 Ventures), which brings entrepreneurial thinking to middle, high school, and college students, as well as first-time entrepreneurs across the Borderplex.
He holds a B.A. in Economics from Brandeis University and an MBA and a Ph.D. in International Business Strategy from the University of Texas at El Paso. Rich or King? is his first book. He lives in El Paso, Texas, and has fantasies of playing percussion with a touring salsa band and writing poetry in a dimly lit tavern.