Music producer Jermaine Dupri spoke at Tech Cocktail in Miami. Photos by Ezequiel Williams.

The book launch of “Startup Mixology: Tech Cocktail’s Guide to Building, Growing and Celebrating Startup Success,” by Frank Gruber, the founder and CEO of Tech Cocktail, brought together entrepreneurs, on stage and in the audience, and featured sound advice, a llama and cocktails. What else do you need for your next successful startup?

As it turns out, quite a bit more — which is the subject of “Startup Mixology.”

“The reason to do this book was that it took me 10 years to start my company and run it myself,” explained Gruber in a post-panel interview at The Stage in Miami. “It was a scary, long process to figure out on my own and I made a lot of mistakes. So I wanted to create the book that was not out there when I was trying to do this and something that would be easy for people to follow. There are a lot of books out that talk about a lot of the different components but I wanted to create a comprehensive guide that only would tell you how to do it, but [it would tell you] also the harsh realities of it too. Because it’s hard.”

“Startup Mixology” addresses both practical issues, such as employee agreements and accounting, as well as more layered matters such as networking, building a team that can be trusted in the trenches and the importance of celebrations.

Gruber, a new media journalist and entrepreneur, co-founded Tech Cocktail, self- described as “a media company that covers and connects startups communities across the country,” in 2006. It now hosts events in over 20 cities in the United States and abroad, including Miami, where it launched last year with the support of Knight Foundation.

But would-be entrepreneurs would do well in taking success as just one part of the story, Gruber cautioned.

“There is a lot of glorification of startups in the media and you hear about the results in the eighth or ninth year,” Gruber said. “But they don’t tell you about the first seven years — and those are really hard. So I was trying to create a book that helps you understand that as you go along, realize that [challenging times are] part of the journey. This is it. Embrace it. That’s why I write about using celebration as a motivational tool. We asked a lot of our readers in startups what they were doing to get through those harsh realities.”

The evening included a conversation moderated by Gruber with a panel including Jermaine Dupri, CEO of SO SO DEF and Global14.com, songwriter and producer; Lori Anne Wardi, vice president at NeuStar; Hugh MacLeod, cartoonist, writer and creative director at Gaping Void; and Matt Haggman, Knight Foundation’s Miami program director.

Photo: Gaping Void artist Hugh MacLeod at Tech Cocktail.

It was Haggman who set up the conversation early in the evening, noting that in last year’s Kauffman Index of Entrepreneurial Activity, produced by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, Miami ranked “No. 1 in the country in a per capita basis, and it typically ranks in the top five. So entrepreneurial instinct, risk-taking, is very much who we are.”

Haggman also noted that for the entrepreneurial community in Miami to become sustainable “we need more examples of success because … as we create those stars they become, a) the examples that inspire but b) they also become the future funders. Ultimately the goal is creating a sort of pay-it-forward, virtuous cycle … where each success becomes a resource for the next entrepreneur coming up.”

He later stressed the importance of developing a supportive ecosystem as “entrepreneurship used to be viewed as a singular pursuit whereas now it’s much more about community; it’s about co-working, collaboration.”

Meanwhile, asked about the “harsh realities” in creating a successful product, Lori Anne Wardi spoke of the beginnings of .CO, a company she co-founded, and how “many people thought it was merely a typo of .com. They also asked ‘Why do we need another domain extension?’ There were all sorts of naysayers … telling us why it wasn’t going to work so we kind of had to shut everything down and make sure we stuck to our vision.”

In fact, some old-fashioned values — passion for what you do, frugality, persistence, stick-to-it-tiveness — were themes throughout the evening.

“Where people get stuck … is that we think we should have the apartment, the BMW and we should look the part,” said MacLeod during the Q&A portion of the evening. “And you can’t be an entrepreneur if all you care about are [the trappings of success].”

In fact, Gruber concurred, money is not a good enough reason for a true entrepreneur.

“At the end of the day, money is not enough to motivate you every day and get you out of bed, especially when you are having a hard time  — and you are going to get hit by hardship along the way,” he said. “If you don’t love what you are doing, you are not going to do it.”

Fernando González is a Miami-based arts & culture writer.