This image is the cover for the book Ready, Fire, Aim

Ready, Fire, Aim

"Under the best conditions, being an entrepreneur can be filled with anxiety and trepidation. Throw in some challenging circumstances, and trepidation turns to downright terror. Charles Ota Heller is a Holocaust survivor who arrived in the US as a penniless thirteen-year-old who spoke two words of English. Exhibiting strength, persistence, and determination, he earned an athletic scholarship to college and obtained three degrees in engineering. He became an academic at the cutting edge of new computer technology and was bitten by the entrepreneurial bug. Over the next twenty years as CEO of technology companies and an additional twenty as an investor in, and mentor of, startup companies, Charlie experienced the joys, successes, failures, and terrors of entrepreneurship. When the FBI attempted to shut down his company on a trumped-up charge, memories of World War II and the Gestapo filled him with the terror of uncertainty. He was betrayed by a member of his management team and was deposed from leadership of the company he founded. Then he discovered that his partner in a venture capital fund was dishonest and Charlie had to fight to maintain his own reputation. Ready, Fire, Aim is the story of his riveting journey, told as a powerful, candid, engrossing adventure that will not only entertain but will leave present and budding entrepreneurs with valuable takeaways."

Charles Ota Heller

Charlie was born in Prague three years before the country was occupied by Germany. Today, he is a writer, having published an award-winning memoir, "Prague: My Long Journey Home." It was translated into Czech and published (as Dlouhá cesta domů) by Mladá Fronta, the nation’s largest publisher. His lighthearted memoir, titled "Name-droppings: Close Encounters with the Famous and Near Famous" was published in 2013. He holds three engineering degrees and was the recipient of Maryland’s “Entrepreneur-of-the-Year” award, Oklahoma State’s Lohmann Medal, and CUA’s Alumni Achievement Award. He was the youngest-ever tenured professor at the Naval Academy and the first Professor of Practice in the history of the University of Maryland. In 2015, he was inducted into the Oklahoma State University CEAT Hall of Fame.

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