We've ranked the best startup books using expert recommendations, sales data, and millions of reader ratings. At Shortform, we know books. Our book guides are the best in the world. Learn why.
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The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses
Most startups fail. But many of those failures are preventable. The Lean Startup is a new approach being adopted across the globe, changing the way companies are built and new products are launched.
Eric Ries defines a startup as an organization dedicated to creating something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty. This is just as true for one person in a garage or a group of seasoned professionals in a Fortune 500 boardroom. What they have in common is a mission to penetrate that fog of uncertainty to discover a successful path to a sustainable business.
The Lean Startup approach fosters companies that are both more capital efficient and that leverage human creativity more effectively. Inspired by lessons from lean manufacturing, it relies on "validated learning," rapid scientific experimentation, as well as a number of counter-intuitive practices that shorten product development cycles, measure actual progress without resorting to vanity metrics, and learn what customers really want. It enables a company to shift directions with agility, altering plans inch by inch, minute by minute.
Rather than wasting time creating elaborate business plans, The Lean Startup offers entrepreneurs - in companies of all sizes - a way to test their vision continuously, to adapt and adjust before it's too late. Ries provides a scientific approach to creating and managing successful startups in a age when companies need to innovate more than ever.
At Asana, we've been lucky to benefit from the author's advice firsthand; this book will enable him to help many more entrepreneurs answer the tough questions about their business. [source]
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Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
If you want to build a better future, you must believe in secrets.
The great secret of our time is that there are still uncharted frontiers to explore and new inventions to create. In Zero to One, legendary entrepreneur and investor Peter Thiel shows how we can find singular ways to create those new things.
Thiel begins with the contrarian premise that we live in an age of technological stagnation, even if we’re too distracted by shiny mobile devices to notice. Information technology has improved rapidly, but there is no reason why progress should be limited to computers or Silicon Valley. Progress can be achieved in any industry or area of business. It comes from the most important skill that every leader must master: learning to think for yourself.
Doing what someone else already knows how to do takes the world from 1 to n, adding more of something familiar. But when you do something new, you go from 0 to 1. The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. Tomorrow’s champions will not win by competing ruthlessly in today’s marketplace. They will escape competition altogether, because their businesses will be unique.
Zero to One presents at once an optimistic view of the future of progress in America and a new way of thinking about innovation: it starts by learning to ask the questions that lead you to find value in unexpected places.
The full inside story of the breathtaking rise and shocking collapse of a multibillion-dollar startup, by the prize-winning journalist who first broke the story and pursued it to the end in the face of pressure and threats from the CEO and her lawyers.
In 2014, Theranos founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes was widely seen as the female Steve Jobs: a brilliant Stanford dropout whose startup "unicorn" promised to revolutionize the medical industry with a machine that would make blood tests significantly faster and easier. Backed by investors such as Larry Ellison and Tim Draper, Theranos sold shares in a fundraising round that valued the company at $9 billion, putting Holmes's worth at an estimated $4.7 billion. There was just one problem: The technology didn't work.
For years, Holmes had been misleading investors, FDA officials, and her own employees. When Carreyrou, working at The Wall Street Journal, got a tip from a former Theranos employee and started asking questions, both Carreyrou and the Journal were threatened with lawsuits. Undaunted, the newspaper ran the first of dozens of Theranos articles in late 2015. By early 2017, the company's value was zero and Holmes faced potential legal action from the government and her investors. Here is the riveting story of the biggest corporate fraud since Enron, a disturbing cautionary tale set amid the bold promises and gold-rush frenzy of Silicon Valley.
A bunch of my friends recommended this one to me. Carreyrou gives you the definitive insider’s look at the rise and fall of Theranos. The story is even crazier than I expected, and I found myself unable to put it down once I started. This book has everything: elaborate scams, corporate intrigue, magazine cover stories, ruined family relationships, and the demise of a company once valued at nearly $10 billion. [source]
Finished “bad blood” on the Theranos scandal. Wow. Just wow. It’s a must read for everyone in tech and startups. Just 1-click buy it :) Amazing how far charisma and social proof got them. Here’s the NYT review of the book https://t.co/PyMGxfoG2R [source]
Brad Feld
Co-Founder/Foundry Group
Every entrepreneur and VC should read this book. John Carreyrou has done something important here. Maybe this book will finally put a nail in the phrase “fake it till you make it”, but I doubt it. The amount of lying, disingenuousness, blatant and unjustified self-promotion, and downright deceit that exists in entrepreneurship right now is at a local maximum. This always happens when entrepreneurship gets trendy. Carreyrou just wrote a long warning for entrepreneurs and VCs. [source]
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The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers
A lot of people talk about how great it is to start a business, but only Ben Horowitz is brutally honest about how hard it is to run one.
In The Hard Thing About Hard Things, Ben Horowitz, cofounder of Andreessen Horowitz and one of Silicon Valley's most respected and experienced entrepreneurs, draws on his own story of founding, running, selling, buying, managing, and investing in technology companies to offer essential advice and practical wisdom for navigating the toughest problems business schools don't cover. His blog has garnered a devoted following of millions of readers who have come to rely on him to help them run their businesses. A lifelong rap fan, Horowitz amplifies business lessons with lyrics from his favorite songs and tells it straight about everything from firing friends to poaching competitors, from cultivating and sustaining a CEO mentality to knowing the right time to cash in.
His advice is grounded in anecdotes from his own hard-earned rise—from cofounding the early cloud service provider Loudcloud to building the phenomenally successful Andreessen Horowitz venture capital firm, both with fellow tech superstar Marc Andreessen (inventor of Mosaic, the Internet's first popular Web browser). This is no polished victory lap; he analyzes issues with no easy answers through his trials, including
demoting (or firing) a loyal friend; whether you should incorporate titles and promotions, and how to handle them; if it's OK to hire people from your friend's company; how to manage your own psychology, while the whole company is relying on you; what to do when smart people are bad employees; why Andreessen Horowitz prefers founder CEOs, and how to become one; whether you should sell your company, and how to do it. Filled with Horowitz's trademark humor and straight talk, and drawing from his personal and often humbling experiences, The Hard Thing About Hard Things is invaluable for veteran entrepreneurs as well as those aspiring to their own new ventures.
Ben's book is a great read - with uncomfortable truths about entrepreneurship and how to lead to a company. It's also an inspiring story of a business rebirth through sheer willpower. [source]
Ben's experience and expertise make him one of the most important leaders not just in Silicon Valley but also in the global knowledge economy. For anyone interested in building, growing or leading a great company, this book is an incredibly valuable resource - and a funny and insightful read. [source]
Drew Houston
CEO/Dropbox
One of the great things that the author wrote in this book is the hardest part of being a CEO is managing your psychology. [source]
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Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't
To find the keys to greatness, Collins's 21-person research team read and coded 6,000 articles, generated more than 2,000 pages of interview transcripts and created 384 megabytes of computer data in a five-year project. The findings will surprise many readers and, quite frankly, upset others.
The Challenge Built to Last, the defining management study of the nineties, showed how great companies triumph over time and how long-term sustained performance can be engineered into the DNA of an enterprise from the very beginning.
But what about the company that is not born with great DNA? How can good companies, mediocre companies, even bad companies achieve enduring greatness?
The Study For years, this question preyed on the mind of Jim Collins. Are there companies that defy gravity and convert long-term mediocrity or worse into long-term superiority? And if so, what are the universal distinguishing characteristics that cause a company to go from good to great?
The Standards Using tough benchmarks, Collins and his research team identified a set of elite companies that made the leap to great results and sustained those results for at least fifteen years. How great? After the leap, the good-to-great companies generated cumulative stock returns that beat the general stock market by an average of seven times in fifteen years, better than twice the results delivered by a composite index of the world's greatest companies, including Coca-Cola, Intel, General Electric, and Merck.
The Comparisons The research team contrasted the good-to-great companies with a carefully selected set of comparison companies that failed to make the leap from good to great. What was different? Why did one set of companies become truly great performers while the other set remained only good?
The Findings The findings of the Good to Great study will surprise many readers and shed light on virtually every area of management strategy and practice. The findings include: Level 5 Leaders: The research team was shocked to discover the type of leadership required to achieve greatness.
The Hedgehog Concept (Simplicity within the Three Circles): To go from good to great requires transcending the curse of competence.
A Culture of Discipline: When you combine a culture of discipline with an ethic of entrepreneurship, you get the magical alchemy of great results. Technology Accelerators: Good-to-great companies think differently about the role of technology.
The Flywheel and the Doom Loop: Those who launch radical change programs and wrenching restructurings will almost certainly fail to make the leap.
"Collins briefed Amazon executives on his seminal management book before its publication. Companies must confront the brutal facts of their business, find out what they are uniquely good at, and master their fly wheel, in which each part of the business reinforces and accelerates the other parts," Stone writes. [source]
The bestselling classic on disruptive innovation, renowned author Clayton M. Christensen.
His work is cited by the world’s best-known thought leaders, from Steve Jobs to Malcolm Gladwell. In this classic bestseller—now updated with a fresh new package—innovation expert Clayton Christensen shows how even the most outstanding companies can do everything right—yet still lose market leadership. Read this international bestseller to avoid a similar fate.
Clay Christensen—who authored the award-winning Harvard Business Review article “How Will You Measure Your Life?”—explains why most companies miss out on new waves of innovation. No matter the industry, he says a successful company with established products WILL get pushed aside unless managers know how and when to abandon traditional business practices. Offering both successes and failures from leading companies as a guide, The Innovator’s Dilemma gives you a set of rules for capitalizing on the phenomenon of disruptive innovation.
Sharp, cogent, provocative, and one of the most influential business books of all time—The Innovator’s Dilemma is the book no manager or entrepreneur should be without. Add this newly released edition to your library.
Brad Stone's new book, The Everything Store, describes how Bezos developed this strategy after reading another book called The Innovator's Dilemma by Harvard professor Clayton Christensen. [source]
It's important that we make this transformation, because of what Clayton Christensen calls "the innovator's dilemma," where people who invent something are usually the last ones to see past it, and we certainly don't want to be left behind. [source]
Drew Houston
CEO/Dropbox
About how businesses get disrupted, and a lot of those themes are why startups can succeed and thrive even when there are big competitors who you would think would just wipe ’em out. [source]
How do successful companies create products people can’t put down?
Why do some products capture widespread attention while others flop? What makes us engage with certain products out of sheer habit? Is there a pattern underlying how technologies hook us? Nir Eyal answers these questions (and many more) by explaining the Hook Model—a four-step process embedded into the products of many successful companies to subtly encourage customer behavior. Through consecutive “hook cycles,” these products reach their ultimate goal of bringing users back again and again without depending on costly advertising or aggressive messaging.
Hooked is based on Eyal’s years of research, consulting, and practical experience. He wrote the book he wished had been available to him as a start-up founder—not abstract theory, but a how-to guide for building better products. Hooked is written for product managers, designers, marketers, start-up founders, and anyone who seeks to understand how products influence our behavior.
Eyal provides readers with:
• Practical insights to create user habits that stick. • Actionable steps for building products people love.
• Fascinating examples from the iPhone to Twitter, Pinterest to the Bible App, and many other habit-forming products.
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Recommended by Andrew Chen, Nir Eyal, Ken Norton, and 41 others.
Matt Mullenweg
Founder & CEO/Automattic
Hooked gives you the blueprint for the next generation of products. Read Hooked or the company that replaces you will. [source]
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten
The book everyone in Silicon Valley is talking about. [source]
Chandini Jain
One of the five books Chandini would you recommend to young people interested in her career path. [source]
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Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action
Why are some people and organizations more innovative, more influential, and more profitable than others? Why do some command greater loyalty from customers and employees alike? Even among the successful, why are so few able to repeat their success over and over?
People like Martin Luther King Jr., Steve Jobs, and the Wright Brothers might have little in common, but they all started with why. It was their natural ability to start with why that enabled them to inspire those around them and to achieve remarkable things.
In studying the leaders who've had the greatest influence in the world, Simon Sinek discovered that they all think, act, and communicate in the exact same way—and it's the complete opposite of what everyone else does. Sinek calls this powerful idea The Golden Circle, and it provides a framework upon which organizations can be built, movements can be lead, and people can be inspired. And it all starts with WHY.
Any organization can explain what it does; some can explain how they do it; but very few can clearly articulate why. WHY is not money or profit—those are always results. WHY does your organization exist? WHY does it do the things it does? WHY do customers really buy from one company or another? WHY are people loyal to some leaders, but not others?
Starting with WHY works in big business and small business, in the nonprofit world and in politics. Those who start with WHY never manipulate, they inspire. And the people who follow them don't do so because they have to; they follow because they want to.
Drawing on a wide range of real-life stories, Sinek weaves together a clear vision of what it truly takes to lead and inspire. This book is for anyone who wants to inspire others or who wants to find someone to inspire them.
Today is World Book Day, a wonderful opportunity to address this #ChallengeRichard sent in by Mike Gonzalez of New Jersey: Make a list of your top 65 books to read in a lifetime. [source]
The basis of this book is so important to anyone looking to increase their influence, profits or impact. People won't truly buy into a product, service, movement, or idea until they understand the WHY behind it. When you start with the why, everything else falls into place. This book is so impactful, I consider it required reading. [source]
Tony Hsieh
CEO/Zappos.com
Over the years he’s recommended well over 20 business books — including his own, the 2010 bestseller Delivering Happiness and you can always find what he’s currently reading atop his cluttered desk. Start with Why is amogst those titles. [source]
In this candid and riveting memoir, for the first time ever, Nike founder and CEO Phil Knight shares the inside story of the company’s early days as an intrepid start-up and its evolution into one of the world’s most iconic, game-changing, and profitable brands.
In 1962, fresh out of business school, Phil Knight borrowed $50 from his father and created a company with a simple mission: import high-quality, low-cost athletic shoes from Japan. Selling the shoes from the trunk of his lime green Plymouth Valiant, Knight grossed $8,000 his first year. Today, Nike’s annual sales top $30 billion. In an age of startups, Nike is the ne plus ultra of all startups, and the swoosh has become a revolutionary, globe-spanning icon, one of the most ubiquitous and recognizable symbols in the world today.
But Knight, the man behind the swoosh, has always remained a mystery. Now, for the first time, in a memoir that is candid, humble, gutsy, and wry, he tells his story, beginning with his crossroads moment. At 24, after backpacking around the world, he decided to take the unconventional path, to start his own business—a business that would be dynamic, different.
Knight details the many risks and daunting setbacks that stood between him and his dream—along with his early triumphs. Above all, he recalls the formative relationships with his first partners and employees, a ragtag group of misfits and seekers who became a tight-knit band of brothers. Together, harnessing the transcendent power of a shared mission, and a deep belief in the spirit of sport, they built a brand that changed everything.
This memoir, by the co-founder of Nike, is a refreshingly honest reminder of what the path to business success really looks like: messy, precarious, and riddled with mistakes. I’ve met Knight a few times over the years. He’s super nice, but he’s also quiet and difficult to get to know. Here Knight opens up in a way few CEOs are willing to do. I don’t think Knight sets out to teach the reader anything. Instead, he accomplishes something better. He tells his story as honestly as he can. It’s an amazing tale. [source]
I've known Phil Knight since I was a kid, but I didn't really know him until I opened this beautiful, startling, intimate book. And the same goes for Nike. I've worn the gear with pride, but I didn't realize the remarkable saga of innovation and survival and triumph that stood behind every swoosh. Candid, funny, suspenseful, literary - this is a memoir for people who love sport, but above all it's a memoir for people who love memoirs. [source]
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The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich
More than 100 pages of new, cutting-edge content. Forget the old concept of retirement and the rest of the deferred-life plan there is no need to wait and every reason not to, especially in unpredictable economic times. Whether your dream is escaping the rat race, experiencing high-end world travel, earning a monthly five-figure income with zero management, or just living more and working less, The 4-Hour Workweek is the blueprint. This step-by-step guide to luxury lifestyle design teaches: How Tim went from $40,000 per year and 80 hours per week to $40,000 per month and 4 hours per week. How to outsource your life to overseas virtual assistants for $5 per hour and do whatever you want How blue-chip escape artists travel the world without quitting their jobs How to eliminate 50% of your work in 48 hours using the principles of a forgotten Italian economist How to trade a long-haul career for short work bursts and frequent mini-retirements The new expanded edition of Tim Ferriss The 4-Hour Workweek includes: More than 50 practical tips and case studies from readers (including families) who have doubled income, overcome common sticking points, and reinvented themselves using the original book as a starting point Real-world templates you can copy for eliminating e-mail, negotiating with bosses and clients, or getting a private chef for less than $8 a meal How Lifestyle Design principles can be suited to unpredictable economic times The latest tools and tricks, as well as high-tech shortcuts, for living like a diplomat or millionaire without being either"
Eric Weinstein recommended this book on Twitter. [source]
Tim Draper
Founder/Draper Fisher Jurvetson
With this kind of time management and focus on the important things in life, people should be able to get 15 times as much done in a normal work week. [source]
It's about time this book was written. It is a long-overdue manifesto for the mobile lifestyle, and Tim Ferriss is the ideal ambassador. This will be huge. [source]
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The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It
E-Myth \ 'e-,'mith\ n 1: the entrepreneurial myth: the myth that most people who start small businesses are entrepreneurs 2: the fatal assumption that an individual who understands the technical work of a business can successfully run a business that does that technical work
Voted #1 business book by Inc. 500 CEOs.
An instant classic, this revised and updated edition of the phenomenal bestseller dispels the myths about starting your own business. Small business consultant and author Michael E. Gerber, with sharp insight gained from years of experience, points out how common assumptions, expectations, and even technical expertise can get in the way of running a successful business.
Gerber walks you through the steps in the life of a business—from entrepreneurial infancy through adolescent growing pains to the mature entrepreneurial perspective: the guiding light of all businesses that succeed—and shows how to apply the lessons of franchising to any business, whether or not it is a franchise. Most importantly, Gerber draws the vital, often overlooked distinction between working on your business and working in your business.
The E-Myth Revisited will help you grow your business in a productive, assured way.
After reading The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber and The 80/20 Principle by Richard Koch, I decided that extreme questions were the forcing function I needed. [source]
Brian Scudamore
Founder & CEO/1-800-GOT-JUNK?
The book that’s had the biggest impact on me is The E-Myth by Michael Gerber (I even wrote about it in my own book). I read it front to back, then reread it right away. Gerber takes you through every step of a running a business from start to finish, and shows you what you need to make it successful. I read it when I was looking to take 1-800-GOT-JUNK? to the next level, and I had an epiphany: people don’t fail, systems do. Reading his book got me to take a good, hard look at my business and focus on developing our systems and hiring happy people. His book is one of the reasons we were able to sell out of 1-800-GOT-JUNK? franchises and scale that success into three other home-service companies, WOW 1 DAY PAINTING, You Move Me, and Shack Shine under the O2E Brands banner. [source]
Most business books give you the same old advice: Write a business plan, study the competition, seek investors, yadda yadda. If you're looking for a book like that, put this one back on the shelf.
Rework shows you a better, faster, easier way to succeed in business. Read it and you'll know why plans are actually harmful, why you don't need outside investors, and why you're better off ignoring the competition. The truth is, you need less than you think. You don't need to be a workaholic. You don't need to staff up. You don't need to waste time on paperwork or meetings. You don't even need an office. Those are all just excuses.
What you really need to do is stop talking and start working. This book shows you the way. You'll learn how to be more productive, how to get exposure without breaking the bank, and tons more counterintuitive ideas that will inspire and provoke you.
With its straightforward language and easy-is-better approach, Rework is the perfect playbook for anyone who’s ever dreamed of doing it on their own. Hardcore entrepreneurs, small-business owners, people stuck in day jobs they hate, victims of "downsizing," and artists who don’t want to starve anymore will all find valuable guidance in these pages.
Unperturbed by conventional wisdom, the authors start fresh and rewrite the rules of business. Their approach turns out to be as successful as it is counter-intuitive. [source]
If given a choice between investing in someone who has read Rework or has an MBA, I'm investing in Rework every time. This is a must read for every entrepreneur. [source]
Tony Hsieh
CEO/Zappos.com
The wisdom in these pages is edgy yet simple, straightforward, and proven. Read this book multiple times to help give you the courage you need to get out there and make something great. [source]
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The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company
Steve Blank, Bob Dorf
4.4
Now a decade after the Four Steps to the Epiphany sparked the Lean Startup revolution, comes its sequel… The Startup Owner's Manual
The Manual incorporates 10 years of learning and best practices that have swept the startup world. It:
Incorporates the "Business Model Canvas" as the organizing principle for startup hypotheses Provides separate paths and advice for web/mobile products versus physical products Offers a wealth of detailed instruction on how to get, keep, and grow customers recognizing the different techniques for web and physical channels And teaches a "new math" for startups: "metrics that matter for fueling growth"
The Startup Owner's Manual is a step-by-step, near-encyclopedic reference manual or "how to" for building a successful, scalable startup. Want to know what to do the first, week, month or year? What's the right distribution channel for your product? How to get traffic to your web site? …and how to activate customers or users on arrival? Who are the right "first customers," and why? …plus many more great tips in nearly 500 pages, complete with index, glossary, and Customer Development Checklists
It's the indispensible reference guide for any startup founder, entrepreneur, investor or educator.
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Recommended by Steve Blank, Bill Earner, and Stephen Jeske.
Bill Earner
The Startup Owner's Manual by Steve Blank is a more full on version of the Lean Startup and is a real how to manual for customer development [source]
You can go after the job you want—and get it! You can take the job you have—and improve it! You can take any situation—and make it work for you!
Dale Carnegie’s rock-solid, time-tested advice has carried countless people up the ladder of success in their business and personal lives. One of the most groundbreaking and timeless bestsellers of all time, How to Win Friends & Influence People will teach you:
-Six ways to make people like you -Twelve ways to win people to your way of thinking -Nine ways to change people without arousing resentment
And much more! Achieve your maximum potential—a must-read for the twenty-first century with more than 15 million copies sold!
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Recommended by Dave Ramsey, Daymond John, Dustin Moskovitz, and 58 others.
Major New York Times bestseller Winner of the National Academy of Sciences Best Book Award in 2012 Selected by the New York Times Book Review as one of the best books of 2011 A Globe and Mail Best Books of the Year 2011 Title One of The Economist's 2011 Books of the Year One of The Wall Street Journal's Best Nonfiction Books of the Year 2011 2013 Presidential Medal of Freedom Recipient
In the international bestseller, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman, the renowned psychologist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, takes us on a groundbreaking tour of the mind and explains the two systems that drive the way we think. System 1 is fast, intuitive, and emotional; System 2 is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. The impact of overconfidence on corporate strategies, the difficulties of predicting what will make us happy in the future, the profound effect of cognitive biases on everything from playing the stock market to planning our next vacation—each of these can be understood only by knowing how the two systems shape our judgments and decisions. Engaging the reader in a lively conversation about how we think, Kahneman reveals where we can and cannot trust our intuitions and how we can tap into the benefits of slow thinking. He offers practical and enlightening insights into how choices are made in both our business and our personal lives—and how we can use different techniques to guard against the mental glitches that often get us into trouble. Winner of the National Academy of Sciences Best Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and selected by The New York Times Book Review as one of the ten best books of 2011, Thinking, Fast and Slow is destined to be a classic.
A few months ago, Mr. Obama read “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” by Daniel Kahneman, about how people make decisions — quick, instinctive thinking versus slower, contemplative deliberation. For Mr. Obama, a deliberator in an instinctive business, this may be as instructive as any political science text. [source]
Captivating dive into human decision making, marred by inclusion of several/many? psychology studies that fail to replicate. Will stand as a cautionary tale? [source]
From the author of the bestselling biographies of Benjamin Franklin and Albert Einstein, this is the exclusive, New York Times bestselling biography of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs.
Based on more than forty interviews with Jobs conducted over two years—as well as interviews with more than a hundred family members, friends, adversaries, competitors, and colleagues—Walter Isaacson has written a riveting story of the roller-coaster life and searingly intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing.
At a time when America is seeking ways to sustain its innovative edge, and when societies around the world are trying to build digital-age economies, Jobs stands as the ultimate icon of inventiveness and applied imagination. He knew that the best way to create value in the twenty-first century was to connect creativity with technology. He built a company where leaps of the imagination were combined with remarkable feats of engineering.
Although Jobs cooperated with this book, he asked for no control over what was written nor even the right to read it before it was published. He put nothing off-limits. He encouraged the people he knew to speak honestly. And Jobs speaks candidly, sometimes brutally so, about the people he worked with and competed against. His friends, foes, and colleagues provide an unvarnished view of the passions, perfectionism, obsessions, artistry, devilry, and compulsion for control that shaped his approach to business and the innovative products that resulted.
Driven by demons, Jobs could drive those around him to fury and despair. But his personality and products were interrelated, just as Apple’s hardware and software tended to be, as if part of an integrated system. His tale is instructive and cautionary, filled with lessons about innovation, character, leadership, and values.
For Chesky, a source may come in the form of a biography of a business hero such as Steve Jobs or Walt Disney. His primary book source on management technique is Andy Grove’s High Output Management. [source]
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Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers
The bible for bringing cutting-edge products to larger markets--now revised and updated with new insights into the realities of high-tech marketing
In Crossing the Chasm, Geoffrey A. Moore shows that in the Technology Adoption Life Cycle--which begins with innovators and moves to early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards--there is a vast chasm between the early adopters and the early majority. While early adopters are willing to sacrifice for the advantage of being first, the early majority waits until they know that the technology actually offers improvements in productivity. The challenge for innovators and marketers is to narrow this chasm and ultimately accelerate adoption across every segment.
This third edition brings Moore's classic work up to date with dozens of new examples of successes and failures, new strategies for marketing in the digital world, and Moore's most current insights and findings. He also includes two new appendices, the first connecting the ideas in Crossing the Chasm to work subsequently published in his Inside the Tornado, and the second presenting his recent groundbreaking work for technology adoption models for high-tech consumer markets.
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Recommended by Andrew Chen, Drew Houston, Ev Williams, and 28 others.
Drew Houston
CEO/Dropbox
It’s about how do technology products make their way from early adopters t the mainstream. [source]
Ron Conway
Bestselling guide that created a new game plan for marketing in high-tech industries. [source]
This is a key component in my Purple Cow thinking, but with a twist. I'm not as worried about the chasm as I am about the desire of marketers to go for the big middle. [source]
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Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - The instant classic about why some ideas thrive, why others die, and how to improve your idea's chances--essential reading in the "fake news" era.
Mark Twain once observed, "A lie can get halfway around the world before the truth can even get its boots on." His observation rings true: Urban legends, conspiracy theories, and bogus news stories circulate effortlessly. Meanwhile, people with important ideas--entrepreneurs, teachers, politicians, and journalists--struggle to make them "stick."
In Made to Stick, Chip and Dan Heath reveal the anatomy of ideas that stick and explain ways to make ideas stickier, such as applying the human scale principle, using the Velcro Theory of Memory, and creating curiosity gaps. Along the way, we discover that sticky messages of all kinds--from the infamous "kidney theft ring" hoax to a coach's lessons on sportsmanship to a vision for a new product at Sony--draw their power from the same six traits.
Made to Stick will transform the way you communicate. It's a fast-paced tour of success stories (and failures): the Nobel Prize-winning scientist who drank a glass of bacteria to prove a point about stomach ulcers; the charities who make use of the Mother Teresa Effect; the elementary-school teacher whose simulation actually prevented racial prejudice.
Provocative, eye-opening, and often surprisingly funny, Made to Stick shows us the vital principles of winning ideas--and tells us how we can apply these rules to making our own messages stick.
@conorgil My all-time favorite example of research communication is The Selfish Gene. Astonishingly effective at explaining deep research ideas/findings to a lay reader. A book with great advice: https://t.co/QD1sM2o0z6 (It isn't specific to research but still super valuable.) [source]
Bill Liao
The Book "Made to Stick" combined with "The Poetics" by Aristotle really helped me to see the power of telling great stories with surprises in them and every time I meet a start-up I can always make a contribution to their pitch. [source]
Cristian-Dragos Baciu
I highly recommend all the books written by the Heath brothers, especially Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive And Others Die. This one's a must-read for marketers. The reason I enjoyed their work so much is because they offer real-life stories and insights that makes it so much easier for the reader to imprint that information in his mind [source]
Influence, the classic book on persuasion, explains the psychology of why people say "yes"—and how to apply these understandings. Dr. Robert Cialdini is the seminal expert in the rapidly expanding field of influence and persuasion. His thirty-five years of rigorous, evidence-based research along with a three-year program of study on what moves people to change behavior has resulted in this highly acclaimed book.
You'll learn the six universal principles, how to use them to become a skilled persuader—and how to defend yourself against them. Perfect for people in all walks of life, the principles of Influence will move you toward profound personal change and act as a driving force for your success.
Elon Musk, the entrepreneur and innovator behind SpaceX, Tesla, and SolarCity, sold one of his internet companies, PayPal, for $1.5 billion. Ashlee Vance captures the full spectacle and arc of the genius's life and work, from his tumultuous upbringing in South Africa and flight to the United States to his dramatic technical innovations and entrepreneurial pursuits. Vance uses Musk's story to explore one of the pressing questions of our age: can the nation of inventors and creators who led the modern world for a century still compete in an age of fierce global competition? He argues that Musk is an amalgam of legendary inventors and industrialists including Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Howard Hughes, and Steve Jobs. More than any other entrepreneur today, Musk has dedicated his energies and his own vast fortune to inventing a future that is as rich and far-reaching as the visionaries of the golden age of science-fiction fantasy
Elon Musk is a man after my own heart: a risk taker undaunted by setbacks and ever driven to ensure a bright future for humanity. Ashlee Vance's stellar biography captures Musk's remarkable life story and irrepressible spirit. [source]
I'm fascinated by Elon Musk, I own a Tesla, I read Ashlee Vance's biography on Elon Musk. I think he's a very interesting charachter. [source]
Andrea Loubier
Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future as this was still in the first couple of years of me starting my own company, Mailbird and it was inspiring and visionary. It helps you go from a small voice in a big corporate company, to thinking big and voicing your wild opinions and creating plan to work towards it. [source]
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The $100 Startup: Reinvent the Way You Make a Living, Do What You Love, and Create a New Future
In The $100 Startup, Chris Guillebeau shows you how to lead of life of adventure, meaning and purpose – and earn a good living.
Still in his early thirties, Chris is on the verge of completing a tour of every country on earth – he’s already visited more than 175 nations – and yet he’s never held a “real job” or earned a regular paycheck. Rather, he has a special genius for turning ideas into income, and he uses what he earns both to support his life of adventure and to give back.
There are manyothers like Chris – those who’ve found ways to opt out of traditional employment and create the time and income to pursue what they find meaningful. Sometimes, achieving that perfect blend of passion and income doesn’t depend on shelving what you currently do. You can start small with your venture, committing little time or money, and wait to take the real plunge when you're sure it's successful.
In preparing to write this book, Chris identified 1,500 individuals who have built businesses earning $50,000 or more from a modest investment (in many cases, $100 or less), and from that group he’s chosen to focus on the 50 most intriguing case studies. In nearly all cases, people with no special skills discovered aspects of their personal passions that could be monetized, and were able to restructure their lives in ways that gave them greater freedom and fulfillment.
Here, finally, distilled into one easy-to-use guide, are the most valuable lessons from those who’ve learned how to turn what they do into a gateway to self-fulfillment. It’s all about finding the intersection between your “expertise” – even if you don’t consider it such -- and what other people will pay for. You don’t need an MBA, a business plan or even employees. All you need is a product or service that springs from what you love to do anyway, people willing to pay, and a way to get paid.
Not content to talk in generalities, Chris tells you exactly how many dollars his group of unexpected entrepreneurs required to get their projects up and running; what these individuals did in the first weeks and months to generate significant cash; some of the key mistakes they made along the way, and the crucial insights that made the business stick. Among Chris’s key principles: if you’re good at one thing, you’re probably good at something else; never teach a man to fish – sell him the fish instead; and in the battle between planning and action, action wins.
In ancient times, people who were dissatisfied with their lives dreamed of finding magic lamps, buried treasure, or streets paved with gold. Today, we know that it’s up to us to change our lives. And the best part is, if we change our own life, we can help others change theirs. This remarkable book will start you on your way.
In this valuable guide Chris Guillebeau shows that transforming an idea into a successful business can be easier than you think…You are in charge of which ideas deserve your time, and this book can help you wake up every morning eager to progress to the next step. [source]
Chelsea Frank
I read everything with an open mind, often challenging myself by choosing books with an odd perspective or religious/spiritual views. These books do not reflect my personal feelings but are books that helped shape my perspective on life, love, and happiness. [source]
Dean Roller
Question: What books would you recommend to young people interested in your career path? Answer: Four Hour Work Week, The $100 startup and Jobs to be done . I like books that share examples of real world approaches to getting something off the ground. [source]
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The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon
The definitive story of Amazon.com, one of the most successful companies in the world, and of its driven, brilliant founder, Jeff Bezos.
Amazon.com started off delivering books through the mail. But its visionary founder, Jeff Bezos, wasn't content with being a bookseller. He wanted Amazon to become the everything store, offering limitless selection and seductive convenience at disruptively low prices. To do so, he developed a corporate culture of relentless ambition and secrecy that's never been cracked. Until now. Brad Stone enjoyed unprecedented access to current and former Amazon employees and Bezos family members, giving readers the first in-depth, fly-on-the-wall account of life at Amazon. Compared to tech's other elite innovators--Jobs, Gates, Zuckerberg--Bezos is a private man. But he stands out for his restless pursuit of new markets, leading Amazon into risky new ventures like the Kindle and cloud computing, and transforming retail in the same way Henry Ford revolutionized manufacturing.
The Everything Store will be the revealing, definitive biography of the company that placed one of the first and largest bets on the Internet and forever changed the way we shop and read.
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Recommended by Doug McMillon, Aaron Watson, Alan Pierce, and 10 others.
I read and give this book because you need to understand what you’re up against. [source]
Aaron Watson
Amazon is going to rule the world unless governments decide to break them up. It just makes sense to understand the most powerful company on the planet. Also, there is a (small) chance that Amazon sets up HQ2 in my hometown (Pittsburgh). [source]
Alan Pierce
This was an amazing glimpse into one of the most disruptive companies in history as well as the past and future trajectory of e-commerce and retail. It is also a testament to unwavering self-belief. The thing that impressed me the most is that Jeff Bezos intentionally built an entire department dedicated to making his primary business obsolete which allowed him to take the lead in the next development, e-books. His foresight is extraordinary and he is an inspirational big thinker. [source]
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Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers
Business Model Generation is a handbook for visionaries, game changers, and challengers striving to defy outmoded business models and design tomorrow's enterprises. If your organization needs to adapt to harsh new realities, but you don't yet have a strategy that will get you out in front of your competitors, you need Business Model Generation. Co-created by 470 -Business Model Canvas- practitioners from 45 countries, the book features a beautiful, highly visual, 4-color design that takes powerful strategic ideas and tools, and makes them easy to implement in your organization. It explains the most common Business Model patterns, based on concepts from leading business thinkers, and helps you reinterpret them for your own context. You will learn how to systematically understand, design, and implement a game-changing business model--or analyze and renovate an old one. Along the way, you'll understand at a much deeper level your customers, distribution channels, partners, revenue streams, costs, and your core value proposition.
Business Model Generation features practical innovation techniques used today by leading consultants and companies worldwide, including 3M, Ericsson, Capgemini, Deloitte, and others. Designed for doers, it is for those ready to abandon outmoded thinking and embrace new models of value creation: for executives, consultants, entrepreneurs, and leaders of all organizations. If you're ready to change the rules, you belong to -the business model generation!-
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Recommended by Nir Eyal, Steve Blank, Alexandra Stroe, and 3 others.
Alexandra Stroe
I'd recommend The Lean Startup by Eric Ries, Business Model Generation by Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur and Zero to One by Peter Thiel when they are in the starting phase of a business that needs to validate its business model. [source]
Ashley Hathaway
I could probably name a dozen books here, but I’ll point out The Business Model Generation and Value Prop Design from Strategyzer. I steal from these constantly and are engrained in my work process. These books put into practice really taught me how to think. As soon as I saw that everything should have a foundation of empathy, what good user-testing looks like, how to test and iterate it changed everything. After that any problem could be solved. It wasn’t solving one big monolithic problem. It was going through a process. [source]
Kaci Lambe Kai
This was a great book, because it opened up the idea of what a business model is supposed to be vs what it can be. It doesn't have to be a stuffy, boring document. [source]
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The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference
The tipping point is that magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire. Just as a single sick person can start an epidemic of the flu, so too can a small but precisely targeted push cause a fashion trend, the popularity of a new product, or a drop in the crime rate. This widely acclaimed bestseller, in which Malcolm Gladwell explores and brilliantly illuminates the tipping point phenomenon, is already changing the way people throughout the world think about selling products and disseminating ideas.
Gladwell introduces us to the particular personality types who are natural pollinators of new ideas and trends, the people who create the phenomenon of word of mouth. He analyzes fashion trends, smoking, children's television, direct mail, and the early days of the American Revolution for clues about making ideas infectious, and visits a religious commune, a successful high-tech company, and one of the world's greatest salesmen to show how to start and sustain social epidemics.
Bunch of really good information in here on how to make ideas go viral. This could be good to apply to any kind of products or ideas you may have. Definitely, check out The Tipping Point, which is one of my favorites. [source]
Malcolm Gladwell's breakthrough insight was to focus on the micro-relationships between individuals, which helped organizations realize that it's not about the big ads and the huge charity balls... it's about setting the stage for the buzz to start. [source]
Andy Stern
I think that when we talk about making change, it is much more about macro change, like in policy. This book reminds you that at times when you're building big movements, or trying to elect significant decision-makers in politics, sometimes it's the little things that make a difference. Ever since the book was written, we've become very used to the idea of things going viral unexpectedly and then having massive impact. The Tipping Point, to me, is really an appreciation that very small things can rearrange thinking in ways – like infectious diseases – that have huge implications. While we're always searching for the big policy changes – and we think we have to do that in very traditional ways of building coalitions against constituencies, movements and the media – sometimes it's the little things that actually tip the situation. Like the story of a person and their unique set of circumstances that really captures an issue about health care or housing. So it's trying to remember, while you're thinking about the grand and the glorious, that thinking about the small things can equally bring about change. [source]
One of the most popular personal development and self-improvement books of all time, Think and Grow Rich has sold over 100 million copies worldwide since its first publication during the Great Depression. In this hardcover edition, Napoleon Hill presents a "Philosophy of Achievement" in 13 principles drawn from the success stories of such greats as Andrew Carnegie, Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, and other millionaires of his time.
Think and Grow Rich reveals the secrets that can bring you fortune. By suppressing negative thoughts and keeping your focus on the long term, you can find true and lasting success. Napoleon Hill details his philosophy through the following 13 principles:
Desire Faith Autosuggestion Specialized Knowledge Imagination Organized Planning Decision Persistence Power of the Master Mind The Mystery of Sex Transmutation The Subconscious Mind The Brain The Sixth Sense Follow the steps outlined here, and you may just find the path to your own personal fortune.
For anyone interested in my career path, I’d recommend books in various genres. On a real practical level, I’d certainly recommend reading any and all plant/mushroom/tree/ecology/nature books you can acquire. It’s even more helpful to read the books that pertain specifically to your ecosystem and bioregion. Additionally, I’d also recommend reading a plethora of business and marketing books — both old and new alike. Think And Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill, Crush It! by Gary Vaynerchuk, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini, and anything by Seth Godin would be my top recommendations. And of course, every book I mentioned in the previous answers are strongly recommended as well. [source]
Alan Pierce
This book dramatically changed the way I structured my day to day life. Based on over two decades of personal interviews and studies of some of history's’ greatest minds, the author distills the lessons he learned and details how you can train and condition your mind through daily habit to master your actions. The way it promotes a disciplined and holistic approach of continual self-improvement, goal setting and strategic decision making really resonated with me. [source]
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Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days
Jessica Livingston
4.3
Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days is a collection of interviews with founders of famous technology companies about what happened in the very earliest days. These people are celebrities now. What was it like when they were just a couple friends with an idea? Founders like Steve Wozniak (Apple), Caterina Fake (Flickr), Mitch Kapor (Lotus), Max Levchin (PayPal), and Sabeer Bhatia (Hotmail) tell you in their own words about their surprising and often very funny discoveries as they learned how to build a company.
Where did they get the ideas that made them rich? How did they convince investors to back them? What went wrong, and how did they recover?
Nearly all technical people have thought of one day starting or working for a startup. For them, this book is the closest you can come to being a fly on the wall at a successful startup, to learn how it's done.
But ultimately these interviews are required reading for anyone who wants to understand business, because startups are business reduced to its essence. The reason their founders become rich is that startups do what businesses do--create value--more intensively than almost any other part of the economy. How? What are the secrets that make successful startups so insanely productive? Read this book, and let the founders themselves tell you.
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Recommended by Andrew Chen, Paul Graham, Ron Conway, and 9 others.
Paul Graham
Probably the single most valuable book a startup founder could read. [source]
Ron Conway
Collection of interviews with founders of famous technology companies about what happened in the very earliest days. [source]
Alexis Ohanian
Co-founder/Reddit
A bunch of really great interviews Jessica did with a bunch of just OGs of entrepreneurship. [source]
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Blue Ocean Strategy: How To Create Uncontested Market Space And Make The Competition Irrelevant
Winning by not competing! This international best seller upends traditional thinking with principles and tools to make the competition irrelevant. In an audiobook that challenges everything you thought you knew, W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne assert that tomorrow's leading companies will succeed, not by battling their rivals for market share in the bloody "red ocean" of a shrinking profit pool, but by creating "blue oceans" of untapped new market spaces ripe for growth.
Based on a study of 150 strategic moves, spanning more than 100 years and 30 industries, they provide a systematic approach that every company can use to render rivals obsolete and unleash new demand:
Reconstruct market boundaries Focus on the big picture Reach beyond existing demand Get the strategic sequence right Overcome organizational hurdles Build execution into strategy
Recommended by Daymond John, Steve Blank, Danielle Morrill, and 13 others.
Daymond John
Founder/FUBU
There are the normal ones that everybody loves. There would be "Rich Dad Poor Dad," "Who Moved My Cheese?;" I love all the Dale Carnegie books; "The One Minute Manager." I love newer ones like "Blue Ocean Strategy" and all the "Freaknomics" books. [source]
I don’t remember who originally told me to read Blue Ocean Strategy but I’m glad they did because this simple recommendation would substantially shape the course of my life and my career. [source]
Ayush Kumar
One doesn't necessarily need to take from others to fill their glass & you can always build a successful business in any industry. [source]
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The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Products That Win
Steve Blank
4.3
The bestselling classic that launched 10,000 startups and new corporate ventures - The Four Steps to the Epiphany is one of the most influential and practical business books of all time. The Four Steps to the Epiphany launched the Lean Startup approach to new ventures. It was the first book to offer that startups are not smaller versions of large companies and that new ventures are different than existing ones.
Startups search for business models while existing companies execute them. The book offers the practical and proven four-step Customer Development process for search and offers insight into what makes some startups successful and leaves others selling off their furniture.
Rather than blindly execute a plan, The Four Steps helps uncover flaws in product and business plans and correct them before they become costly. Rapid iteration, customer feedback, testing your assumptions are all explained in this book.
Packed with concrete examples of what to do, how to do it and when
Too much (good) info but thankfully there's a summary in the Appendix. [source]
Antonio Eram
This book was recommended by Antonio when asked for titles he would recommend to young people interested in his career path. [source]
Craig Pearce
If you are reading to learn skills that can be implemented in your startup, I’d recommend The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful by Eric Reis and actually avoid its predecessor The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Products That Win by Steve Blank until later in your career. [source]
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Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days
A fantastic, proven formula for moving from idea to prototyping to decision making within five days, based on a process he developed while working at Google and later GV. [source]
Cat Williams-Treloar
Jake Knapp, John Zeratsky & Braden Kowitz "Sprint" - the go-to guide on how to sprint. You may not follow everything to the tee, but it's simple, clean and full of great examples of how to move fast with structure. [source]
Javed Khatri
This book details the "sprint" process used at Google Ventures. We follow a similar process at Kustard to validate business ideas and to solve problems without wasting much time, money and energy. If you want to quickly validate an idea, this is a proven model and a must read. [source]
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The Founder's Dilemmas: Anticipating and Avoiding the Pitfalls That Can Sink a Startup
Noam Wasserman
4.3
Often downplayed in the excitement of starting up a new business venture is one of the most important decisions entrepreneurs will face: should they go it alone, or bring in cofounders, hires, and investors to help build the business? More than just financial rewards are at stake. Friendships and relationships can suffer. Bad decisions at the inception of a promising venture lay the foundations for its eventual ruin. The Founder's Dilemmas is the first book to examine the early decisions by entrepreneurs that can make or break a startup and its team.
Drawing on a decade of research, Noam Wasserman reveals the common pitfalls founders face and how to avoid them. He looks at whether it is a good idea to cofound with friends or relatives, how and when to split the equity within the founding team, and how to recognize when a successful founder-CEO should exit or be fired. Wasserman explains how to anticipate, avoid, or recover from disastrous mistakes that can splinter a founding team, strip founders of control, and leave founders without a financial payoff for their hard work and innovative ideas. He highlights the need at each step to strike a careful balance between controlling the startup and attracting the best resources to grow it, and demonstrates why the easy short-term choice is often the most perilous in the long term.
The Founder's Dilemmas draws on the inside stories of founders like Evan Williams of Twitter and Tim Westergren of Pandora, while mining quantitative data on almost ten thousand founders.
People problems are the leading cause of failure in startups. This book offers solutions.
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Recommended by Cody McLain and Thomas Hellmann.
Cody McLain
Will assume career path is running a startup, getting clients and managing a team of employees or collaborating with founders. These are some of the best books to cover these areas. It’s hard running a startup, let alone being the person who has to make the highest decisions in the organization. These books help provide the framework in how to run a successful organization but also share some of the stories and pitfalls from other founders so you can avoid making the same mistakes. [source]
Thomas Hellmann
It looks at the human or personal aspect of entrepreneurship. [source]
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Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth
Gabriel Weinberg, Justin Mares
4.3
Two successful startup founders offer a comprehensive overview of the various ways startups can achieve strong, sustainable growth, and a guide to choosing the ones that will make the differencce.
Why do so many startups fail? According to entrepreneurs Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares, most failed startups don’t get off the ground not because of a bad product, but because they don’t have enough customers. They make the fatal mistake of putting all their effort into perfecting their product at the cost of reaching out to potential users. Instead, they should be putting half their resources into getting traction.
TRACTION is the essential guide for any startup looking to stay ahead of the curve and start building a user base early in the game. The book offers no one-size-fits-all solution: every startup is unique, so no single method is guaranteed to generate traction. Instead, the authors identify nineteen different traction channels from viral marketing to trade shows, offer insights on how to exploit each one to its fullest potential, and provide a framework to test various channels and identify the best one for any startup.
Drawing on advice from more than 40 successful startup founders and marketers, from Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales to American Apparel’s Ryan Holiday, TRACTION is a comprehensive textbook for marketing your way to growth.
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Recommended by Nir Eyal, Cory Zue, Dave Child, and 13 others.
Cory Zue
The business book I find myself recommending the most often is Traction, which is an excellent practical and high-level take on strategies for getting traction for your products. I found it particularly helpful because it prevents a framework and strategies you can actually execute and follow yourself instead of just pontificating about ideas. [source]
Dave Child
Recently, I've been reading Traction by Gabriel Weinberg. Readable.io has been growing well, and we've been exploring new marketing avenues and ideas. Traction is a really useful book to read in that regard - it explores a variety of different approaches to marketing, each paired with some direct experiences from someone who has achieved success with that approach. We're a small team, with limited resources, and the approach of Traction is working well for us so far. Seeing ideas explored and balanced with some real-world experiences is a nice way to get yourself to think about marketing possibilities, and less dry than some of the other books I've tried. [source]
Gunhee Park
This book lays out a framework to help any startup brainstorm ways to gain more customer traction. [source]
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Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration
“What does it mean to manage well?” From Ed Catmull, co-founder (with Steve Jobs and John Lasseter) of Pixar Animation Studios, comes an incisive book about creativity in business—sure to appeal to readers of Daniel Pink, Tom Peters, and Chip and Dan Heath. Creativity, Inc. is a book for managers who want to lead their employees to new heights, a manual for anyone who strives for originality, and the first-ever, all-access trip into the nerve center of Pixar Animation—into the meetings, postmortems, and “Braintrust” sessions where some of the most successful films in history are made. It is, at heart, a book about how to build a creative culture—but it is also, as Pixar co-founder and president Ed Catmull writes, “an expression of the ideas that I believe make the best in us possible.” For nearly twenty years, Pixar has dominated the world of animation, producing such beloved films as the Toy Story trilogy, Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Up, and WALL-E, which have gone on to set box-office records and garner thirty Academy Awards. The joyousness of the storytelling, the inventive plots, the emotional authenticity: In some ways, Pixar movies are an object lesson in what creativity really is. Here, in this book, Catmull reveals the ideals and techniques that have made Pixar so widely admired—and so profitable.
As a young man, Ed Catmull had a dream: to make the first computer-animated movie. He nurtured that dream as a Ph.D. student at the University of Utah, where many computer science pioneers got their start, and then forged a partnership with George Lucas that led, indirectly, to his founding Pixar with Steve Jobs and John Lasseter in 1986. Nine years later, Toy Story was released, changing animation forever. The essential ingredient in that movie’s success—and in the thirteen movies that followed—was the unique environment that Catmull and his colleagues built at Pixar, based on philosophies that protect the creative process and defy convention, such as:
• Give a good idea to a mediocre team, and they will screw it up. But give a mediocre idea to a great team, and they will either fix it or come up with something better. • If you don’t strive to uncover what is unseen and understand its nature, you will be ill prepared to lead. • It’s not the manager’s job to prevent risks. It’s the manager’s job to make it safe for others to take them. • The cost of preventing errors is often far greater than the cost of fixing them. • A company’s communication structure should not mirror its organizational structure. Everybody should be able to talk to anybody. • Do not assume that general agreement will lead to change—it takes substantial energy to move a group, even when all are on board.
This book is written by the founder of Pixar and is about his experience building a culture that fosters creativity. His theory is that people are fundamentally creative, but many forces stand in the way of people being able to do their best work. I love reading first-hand accounts about how people build great companies like Pixar and nurture innovation and creativity. This should be inspiring to anyone looking to do the same, and hopefully there will be lessons we can apply to connecting the world! [source]
No matter your circumstances, storytelling and creativity are two 'meta-skills' that can take your business and life to the next level. Ed is a master. [source]
Running Lean: Iterate from Plan A to a Plan That Works
Ash Maurya
4.3
We live in an age of unparalleled opportunity for innovation. We’re building more products than ever before, but most of them fail—not because we can’t complete what we set out to build, but because we waste time, money, and effort building the wrong product.
What we need is a systematic process for quickly vetting product ideas and raising our odds of success. That’s the promise of Running Lean.
In this inspiring book, Ash Maurya takes you through an exacting strategy for achieving a "product/market fit" for your fledgling venture, based on his own experience in building a wide array of products from high-tech to no-tech. Throughout, he builds on the ideas and concepts of several innovative methodologies, including the Lean Startup, Customer Development, and bootstrapping.
Running Lean is an ideal tool for business managers, CEOs, small business owners, developers and programmers, and anyone who’s interested in starting a business project.
Find a problem worth solving, then define a solution Engage your customers throughout the development cycle Continually test your product with smaller, faster iterations Build a feature, measure customer response, and verify/refute the idea Know when to "pivot" by changing your plan’s course Maximize your efforts for speed, learning, and focus Learn the ideal time to raise your "big round" of funding
Get on track with The Lean Series Presented by Eric Ries—bestselling author of The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses—The Lean Series gives you solid footing in a proven methodology that will help your business succeed.
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Recommended by Ash Maurya, Garrett Moon, and Ola Olusoga.
Garrett Moon
Running Lean by Ash Maurya: Learn to build products the lean way! [source]
Ola Olusoga
For business, I've read Influence by Robert Cialdini 3 times, and Traction by Gabriel Weinberg twice, so if number of times read indicates favor, then those are it. There are a whole bunch of others, like The Personal MBA by Josh Kaufman, Confession of an Advertising Man by David Ogilvy, The 4 Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss, and Running Lean by Ash Maurya, that I've also enjoyed and recommend to people. [source]
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The Art of the Start 2.0: The Time-Tested, Battle-Hardened Guide for Anyone Starting Anything
Guy Kawasaki
4.3
A new product, a new service, a new company, a new division, a new organization, a new anything—where there’s a will, here’s the way. It begins with a dream that just won’t quit, the once-in-a-lifetime thunderbolt of pure inspiration, the obsession, the world-beater, the killer app, the next big thing. Everyone who wants to make the world a better place becomes possessed by a grand idea. But what does it take to turn your idea into action? Whether you are an entrepreneur, intrapreneur, or not-for-profit crusader, there’s no shortage of advice available on issues such as writing a business plan, recruiting, raising capital, and branding. In fact, there are so many books, articles, and Web sites that many startups get bogged down to the point of paralysis. Or else they focus on the wrong priorities and go broke before they discover their mistakes. In The Art of the Start, Guy Kawasaki brings two decades of experience as one of business’s most original and irreverent strategists to offer the essential guide for anyone starting anything, from a multinational corporation to a church group. At Apple in the 1980s, he helped lead one of the great companies of the century, turning ordinary consumers into evangelists. As founder and CEO of Garage Technology Ventures, a venture capital firm, he has field-tested his ideas with dozens of newly hatched companies. And as the author of bestselling business books and articles, he has advised thousands of people who are making their startup dreams real. From raising money to hiring the right people, from defining your positioning to creating a brand, from creating buzz to buzzing the competition, from managing a board to fostering a community, this book will guide you through an adventure that’s more art than science—the art of the start.
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Recommended by Ev Williams and Deepak Hariharan.
Deepak Hariharan
Art of the Start by Guy Kawasaki was my bible when I started up. If you plan to become an entrepreneur – this is an absolute must-read. [source]
Now updated with new research — the book that has changed millions of lives.
After decades of research, world-renowned Stanford University psychologist Carol S. Dweck, Ph.D., discovered a simple but groundbreaking idea: the power of mindset. In this brilliant book, she shows how success in school, work, sports, the arts, and almost every area of human endeavor can be dramatically influenced by how we think about our talents and abilities. People with a fixed mindset — those who believe that abilities are fixed — are less likely to flourish than those with a growth mindset — those who believe that abilities can be developed. Mindset reveals how great parents, teachers, managers, and athletes can put this idea to use to foster outstanding accomplishment.
In this edition, Dweck offers new insights into her now famous and broadly embraced concept. She introduces a phenomenon she calls false growth mindset and guides people toward adopting a deeper, truer growth mindset. She also expands the mindset concept beyond the individual, applying it to the cultures of groups and organizations. With the right mindset, you can motivate those you lead, teach, and love — to transform their lives and your own.
One of the reasons I loved Mindset is because it’s solutions-oriented. In the book’s final chapter, Dweck describes the workshop she and her colleagues have developed to shift students from a fixed to a growth mindset. These workshops demonstrate that ‘just learning about the growth mindset can cause a big shift in the way people think about themselves and their lives. [source]
Without exaggeration, I’ve never met a CEO who didn’t have Mindset on their bookshelf. It resonates with people who have become successful because the belief that your abilities can grow is foundational to their achievements. [source]
The essential skill of creating and maintaining new businesses—the art of the entrepreneur—can be summed up in a single word: managing. In High Output Management, Andrew S. Grove, former chairman and CEO (and employee number three) of Intel, shares his perspective on how to build and run a company. Born of Grove’s experiences at one of America’s leading technology companies, this legendary management book is a Silicon Valley staple, equally appropriate for sales managers, accountants, consultants, and teachers, as well as CEOs and startup founders. Grove covers techniques for creating highly productive teams, demonstrating methods of motivation that lead to peak performance—throughout, High Output Management is a practical handbook for navigating real-life business scenarios and a powerful management manifesto with the ability to revolutionize the way we work.
Andy Grove, who built himself from nothing to run Intel, stopped what he was doing to teach us his magic. And not through some ghostwriter either — Andy wrote this book himself. What an incredible gift. [source]
For Chesky, a source may come in the form of a biography of a business hero such as Steve Jobs or Walt Disney. His primary book source on management technique is Andy Grove’s High Output Management. [source]
In this stunning new book, Malcolm Gladwell takes us on an intellectual journey through the world of "outliers"--the best and the brightest, the most famous and the most successful. He asks the question: what makes high-achievers different?
His answer is that we pay too much attention to what successful people are like, and too little attention to where they are from: that is, their culture, their family, their generation, and the idiosyncratic experiences of their upbringing. Along the way he explains the secrets of software billionaires, what it takes to be a great soccer player, why Asians are good at math, and what made the Beatles the greatest rock band.
Gladwell is not the first person to come up with the 10,000 hour rule. Nor is he the first person to document what it takes to become the best in the world at something. But his stories are so great as he explains these deep concepts. How did the Beatles become the best? Why are professional hockey players born in January, February and March? And so on. [source]
Alex Circei
Question: What five books would you recommend to young people interested in your career path & why? Answer: Screw It, Let's Do It: Lessons In Life by Richard Branson Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone To Take Action by Simon Sinek The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers by Ben Horowitz Rich Dad Poor Dad: What the Rich Teach Their Kids About Money That the Poor and Middle Class Do Not! by Robert T. Kiyosaki [source]
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Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies
LinkedIn co-founder, legendary investor and author of the NYT Bestseller The Start-up of You reveals the secret to starting and scaling massively valuable companies.
For most of the world, the terms "Silicon Valley" and "startup" are synonymous. Indeed, Silicon Valley is home to a disproportionate number of companies that have grown from garage startups into global giants. But what is the secret to these startups' extraordinary success? Contrary to the popular narrative, it's not their superhuman founders or savvy venture capitalists. Rather, it's that they have learned how to Blitzscale. Blitzscaling is a specific set of practices for igniting and managing dizzying growth; an accelerated path to the stage in a startup's life-cycle where the most value is created. It prioritizes speed over efficiency in an environment of uncertainty, and allows a company to go from "startup" to "scaleup" at a furious pace that captures the market. Drawing on their experiences scaling startups into billion-dollar businesses, Hoffman and Yeh offer a framework for blitzscaling that can be replicated in any region or industry. Readers will learn how to design business models that support lightning-fast growth, navigate necessary shifts in strategy at each level of scale, and weather the management challenges that arise as their company grows.
The case studies you’re about to explore and the tools you’re about to gain have never been more relevant. This is an ideal moment to be reading this book. [source]
The secret of Silicon Valley is that it keeps updating the playbook. Each new success - from Google to Facebook to Airbnb and Uber - develops new techniques for world-transforming products. Blitzscaling paints the picture, with key case studies, of what it really takes to build a market-leading company. If you want to learn how to manage growth amid the controlled chaos that has become the new normal for startups and legacy businesses alike, read this book. [source]
Sheryl Sandberg
COO/Facebook
Blitzscaling shows how companies can build value for customers and shareholders in the digital age. A compelling inside view of how the new economy is being built and is transforming global business. [source]
A former international hostage negotiator for the FBI offers a new, field-tested approach to high-stakes negotiations—whether in the boardroom or at home.
After a stint policing the rough streets of Kansas City, Missouri, Chris Voss joined the FBI, where his career as a hostage negotiator brought him face-to-face with a range of criminals, including bank robbers and terrorists. Reaching the pinnacle of his profession, he became the FBI’s lead international kidnapping negotiator. Never Split the Difference takes you inside the world of high-stakes negotiations and into Voss’s head, revealing the skills that helped him and his colleagues to succeed where it mattered most: saving lives. In this practical guide, he shares the nine effective principles—counter-intuitive tactics and strategies—you too can use to become more persuasive in both your professional and personal life.
Life is a series of negotiations you should be prepared for: buying a car; negotiating a salary; buying a home; renegotiating rent; deliberating with your partner. Taking emotional intelligence and intuition to the next level, Never Split the Difference gives you the competitive edge in any discussion.
Emphasizes the importance of emotional intelligence without sacrificing deal-making power. From the pen of a former hostage negotiator—someone who couldn’t take no for an answer—which makes it fascinating reading. But it’s also eminently practical. In these pages, you will find the techniques for getting the deal you want. [source]
This book blew my mind. It’s a riveting read, full of instantly actionable advice—not just for high-stakes negotiations, but also for handling everyday conflicts at work and at home. [source]
The New York Times bestselling author of Better and Complications reveals the surprising power of the ordinary checklist
We live in a world of great and increasing complexity, where even the most expert professionals struggle to master the tasks they face. Longer training, ever more advanced technologies‚neither seems to prevent grievous errors. But in a hopeful turn, acclaimed surgeon and writer Atul Gawande finds a remedy in the humblest and simplest of techniques: the checklist.
First introduced decades ago by the U.S. Air Force, checklists have enabled pilots to fly aircraft of mind-boggling sophistication. Now innovative checklists are being adopted in hospitals around the world, helping doctors and nurses respond to everything from flu epidemics to avalanches. Even in the immensely complex world of surgery, a simple ninety-second variant has cut the rate of fatalities by more than a third.
In riveting stories, Gawande takes us from Austria, where an emergency checklist saved a drowning victim who had spent half an hour underwater, to Michigan, where a cleanliness checklist in intensive care units virtually eliminated a type of deadly hospital infection. He explains how checklists actually work to prompt striking and immediate improvements. And he follows the checklist revolution into fields well beyond medicine, from homeland security to investment banking, skyscraper construction, and businesses of all kinds.
An intellectual adventure in which lives are lost and saved and one simple idea makes a tremendous difference, The Checklist Manifesto is essential reading for anyone working to get things right.
Atul is really talking about how absolutely powerful checklists are, and I think he makes a very creative point: that checklist are not just some static, boring thing. They actually allow you to do excellent work and free up your brain by not having to keep remembering what you need to do when. That then allows your brain to be a lot more creative about whatever it is you’re doing. [source]
Legendary venture capitalist John Doerr reveals how the goal-setting system of Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) has helped tech giants from Intel to Google achieve explosive growth--and how it can help any organization thrive.
In the fall of 1999, John Doerr met with the founders of a start-up whom he'd just given $12.5 million, the biggest investment of his career. Larry Page and Sergey Brin had amazing technology, entrepreneurial energy, and sky-high ambitions, but no real business plan. For Google to change the world (or even to survive), Page and Brin had to learn how to make tough choices on priorities while keeping their team on track. They'd have to know when to pull the plug on losing propositions, to fail fast. And they needed timely, relevant data to track their progress -- to measure what mattered.
Doerr taught them about a proven approach to operating excellence: Objectives and Key Results. He had first discovered OKRs in the 1970s as an engineer at Intel, where the legendary Andy Grove ("the greatest manager of his or any era") drove the best-run company Doerr had ever seen. Later, as a venture capitalist, Doerr shared Grove's brainchild with more than fifty companies. Wherever the process was faithfully practiced, it worked.
In this goal-setting system, objectives define what we seek to achieve; key results are how those top-priority goals will be attained with specific, measurable actions within a set time frame. Everyone's goals, from entry level to CEO, are transparent to the entire organization.
The benefits are profound. OKRs surface an organization's most important work. They focus effort and foster coordination. They keep employees on track. They link objectives across silos to unify and strengthen the entire company. Along the way, OKRs enhance workplace satisfaction and boost retention.
In Measure What Matters, Doerr shares a broad range of first-person, behind-the-scenes case studies, with narrators including Bono and Bill Gates, to demonstrate the focus, agility, and explosive growth that OKRs have spurred at so many great organizations. This book will help a new generation of leaders capture the same magic.
John explains how OKRs Objectives and Key Results work and shows how you can apply them in all sorts of situations. I’d recommend John’s book for anyone interested in becoming a better manager (and I’d say that even if I hadn’t been interviewed for a super-nice chapter about the Gates Foundation). [source]
Whether you're a seasoned CEO or a first-time entrepreneur, you'll find valuable lessons, tools, and inspiration in the pages of Measure What Matters. I'm glad John invested the time to share these ideas with the world. [source]
In this indispensable book, the most important venture capitalist of our era reveals a key to business innovation and success. This crisp and colorful book combines fascinating case studies with insightful personal stories to show how OKRs can add magic to organizations of any size. [source]
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Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist
Brad Feld, Jason Mendelson
4.2
Get the inside scoop on what venture capitalists want to see in your startup as you hit the fundraising trail.
This is the highly anticipated third edition of the best-selling book which has become the definitive resource for understanding venture capital fundraising. Whether you are an entrepreneur, lawyer, student or just have an interest in the venture capital ecosystem, Venture Deals is for you. The book dives deeply into how deals are constructed, why certain terms matter (and others don't), and more importantly, what motivates venture capitalists to propose certain outcomes. You'll see the process of negotiating from the eyes of two seasoned venture capitalists who have over 40 years of investing experience as VCs, LPs, angels, and founders. They will teach you how to develop a fundraising strategy that will be a win for all parties involved.
This book is designed to bring transparency to the venture capital funding process and includes such topics as:
How to raise money; What terms matter and which ones don't; How to negotiate a fair deal for everyone; What makes venture capitalists tick, including how they are compensated and motivated; How companies are valued by venture capitalists; How all current structures of funding work, including convertible debt, crowdfunding, pre-sales and other non-traditional methods; How these particular issues change through different stages of financing (seed, early, mid and late); and How to avoid business and legal pitfalls that many entrepreneurs make. And as in the previous editions, this book isn't just a one-sided opinion from venture capitalists, but also has helpful commentary throughout from a veteran CEO who has raised many rounds of financing from many different investors.
If you are ready to learn all the secrets and ins and outs of fundraising, Venture Deals is an essential read.
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Recommended by Timothy Ferriss, Danielle Morrill, Auston Bunsen, and 6 others.
For the fellow tech nerds among you, here are a few resources for learning about angel investing, founding tech companies, or picking the right startup to work for. [source]
Auston Bunsen
I’m actually a self-taught programmer, so these books have really helped me with practical skills that I could put to use & yield results. The return on investment for these kinds of books is off the charts for me! [source]
Erik Cheong
One of the biggest challenges for startups is fund raising. Learn and know what the investors are thinking and what they looking for. [source]
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Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies
"This is not a book about charismatic visionary leaders. It is not about visionary product concepts or visionary products or visionary market insights. Nor is it about just having a corporate vision. This is a book about something far more important, enduring, and substantial. This is a book about visionary companies." So write Jim Collins and Jerry Porras in this groundbreaking book that shatters myths, provides new insights, and gives practical guidance to those who would like to build landmark companies that stand the test of time.
Drawing upon a six-year research project at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business, Collins and Porras took eighteen truly exceptional and long-lasting companies -- they have an average age of nearly one hundred years and have outperformed the general stock market by a factor of fifteen since 1926 -- and studied each company in direct comparison to one of its top competitors. They examined the companies from their very beginnings to the present day -- as start-ups, as midsize companies, and as large corporations. Throughout, the authors asked: "What makes the truly exceptional companies different from other companies?"
What separates General Electric, 3M, Merck, Wal-Mart, Hewlett-Packard, Walt Disney, and Philip Morris from their rivals? How, for example, did Procter & Gamble, which began life substantially behind rival Colgate, eventually prevail as the premier institution in its industry? How was Motorola able to move from a humble battery repair business into integrated circuits and cellular communications, while Zenith never became dominant in anything other than TVs? How did Boeing unseat McDonnell Douglas as the world's best commercial aircraft company -- what did Boeing have that McDonnell Douglas lacked?
By answering such questions, Collins and Porras go beyond the incessant barrage of management buzzwords and fads of the day to discover timeless qualities that have consistently distinguished out-standing companies. They also provide inspiration to all executives and entrepreneurs by destroying the false but widely accepted idea that only charismatic visionary leaders can build visionary companies.
Filled with hundreds of specific examples and organized into a coherent framework of practical concepts that can be applied by managers and entrepreneurs at all levels, Built to Last provides a master blueprint for building organizations that will prosper long into the twenty-first century and beyond.
…
Recommended by Jeff Bezos, Drew Huston, Ev Williams, and 13 others.
recommends this book because it shows how to create a long lasting company. [source]
Tim O'Reilly
Founder/O'Reilly Media
Built to Last, by James Collins and Jerry Porras. The idea here is that great companies aren't afraid to have strong values. In fact, their cult-like values are what make them stand out from the norm. [source]
Alden Mills
Built to Last focused my daydreaming mind into what it takes to build truly great companies. [source]
Ray Dalio, one of the world’s most successful investors and entrepreneurs, shares the unconventional principles that he’s developed, refined, and used over the past forty years to create unique results in both life and business—and which any person or organization can adopt to help achieve their goals.
In 1975, Ray Dalio founded an investment firm, Bridgewater Associates, out of his two-bedroom apartment in New York City. Forty years later, Bridgewater has made more money for its clients than any other hedge fund in history and grown into the fifth most important private company in the United States, according to Fortune magazine. Dalio himself has been named to Time magazine’s list of the 100 most influential people in the world. Along the way, Dalio discovered a set of unique principles that have led to Bridgewater’s exceptionally effective culture, which he describes as “an idea meritocracy that strives to achieve meaningful work and meaningful relationships through radical transparency.” It is these principles, and not anything special about Dalio—who grew up an ordinary kid in a middle-class Long Island neighborhood—that he believes are the reason behind his success.
In Principles, Dalio shares what he’s learned over the course of his remarkable career. He argues that life, management, economics, and investing can all be systemized into rules and understood like machines. The book’s hundreds of practical lessons, which are built around his cornerstones of “radical truth” and “radical transparency,” include Dalio laying out the most effective ways for individuals and organizations to make decisions, approach challenges, and build strong teams. He also describes the innovative tools the firm uses to bring an idea meritocracy to life, such as creating “baseball cards” for all employees that distill their strengths and weaknesses, and employing computerized decision-making systems to make believability-weighted decisions. While the book brims with novel ideas for organizations and institutions, Principles also offers a clear, straightforward approach to decision-making that Dalio believes anyone can apply, no matter what they’re seeking to achieve.
Here is a rare opportunity to gain proven advice unlike anything you’ll find in the conventional business press.
I found it to be truly extraordinary. Every page is full of so many principles of distinction and insights—and I love how Ray incorporates his history and his life in such an elegant way. [source]
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45
Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose
You want to learn about the path that we took at Zappos to get to over $1 billion in gross merchandise sales in less than ten years. You want to learn about the path I took that eventually led me to Zappos, and the lessons I learned along the way. You want to learn from all the mistakes we made at Zappos over the years so that your business can avoid making some of the same ones. You want to figure out the right balance of profits, passion, and purpose in business and in life. You want to build a long-term, enduring business and brand. You want to create a stronger company culture, which will make your employees and coworkers happier and create more employee engagement, leading to higher productivity. You want to deliver a better customer experience, which will make your customers happier and create more customer loyalty, leading to increased profits. You want to build something special. You want to find inspiration and happiness in work and in life. You ran out of firewood for your fireplace. This book makes an excellent fire-starter.
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Recommended by Ev Williams, Chip Conley, Adam Johnston, and 15 others.
Chip Conley
The author is a wise guy. Sincerely. He’s one of the wisest and most thoughtful business leaders of the modern age. [source]
Adam Johnston
Inspiring case study into building brand and customer service. [source]
Chelsea Frank
I read everything with an open mind, often challenging myself by choosing books with an odd perspective or religious/spiritual views. These books do not reflect my personal feelings but are books that helped shape my perspective on life, love, and happiness. [source]
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46
Lean Analytics: Use Data to Build a Better Startup Faster
Alistair Croll and Benjamin Yoskovitz
4.2
Whether you’re a startup founder trying to disrupt an industry or an intrapreneur trying to provoke change from within, your biggest challenge is creating a product people actually want. Lean Analytics steers you in the right direction.
This book shows you how to validate your initial idea, find the right customers, decide what to build, how to monetize your business, and how to spread the word. Packed with more than thirty case studies and insights from over a hundred business experts, Lean Analytics provides you with hard-won, real-world information no entrepreneur can afford to go without.
Understand Lean Startup, analytics fundamentals, and the data-driven mindset Look at six sample business models and how they map to new ventures of all sizes Find the One Metric That Matters to you Learn how to draw a line in the sand, so you’ll know it’s time to move forward Apply Lean Analytics principles to large enterprises and established products
Like Charlie Munger once said: “I’ve long believed that a certain system - which almost any intelligent person can learn - works way better than the systems most people use to understand the world. What you need is a latticework of mental models in your head. And, with that system, things gradually fit together in a way that enhances cognition. Just as multiple factors shape every system, multiple mental models from a variety of disciplines are necessary to understand that system". You can read this book to start building a "latticework of mental models in your head". [source]
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Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity
"The Bible of business and personal productivity" —Lifehack
"A completely revised and updated edition of the blockbuster bestseller from 'the personal productivity guru'"—Fast Company
Since it was first published almost fifteen years ago, David Allen’s Getting Things Done has become one of the most influential business books of its era, and the ultimate book on personal organization. “GTD” is now shorthand for an entire way of approaching professional and personal tasks, and has spawned an entire culture of websites, organizational tools, seminars, and offshoots.
Allen has rewritten the book from start to finish, tweaking his classic text with important perspectives on the new workplace, and adding material that will make the book fresh and relevant for years to come. This new edition of Getting Things Done will be welcomed not only by its hundreds of thousands of existing fans but also by a whole new generation eager to adopt its proven principles.
…
Recommended by David Allen, Dustin Moskovitz, Ev Williams, and 19 others.
Getting Things Done by David Allen. He recently spoke at our Zappos all-hands meeting and gave me a signed copy of his book. [source]
Eric Rose
Chairman/Columbia University Department of Surgery
When I'm flat-out stressed about the volume and complexity of my work, I open this book and find immediate ways to gain a sense of control. That's really a critical need for decision making. David made me what I am today: headstrong and proud of it. [source]
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48
The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business
A young woman walks into a laboratory. Over the past two years, she has transformed almost every aspect of her life. She has quit smoking, run a marathon, and been promoted at work. The patterns inside her brain, neurologists discover, have fundamentally changed.
Marketers at Procter & Gamble study videos of people making their beds. They are desperately trying to figure out how to sell a new product called Febreze, on track to be one of the biggest flops in company history. Suddenly, one of them detects a nearly imperceptible pattern—and with a slight shift in advertising, Febreze goes on to earn a billion dollars a year.
An untested CEO takes over one of the largest companies in America. His first order of business is attacking a single pattern among his employees—how they approach worker safety—and soon the firm, Alcoa, becomes the top performer in the Dow Jones.
What do all these people have in common? They achieved success by focusing on the patterns that shape every aspect of our lives.
They succeeded by transforming habits.
In The Power of Habit, award-winning New York Times business reporter Charles Duhigg takes us to the thrilling edge of scientific discoveries that explain why habits exist and how they can be changed. With penetrating intelligence and an ability to distill vast amounts of information into engrossing narratives, Duhigg brings to life a whole new understanding of human nature and its potential for transformation.
Along the way we learn why some people and companies struggle to change, despite years of trying, while others seem to remake themselves overnight. We visit laboratories where neuroscientists explore how habits work and where, exactly, they reside in our brains. We discover how the right habits were crucial to the success of Olympic swimmer Michael Phelps, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, and civil-rights hero Martin Luther King, Jr. We go inside Procter & Gamble, Target superstores, Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church, NFL locker rooms, and the nation’s largest hospitals and see how implementing so-called keystone habits can earn billions and mean the difference between failure and success, life and death.
At its core, The Power of Habit contains an exhilarating argument: The key to exercising regularly, losing weight, raising exceptional children, becoming more productive, building revolutionary companies and social movements, and achieving success is understanding how habits work.
Habits aren’t destiny. As Charles Duhigg shows, by harnessing this new science, we can transform our businesses, our communities, and our lives.
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Recommended by Naval Ravikant, Blake Irving, Alden Mills, and 15 others.
I also recently finished The Power of Habit, or close to finish as I get. That one was interesting, not because of its content necessarily, but because it’s good for me to always keep on top of mind how powerful my habits are. … I think learning how to break habits is a very important meta-skill that can serve you better in life than almost anything else. Although you can read tons of books on it, the reality is you’re never going to learn how to break bad habits until you just break them. [source]
Blake Irving
CEO/GoDaddy
You know, there's a book called The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg. Simple read book about just how to build positive habits that can be I think I what I'd call you know whether in your personal life or whether in your business life to help you build you know, have a loop that can build your success and that's one I mean there are so many great books out there. [source]
Alden Mills
More recent books that have had a significant impact on me are The Power of Habit and The Diamond Cutter. Both represent different forces for me – the former helps me tactically with making incremental improvements in my life. [source]
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49
The One Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results
The One Thing explains the success habit to overcome the six lies that block our success, beat the seven thieves that steal time, and leverage the laws of purpose, priority, and productivity.
Recommended by Aaron Agius, Charles Poliquin, David Cancel, and 13 others.
Charles Poliquin recommended this book in the book "Tools of Titans". [source]
Erik Rostad
For career books, I'll focus on more overarching themes. You can get books on particular skills you need for a given job, but these books will help having the right mindset for a career and how work should fit into the greater story of your life. For focus: The One Thing by Gary Keller. [source]
Gennady Batrakov
Reading improved my self-discipline and consistency. It helped me to focus on the right things. This book, in particular, opened my eyes to how extraordinary results can be achieved – The ONE Thing by Gary Keller. [source]
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50
Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness
Every day, we make decisions on topics ranging from personal investments to schools for our children to the meals we eat to the causes we champion. Unfortunately, we often choose poorly. The reason, the authors explain, is that, being human, we all are susceptible to various biases that can lead us to blunder. Our mistakes make us poorer and less healthy; we often make bad decisions involving education, personal finance, health care, mortgages and credit cards, the family, and even the planet itself.
Thaler and Sunstein invite us to enter an alternative world, one that takes our humanness as a given. They show that by knowing how people think, we can design choice environments that make it easier for people to choose what is best for themselves, their families, and their society. Using colorful examples from the most important aspects of life, Thaler and Sunstein demonstrate how thoughtful “choice architecture” can be established to nudge us in beneficial directions without restricting freedom of choice. Nudge offers a unique new take—from neither the left nor the right—on many hot-button issues, for individuals and governments alike. This is one of the most engaging and provocative books to come along in many years.
Nudge is a very important book. One of the reasons Nudge is so important is because it’s taking these ideas and applying them to the policy domain. Here are the mistakes we make. Here are the ways marketers are trying to influence us. Here’s the way we might be able to fight back. If policymakers understood these principles, what could they do? The other important thing about the book is that it describes, in detail, small interventions. It’s basically a book about cheap persuasion. [source]
This might feel like a weird book to include, but I think it presents another side of strategy that is too often forgotten. It’s not always about bold actors and strategic thrusts. Sometimes strategy is about subtle influence. Sometimes it is framing and small tweaks that change behavior. We can have big aims, but get there with little moves. This book has excellent examples of that kind of thinking and how it is changing politics, government and business. My favorite example is about the bumblebee that they started putting on urinals–which drastically reduced the amount of spray and spillage because it changed where men aimed when they peed. It’s not exactly the coolest strategy but it solved a problem. So we can learn from it. [source]
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51
Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook: How to Tell Your Story in a Noisy Social World
The New York Times bestselling author and social media expert returns with hard-won advice on how to connect with customers and beat the competition by mastering social media marketing
When managers and marketers outline their social media strategies, they often plan for the "right hook"-their next highly anticipated sale or campaign that's going to put the competition out for the count. Even companies committed to jabbing-patiently engaging with customers to build the relationships so crucial to successful social media campaigns-still yearn to land the powerful, bruising swing that will knock out their opponent or their customer's resistance in one tooth-spritzing, killer blow. Right hooks, after all, convert traffic to sales. They easily show results and ROI. Except when they don't.
In the same passionate, street-wise style readers have come to expect, Gary Vaynerchuk is on a mission to improve marketers' right hooks by changing the way they fight to make their customers happy, and ultimately to compete. Thanks to the massive change and proliferation in social media platforms in the last four years, the winning combination of jabs and right hooks is different now. Communication is still key, but context matters more than ever. It's not just about developing high-quality content, but developing high-quality content perfectly adapted to specific social media platforms and mobile devices-content tailor-made for Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, and Tumblr. A mash-up of the best elements of Crush It! and The Thank You Economy with a 2013 spin, here is a blueprint to social media marketing strategies that really works.
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Recommended by Daymond John, Marvin Liao, Aaron Agius, and 35 others.
Marvin Liao
Partner/500 Startups
My list would be (besides the ones I mentioned in answer to the previous question) both business & Fiction/Sci-Fi and ones I personally found helpful to myself. The business books explain just exactly how business, work & investing are in reality & how to think properly & differentiate yourself. On the non-business side, a mix of History & classic fiction to understand people, philosophy to make sense of life and Science fiction to picture what the future could be like (not always utopian). [source]
Alex Circei
Question: What five books would you recommend to young people interested in your career path & why? Answer: Screw It, Let's Do It: Lessons In Life by Richard Branson Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone To Take Action by Simon Sinek The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers by Ben Horowitz Rich Dad Poor Dad: What the Rich Teach Their Kids About Money That the Poor and Middle Class Do Not! by Robert T. Kiyosaki [source]
Auston Bunsen
I’ve got a few, one book that really impacted me early on as someone coming from a middle-class family was “Rich dad, Poor dad”. [source]
Do you simultaneously feel overworked and underutilized?
Are you often busy but not productive?
Do you feel like your time is constantly being hijacked by other people’s agendas?
If you answered yes to any of these, the way out is the Way of the Essentialist.
The Way of the Essentialist isn’t about getting more done in less time. It’s about getting only the right things done. It is not a time management strategy, or a productivity technique. It is a systematic discipline for discerning what is absolutely essential, then eliminating everything that is not, so we can make the highest possible contribution towards the things that really matter.
By forcing us to apply a more selective criteria for what is Essential, the disciplined pursuit of less empowers us to reclaim control of our own choices about where to spend our precious time and energy – instead of giving others the implicit permission to choose for us.
Essentialism is not one more thing – it’s a whole new way of doing everything. A must-read for any leader, manager, or individual who wants to learn who to do less, but better, in every area of their lives, Essentialism is a movement whose time has come.
Noah Kagan recommended this book in the book "Tools of Titans". [source]
Andrew Youderian
Question: What five books would you recommend to young people interested in your career path & why? Answer: 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (Getting the right things done) Entreleadership (Great primer on management) Let My People Go Surfing (How to build a business on your terms, that embraces your values) Essentialism (The Importance of focus) Work the System (A primer on building systems in your business) [source]
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53
Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World
One of the most valuable skills in our economy is becoming increasingly rare. If you master this skill, you'll achieve extraordinary results.
Deep work is the ability to focus without distraction on a cognitively demanding task. It's a skill that allows you to quickly master complicated information and produce better results in less time. Deep work will make you better at what you do and provide the sense of true fulfillment that comes from craftsmanship. In short, deep work is like a super power in our increasingly competitive twenty-first century economy. And yet, most people have lost the ability to go deep-spending their days instead in a frantic blur of e-mail and social media, not even realizing there's a better way.
In Deep Work, author and professor Cal Newport flips the narrative on impact in a connected age. Instead of arguing distraction is bad, he instead celebrates the power of its opposite. Dividing this book into two parts, he first makes the case that in almost any profession, cultivating a deep work ethic will produce massive benefits. He then presents a rigorous training regimen, presented as a series of four "rules," for transforming your mind and habits to support this skill.
A mix of cultural criticism and actionable advice, Deep Work takes the reader on a journey through memorable stories-from Carl Jung building a stone tower in the woods to focus his mind, to a social media pioneer buying a round-trip business class ticket to Tokyo to write a book free from distraction in the air-and no-nonsense advice, such as the claim that most serious professionals should quit social media and that you should practice being bored. Deep Work is an indispensable guide to anyone seeking focused success in a distracted world.
As automation and outsourcing reshape the workplace, what new skill do we need? The ability to do deep work. Cal Newport's exciting new book is an introduction and guide to the kind of intense concentration in a distraction-free environment that results in fast, powerful learning and performance. Think of it as calisthenics for your mind-and start your exercise program today. [source]
Marvin Liao
Partner/500 Startups
The Joy of Not Working (Zelinkski), Flash Foresight (Burrus), The Art of Worldly Wisdom (Gracian), Sapiens (Yuval), The End of Jobs (Pearson), Deep Work (Newport), Sovereign Individual (Davidson), The Fourth Economy (Davison) & The Monk & the Riddle (Komisar). Every single one of these books completely changed how I looked at everything in the world & literally pushed my life in a new direction. They were Paradigm Shifting as they say. (hate that word but it really was a Paradigm Shift for me). [source]
I've been a fan of Cal for a long time. His book So Good They Can't Ignore You is one of my favorites, but it's his new book that's probably had the biggest and most immediate impact on me. For those of you who enjoyed Tyler Cowen's Average is Over, you already know how important the ability to focus, be creative, and think at a high level is going to be in the future. This is a book that explains how to cultivate and protect that skill--the ability to do deep work. One thing I've already started doing since reading this book is recording the number of hours of deep work I do each day in my morning journal. It's a way of keeping a running tally and monitoring if I begin to get distracted or slow my pace. Anyway, great book! [source]
Written in a fast-paced thriller style, 'The Goal' contains a serious message for all managers in industry and explains the ideas which underline the Theory of Constraints developed by the author.
Recommended by Jeff Bezos, Danielle Morrill, Kevin Systrom, and 4 others.
Encourages companies to identify the biggest constraints in their operations and then structure their organizations to get the most out of those constraints. [source]
Kevin Systrom
About basically manufacturing and supply chain management. It sounds really boring, but I promise you it’s really good. [source]
Chris Goward
Here are some of the books that have been very impactful for me, or taught me a new way of thinking: … The Goal. [source]
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55
Start-up Nation: The Story of Israel's Economic Miracle
Dan Senor
4.1
Start-Up Nation addresses the trillion dollar question: How is it that Israel -- a country of 7.1 million, only 60 years old, surrounded by enemies, in a constant state of war since its founding, with no natural resources-- produces more start-up companies than large, peaceful, and stable nations like Japan, China, India, Korea, Canada and the UK?
With the savvy of foreign policy insiders, Senor and Singer examine the lessons of the country's adversity-driven culture, which flattens hierarchy and elevates informality-- all backed up by government policies focused on innovation. In a world where economies as diverse as Ireland, Singapore and Dubai have tried to re-create the "Israel effect", there are entrepreneurial lessons well worth noting. As America reboots its own economy and can-do spirit, there's never been a better time to look at this remarkable and resilient nation for some impressive, surprising clues.
…
Recommended by Amnon Rubinstein, Bogdana Butnar, Iulian Stanciu, and 1 others.
Amnon Rubinstein
This is a new book which has become very successful in America, though it is less well-known in England. It is a book which seeks to explain the economic success of Israel. Israel has withstood the recent crunch, the recent depression, more successfully than other industrial societies and this book seeks to explain that. One of the things that the authors explain is the spirit of leadership and entrepreneurship which is part and parcel of the fact that most Israelis serve in the Israeli army. The regular army of Israel educates its draftees to a position of leadership so when they enter university they are already more adult, more experienced, more likely to be go-getters and they have more knowledge of technology. So I thought this was interesting because I think it’s a fact that many people are not aware of. And there is a flipside to this, which is that those elements in Israeli society that do not go into the army, namely the Arabs and the ultra-orthodox Jews, miss something important. They are the poorer elements of Israeli society and the fact that they do not go into the army, and have many children, exacerbates their position. This explains why the social gap in Israeli society grows by leaps and bounds from year to year. The ultra-orthodox don’t go into the army because it’s part of a political concession, given to them by successive governments who need their support in the Knesset. It’s a very controversial issue back home. These two poor elements make things worse by not participating in the army which contributes so much to the economic success of Israel. [source]
Bogdana Butnar
I thought I might put my money where my mouth is. I keep whining that young people are not in touch with some essential books on advertising that have helped me shape the way I practise my trade today, but I never did anything about it. So I am starting here the ultimate books to read list. I will add to it as I get suggestions and as more good books get written. [source]
Iulian Stanciu
In every good or bad decision, there is a lesson. The real win is not having done something right, but having learned something you can apply in the future. I've let people make the wrong decisions even if I knew they were wrong, because I knew that would teach them something better than I ever could. Why the "Start-up Nation" book? Because lots of things are BS free. If someone in the company thinks I did something stupid, they're free to tell me why. Let's call things as we see them. [source]
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56
Value Proposition Design: How to Create Products and Services Customers Want
Alexander Osterwalder, Yves Pigneur, Gregory Bernarda, and Alan Smith
4.1
If you liked "Business Model Generation," you'll love "Value Proposition Design." The sequel builds on the same visual format and practical tools that made the first one so useful. It shows you how to use the Value Proposition Canvas, a practical business tool to design, test, create, and manage products and services customers want. It compliments and perfectly integrates with the Business Model Canvasfrom "Business Model Generation" so you can succeed with great value propositions embedded in scalable and profitable business models.
Practical exercises, process illustrations, and workshop suggestions help you immediately apply the tools in the book to your daily work. The book includes an online access to Strategyzer.com to complete and assess exercises interactively, learn from peers, and download pdfs, checklists, and more.
You'll love "Value Proposition Design" if you've been overwhelmed by the task of true customer value creation, frustrated by unproductive product meetings and misaligned teams, involved in bold shiny projects that blew up, or simply disappointed by the failure of a good idea."Value Proposition Design" will help you successfully understand the patterns of value creation, leverage the experience and skills of your team, avoid wasting time with ideas that won't work, and guide you through the design and test of products and services that customers want.
…
Recommended by Nir Eyal, Steve Blank, Ashley Hathaway, and 2 others.
Ashley Hathaway
I could probably name a dozen books here, but I’ll point out The Business Model Generation and Value Prop Design from Strategyzer. I steal from these constantly and are engrained in my work process. These books put into practice really taught me how to think. As soon as I saw that everything should have a foundation of empathy, what good user-testing looks like, how to test and iterate it changed everything. After that any problem could be solved. It wasn’t solving one big monolithic problem. It was going through a process. [source]
Chandini Jain
One of the five books Chandini would you recommend to young people interested in her career path. [source]
In Originals the author addresses the challenge of improving the world from the perspective of becoming original: choosing to champion novel ideas and values that go against the grain, battle conformity, and buck outdated traditions. How can we originate new ideas, policies, and practices without risking it all?
Using surprising studies and stories spanning business, politics, sports, and entertainment, Grant explores how to recognize a good idea, speak up without getting silenced, build a coalition of allies, choose the right time to act, and manage fear and doubt; how parents and teachers can nurture originality in children; and how leaders can build cultures that welcome dissent. Learn from an entrepreneur who pitches his start-ups by highlighting the reasons not to invest, a woman at Apple who challenged Steve Jobs from three levels below, an analyst who overturned the rule of secrecy at the CIA, a billionaire financial wizard who fires employees for failing to criticize him, and a TV executive who didn’t even work in comedy but saved Seinfeld from the cutting-room floor. The payoff is a set of groundbreaking insights about rejecting conformity and improving the status quo.
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Recommended by Richard Branson, Arianna Huffington, Tony Hsieh, and 6 others.
Today is World Book Day, a wonderful opportunity to address this #ChallengeRichard sent in by Mike Gonzalez of New Jersey: Make a list of your top 65 books to read in a lifetime. [source]
Arianna Huffington
Founder/The Huffington Post
A fascinating, eye-opening read that will help you not just recognize your own unique gifts, but find the strength to challenge conventional wisdom to bring them to life. [source]
Tony Hsieh
CEO/Zappos.com
It's always interesting just to learn different perspectives, but to be careful of not trying to just say, 'Oh this book is the Bible, and we should copy that,' … Instead, I want us t0 take the parts that make sense for Zappos and try to incorporate them." [source]
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58
The Mom Test: How to talk to customers & learn if your business is a good idea when everyone is lying to you
The Mom Test is a quick, practical guide that will save you time, money, and heartbreak.
They say you shouldn't ask your mom whether your business is a good idea, because she loves you and will lie to you. This is technically true, but it misses the point. You shouldn't ask anyone if your business is a good idea. It's a bad question and everyone will lie to you at least a little . As a matter of fact, it's not their responsibility to tell you the truth. It's your responsibility to find it and it's worth doing right .
Talking to customers is one of the foundational skills of both Customer Development and Lean Startup. We all know we're supposed to do it, but nobody seems willing to admit that it's easy to screw up and hard to do right. This book is going to show you how customer conversations go wrong and how you can do better.
…
Recommended by Chandini Jain, Mikhail Dubov, and Roxana Bitoleanu.
Chandini Jain
Very recently, I read The Mom Test: How to talk to customers & learn if your business is a good idea when everyone is lying to you. The book talks about how to design user interviews to make sure you're not asking users/customers leading questions and get unbiased feedback. [source]
Mikhail Dubov
One of the five books recommends to young people interested in his career path. [source]
Roxana Bitoleanu
I would definitely start my list with The Mom Test because there is no resource on how to ask questions without being too eager or too revealing. I think this skill should be trained, be it an entrepreneur or not. [source]
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59
The Outsiders: Eight Unconventional CEOs and Their Radically Rational Blueprint for Success
”It is impossible to produce superior performance unless you do something different.” — John Templeton
What makes a successful CEO? Most people call to mind a familiar definition: a seasoned manager with deep industry expertise. Others might point to the qualities of today’s so-called celebrity CEOs—charisma, virtuoso communication skills, and a confident management style. But what really matters when you run an organization? What is the hallmark of exceptional CEO performance? Quite simply, it is the returns for the shareholders of that company over the long term.
In this refreshing, counterintuitive book, author Will Thorndike brings to bear the analytical wisdom of a successful career in investing, closely evaluating the performance of companies and their leaders. You will meet eight individualistic CEOs whose firms’ average returns outperformed the S&P 500 by a factor of twenty—in other words, an investment of $10,000 with each of these CEOs, on average, would have been worth over $1.5 million twenty-five years later. You may not know all their names, but you will recognize their companies: General Cinema, Ralston Purina, The Washington Post Company, Berkshire Hathaway, General Dynamics, Capital Cities Broadcasting, TCI, and Teledyne. In The Outsiders, you’ll learn the traits and methods—striking for their consistency and relentless rationality—that helped these unique leaders achieve such exceptional performance.
Humble, unassuming, and often frugal, these "outsiders” shunned Wall Street and the press, and shied away from the hottest new management trends. Instead, they shared specific traits that put them and the companies they led on winning trajectories: a laser-sharp focus on per share value as opposed to earnings or sales growth; an exceptional talent for allocating capital and human resources; and the belief that cash flow, not reported earnings, determines a company’s long-term value.
Drawing on years of research and experience, Thorndike tells eye-opening stories, extracting lessons and revealing a compelling alternative model for anyone interested in leading a company or investing in one—and reaping extraordinary returns.
In his 2012 shareholder letter, Buffett praises The Outsiders as "an outstanding book about CEOs who excelled at capital allocation." Berkshire Hathaway plays a major role in the book. One chapter is on director Tom Murphy, who Buffett says is "overall the best business manager I've ever met." [source]
Thorndike explores the importance of thoughtful capital allocation through the stories of eight successful CEOs. A good read for any business leader but especially those willing to chart their own course [source]
Austen Allred
This is the best book on being a CEO I’ve ever read https://t.co/snoEVOqJGk https://t.co/GUsZNlnlpn [source]
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60
High Growth Handbook
Elad Gil
4.1
Well-known technology executive and angel investor Elad Gil has worked with high growth tech companies like Airbnb, Twitter, Google, Instacart, Coinbase, Stripe, and Square as they've grown from small companies into global brands. Across all of these break-out companies, a set of common patterns has evolved into a repeatable playbook that Gil has codified in High Growth Handbook.
Covering key topics including the role of the CEO, managing your board, recruiting and managing an executive team, M&A, IPOs and late stage funding rounds, and interspersed with over a dozen interviews with some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley including Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn), Marc Andreessen (Andreessen Horowitz), and Aaron Levie (Box), High Growth Handbook presents crystal clear guidance for navigating the most complex challenges that confront leaders and operators in high-growth startups.
In what Reid Hoffman, cofounder of LinkedIn and co-author of the #1 NYT bestsellers The Alliance and The Startup of You calls "a trenchant guide," High Growth Handbook is the playbook for turning a startup into a unicorn.
"Elad Gil is one of Silicon Valley's seriously knowledgeable and battle-tested players. If you want the chance to turn your startup into the next Google or Twitter, then read this trenchant guide from someone who played key roles in the growth of these companies." - Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, co-author of the #1 NYT bestsellers "The Alliance" and "The Startup of You," and host of the podcast Masters of Scale
"Elad eschews trite management aphorisms in favor of pragmatic and straight-shooting insights on complex topics like managing a board of directors, executing functional re-organizations with as little trauma as possible, and everything in-between." - Dick Costolo, former CEO of Twitter and serial entrepreneur
"Elad first invested in Airbnb when we were less than 10 people and provided early advice on scaling the company. This book shares these learnings for the next generation of entrepreneurs." - Nathan Blecharczyk, cofounder of Airbnb, Chief Strategy Officer, and Chairman of Airbnb China
"Elad jam-packs every useful lesson about building and scaling companies into a single, digestible book. My only gripe is that he didn't write this when we were in the early days of Box as it would have saved my ass countless times." -Aaron Levie, cofounder and CEO of Box
"Armed with observations gathered scaling some of the most successful and important companies of Silicon Valley, Elad has no-nonsense, highly applicable advice to any operator transitioning a company from the proverbial garage to the next stage and beyond." - Max Levchin, cofounder and CEO of Affirm, cofounder and CTO of PayPal
"Elad is one of the most experienced operators in Silicon Valley having seen numerous companies hit their inflection point. His advice has been key for Coinbase as we go through hypergrowth, from hiring executives to improving M&A." - Brian Armstrong, cofounder and CEO of Coinbase
"Elad is one of the best connected and respected early stage investors in the Valley - he invested in Minted when we had fewer than 50 employees and his advice was critical to us in growing our business to where we are now, in the low hundreds of millions in sales. In his book, he crystallizes all of these learnings for the next generation of companies." -Mariam Naficy, cofounder and CEO of Minted
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Recommended by Brian Armstrong, Alok Kejriwal, and Joe Martin.
Alok Kejriwal
Will I work with me? In the book High Growth Handbook, a paragraph was stunning : “Founders should write a guide to working with them. It would be to clarify the founder’s role: “What do I want to be involved in?” Check pic note WHY this is a great idea.. https://t.co/xzdv8cuR4D [source]
The definitive playbook by the pioneers of Growth Hacking, one of the hottest business methodologies in Silicon Valley and beyond.
It seems hard to believe today, but there was a time when Airbnb was the best-kept secret of travel hackers and couch surfers, Pinterest was a niche web site frequented only by bakers and crafters, LinkedIn was an exclusive network for C-suite executives and top-level recruiters, Facebook was MySpace's sorry step-brother, and Uber was a scrappy upstart that didn't stand a chance against the Goliath that was New York City Yellow Cabs.
So how did these companies grow from these humble beginnings into the powerhouses they are today? Contrary to popular belief, they didn't explode to massive worldwide popularity simply by building a great product then crossing their fingers and hoping it would catch on. There was a studied, carefully implemented methodology behind these companies' extraordinary rise. That methodology is called Growth Hacking, and it's practitioners include not just today's hottest start-ups, but also companies like IBM, Walmart, and Microsoft as well as the millions of entrepreneurs, marketers, managers and executives who make up the community of GrowthHackers.com.
Think of the Growth Hacking methodology as doing for market-share growth what Lean Start-Up did for product development, and Scrum did for productivity. It involves cross-functional teams and rapid-tempo testing and iteration that focuses customers attaining them, retaining them, engaging them, and motivating them to come back and buy more. An accessible and practical toolkit that teams and companies in all industries can use to increase their customer base and market share, this book walks readers through the process of creating and executing their own custom-made growth hacking strategy. It is a must read for any marketer, entrepreneur, innovator or manger looking to replace wasteful big bets and "spaghetti-on-the-wall" approaches with more consistent, replicable, cost-effective, and data-driven results.
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Recommended by Nir Eyal, Eric Ries, Annabell Satterfield, and 6 others.
Nir Eyal
Author/Hooked
It used to be that designers and engineers were responsible for developing new products, data teams were responsible for number-crunching reports, and marketers were responsible for acquiring and monetizing as many customers as possible. But today’s companies can’t afford to be slowed down by organizational silos. Here, growth-hacking pioneers Ellis and Brown show how to break down those traditional barriers and marry powerful data analysis, technical know-how, and marketing savvy to quickly devise and test ways to fuel breakout growth. [source]
In an increasingly erratic business landscape where new competition can emerge overnight, customers’ loyalties can shift unexpectedly, and markets are constantly being disrupted, finding growth solutions fast is crucial for survival. Hacking Growth provides a compelling answer to this urgent need for speed, offering companies a methodology for finding and optimizing new strategies to increase their market share and quickly. [source]
Annabell Satterfield
Hacking Growth is the definitive guide to building authentic, sustainable, compounding growth for your company. If you want to know how proven growth practitioners at fast-growing companies do what they do-- pick up this book. [source]
In this must-read book for anyone striving to succeed, pioneering psychologist Angela Duckworth shows parents, educators, students, and business people both seasoned and new that the secret to outstanding achievement is not talent but a focused persistence called grit.
Why do some people succeed and others fail? Sharing new insights from her landmark research on grit, Angela Duckworth explains why talent is hardly a guarantor of success. Rather, other factors can be even more crucial such as identifying our passions and following through on our commitments.
Drawing on her own powerful story as the daughter of a scientist who frequently bemoaned her lack of smarts, Duckworth describes her winding path through teaching, business consulting, and neuroscience, which led to the hypothesis that what really drives success is not genius, but a special blend of passion and long-term perseverance. As a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Duckworth created her own character lab and set out to test her theory.
Here, she takes readers into the field to visit teachers working in some of the toughest schools, cadets struggling through their first days at West Point, and young finalists in the National Spelling Bee. She also mines fascinating insights from history and shows what can be gleaned from modern experiments in peak performance. Finally, she shares what she's learned from interviewing dozens of high achievers; from JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon to the cartoon editor of The New Yorker to Seattle Seahawks Coach Pete Carroll.
Winningly personal, insightful, and even life-changing, Grit is a book about what goes through your head when you fall down, and how that not talent or luck makes all the difference.
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Recommended by Albert Wenger, Anu Hariharan, Benjamin Spall, and 11 others.
Benjamin Spall
Question: What five books would you recommend to youngsters interested in your professional path? … Grit by Angela Duckworth [source]
Bogdan Lucaciu
Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance - it was frustrating to read: “Where was this book 20 years ago!?” [source]
Stephen Lew
When asked what books he would recommend to youngsters interested in his professional path, Stephen mentioned Grit. [source]
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63
Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age
Paul Graham
4.1
“The computer world is like an intellectual Wild West, in which you can shoot anyone you wish with your ideas, if you’re willing to risk the consequences.” —from Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age, by Paul Graham
We are living in the computer age, in a world increasingly designed and engineered by computer programmers and software designers, by people who call themselves hackers. Who are these people, what motivates them, and why should you care?
Consider these facts: Everything around us is turning into computers. Your typewriter is gone, replaced by a computer. Your phone has turned into a computer. So has your camera. Soon your TV will. Your car was not only designed on computers, but has more processing power in it than a room-sized mainframe did in 1970. Letters, encyclopedias, newspapers, and even your local store are being replaced by the Internet.
Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age, by Paul Graham, explains this world and the motivations of the people who occupy it. In clear, thoughtful prose that draws on illuminating historical examples, Graham takes readers on an unflinching exploration into what he calls “an intellectual Wild West.”
The ideas discussed in this book will have a powerful and lasting impact on how we think, how we work, how we develop technology, and how we live. Topics include the importance of beauty in software design, how to make wealth, heresy and free speech, the programming language renaissance, the open-source movement, digital design, internet startups, and more.
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Recommended by Ev Williams, Evan Williams, Brian Armstrong, and 8 others.
Evan Williams
Co-creator/Blogger
I want everybody I know to read "How to Make Wealth" and "Mind the Gap" (chapters 6 and 7), which brilliantly articulate the most commonly, and frustratingly, misunderstood core economic principles of everyday life. [source]
Bob Frankston
A wonderful book and required reading. Paul helps others understand why I chose the name 'Software Arts' for the company Dan Bricklin and I started. Those who don't understand the language of software cannot consider themselves literate. [source]
Chris Anderson
A delightful ping-pong around the brain of a really smart guy. The chapter that answers the key question of our age-- why are nerds unpopular?-- is worth the price of admission alone. [source]
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64
The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable
In The Five Dysfunctions of a Team Patrick Lencioni once again offers a leadership fable that is as enthralling and instructive as his first two best-selling books, The Five Temptations of a CEO and The Four Obsessions of an Extraordinary Executive. This time, he turns his keen intellect and storytelling power to the fascinating, complex world of teams.
Kathryn Petersen, Decision Tech's CEO, faces the ultimate leadership crisis: Uniting a team in such disarray that it threatens to bring down the entire company. Will she succeed? Will she be fired? Will the company fail? Lencioni's utterly gripping tale serves as a timeless reminder that leadership requires as much courage as it does insight.
Throughout the story, Lencioni reveals the five dysfunctions which go to the very heart of why teams even the best ones-often struggle. He outlines a powerful model and actionable steps that can be used to overcome these common hurdles and build a cohesive, effective team. Just as with his other books, Lencioni has written a compelling fable with a powerful yet deceptively simple message for all those who strive to be exceptional team leaders.
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Recommended by AnneMarie Schindler, Holger Seim, Jennifer Rock, and 3 others.
AnneMarie Schindler
I suggest these books because they really open up 'how' you think about life and in turn work, success/challenges/setbacks, and in general, yourself. I believe that the more you can understand yourself and broaden your approach to work, the easier it will be to find work that energizes you. Finally, I'm a team player at heart, and love working with others to achieve a huge goal so a portion of these deal with team composition and performance too. [source]
Holger Seim
Lencioni’s books helped me to shift my focus from individual performance to team performance, and what it takes to make a team perform well. It helped me to realize and take seriously the fact that great team performance doesn’t happen magically but needs conscious effort. When I discovered The Five Dysfunctions of a Team for the first time, we had a dysfunctional team at Blinkist and the book opened my eyes to see the problem clearly and showed clear steps for how they should be tackled. Beforehand I was aware that we had a problem, but I couldn’t pinpoint it specifically and hence, couldn’t solve it easily. This book helped a lot. [source]
Jennifer Rock
In Patrick Lencioni's book The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, the executive asks her senior leaders "Who is your first team?" And they each answer incorrectly that it's the team that reports to him or her. The point is that you need to shift your perspective to understanding your senior leadership peers are your first team. We read that book as a leadership team in a corporation where I worked -- and the environment was very competitive between us. When we agreed that our cross-functional leadership team was our first team, we became more cooperative, innovative and productive. And we vastly boosted our results. [source]
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65
Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love
The basic premise of Inspired is that the best tech companies create products in a manner very different from how most companies create products. The goal of the book is to share the techniques of the best companies. This book is aimed primarily at Product Managers working on technology-powered products. That includes the hundreds of "tech companies" like Google, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter and the like, as well as the thousands of companies moving to leverage technology (financial companies, media companies, retailers, manufacturers, nearly every industry). Inspired covers companies from early stage start-ups to large, established companies. The products might be consumer products or devices, business services for small businesses to enterprises, internal tools, and developer platforms.
Inspired is secondarily aimed at the designers, engineers, user researchers and data scientists that work closely with the product managers on product teams at these same companies.
The New York Times bestseller that gives readers a paradigm-shattering new way to think about motivation
Most people believe that the best way to motivate is with rewards like money—the carrot-and-stick approach. That's a mistake, says Daniel H. Pink (author of To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Motivating Others). In this provocative and persuasive new book, he asserts that the secret to high performance and satisfaction-at work, at school, and at home—is the deeply human need to direct our own lives, to learn and create new things, and to do better by ourselves and our world.
Drawing on four decades of scientific research on human motivation, Pink exposes the mismatch between what science knows and what business does—and how that affects every aspect of life. He examines the three elements of true motivation—autonomy, mastery, and purpose-and offers smart and surprising techniques for putting these into action in a unique book that will change how we think and transform how we live.
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Recommended by Tobi Lütke, Bogdan Lucaciu, David Brudo, and 5 others.
Tobi Lütke
Founder & CEO/Shopify
Tobi Lütke recommended this book in an interview in "The Globe and Mail." [source]
Bogdan Lucaciu
Spoiler: it’s autonomy, mastery, and purpose. [source]
A look deep inside the new Silicon Valley, from the New York Times bestselling author of The Everything Store.
Ten years ago, the idea of getting into a stranger's car, or a walking into a stranger's home, would have seemed bizarre and dangerous, but today it's as common as ordering a book online. Uber and Airbnb have ushered in a new era: redefining neighborhoods, challenging the way governments regulate business, and changing the way we travel.
In the spirit of iconic Silicon Valley renegades like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, another generation of entrepreneurs is using technology to upend convention and disrupt entire industries. These are the upstarts, idiosyncratic founders with limitless drive and an abundance of self-confidence. Led by such visionaries as Travis Kalanick of Uber and Brian Chesky of Airbnb, they are rewriting the rules of business and often sidestepping serious ethical and legal obstacles in the process.
The Upstarts is the definitive story of two new titans of business and a dawning age of tenacity, conflict and wealth. In Brad Stone's riveting account of the most radical companies of the new Silicon Valley, we discover how it all happened and what it took to change the world.
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Recommended by Chris Fralic, Craig Pearce, Ee Ling Lim, and 2 others.
Chris Fralic
Great book by @BradStone I was a little late to, but well worth it and I learned a lot - Brad had truly unique access to the CEOs of Uber and AirBnB in the early days. https://t.co/89C4vIhuxx [source]
Craig Pearce
If you read to maintain motivation and be entertained, I recommend a few books that in addition to telling great stories, also contain lessons and learnings. You won’t gain many step-by-step type lessons from these books but you will come away realizing that not all startups, regardless of what stage they are in, are as well polished as they make you think. You will realize that they make mistakes and struggle through the same things you struggle through when first starting out. I find this helps motivate me. [source]
Ee Ling Lim
It's really hard to pinpoint, but for someone who is thinking about venturing into entrepreneurship but looking for something light, I personally like The Upstarts by Brad Stone. It tells the back-stories of Uber, Airbnb - what they went through to get the business off the ground, challenges and missteps, and what it means to be building something that really challenges the status quo. [source]
Master the fundamentals, hone your business instincts, and save a fortune in tuition.
The consensus is clear: MBA programs are a waste of time and money. Even the elite schools offer outdated assembly-line educations about profit-and-loss statements and PowerPoint presentations. After two years poring over sanitized case studies, students are shuffled off into middle management to find out how business really works.
Josh Kaufman has made a business out of distilling the core principles of business and delivering them quickly and concisely to people at all stages of their careers. His blog has introduced hundreds of thousands of readers to the best business books and most powerful business concepts of all time. In The Personal MBA, he shares the essentials of sales, marketing, negotiation, strategy, and much more.
True leaders aren't made by business schools-they make themselves, seeking out the knowledge, skills, and experiences they need to succeed. Read this book and in one week you will learn the principles it takes most people a lifetime to master.
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Recommended by Brian Burkhart, Ola Olusoga, and 1 others.
Brian Burkhart
It’s jam-packed with little digestible bites of wisdom—from finance to marketing to organizational development. It’s the guru bible of business. [source]
Ola Olusoga
For business, I've read Influence by Robert Cialdini 3 times, and Traction by Gabriel Weinberg twice, so if number of times read indicates favor, then those are it. There are a whole bunch of others, like The Personal MBA by Josh Kaufman, Confession of an Advertising Man by David Ogilvy, The 4 Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss, and Running Lean by Ash Maurya, that I've also enjoyed and recommend to people. [source]
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69
Start Small, Stay Small: A Developer's Guide to Launching a Startup
Rob Walling
4.1
Product Description: Start Small, Stay Small is a step-by-step guide to launching a self-funded startup. If you're a desktop, mobile or web developer, this book is your blueprint to getting your startup off the ground with no outside investment. This book intentionally avoids topics restricted to venture-backed startups such as: honing your investment pitch, securing funding, and figuring out how to use the piles of cash investors keep placing in your lap. This book assumes: • You don't have $6M of investor funds sitting in your bank account • You're not going to relocate to the handful of startup hubs in the world • You're not going to work 70 hour weeks for low pay with the hope of someday making millions from stock options There's nothing wrong with pursuing venture funding and attempting to grow fast like Amazon, Google, Twitter, and Facebook. It just so happened that most people are not in a place to do this. Start Small, Stay Small also focuses on the single most important element of a startup that most developers avoid: marketing. There are many great resources for learning how to write code, organize source control, or connect to a database. This book does not cover the technical aspects developers already know or can learn elsewhere. It focuses on finding your idea, testing it before you build, and getting it into the hands of your customers.
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Recommended by Turgay Birand.
Turgay Birand
Start Small, Stay Small by Rob Walling is good for getting some actionable tactics towards building and selling software products [source]
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70
The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups
An essential book that unlocks the secrets of highly successful groups and provides readers with a toolkit for building a cohesive, innovative culture, from the New York Times bestselling author of The Talent Code
If you want to understand how successful groups work—the signals they transmit, the language they speak, the cues that foster creativity—you won’t find a more essential guide than The Culture Code.
So here are my three must read books. I've been reading a lot of great books like: Outsmart Your Instincts, The Culture Code, and Antonio Damasio’s The Strange Order, and sometimes when you read a lot of nonfiction it’s very enriching, sometimes you need a novel. I really believe you should take a minute and read something beautiful. Listen, listen to Lolita by Nabokov. But also listen to Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy and listen to Richard Poe narrate that. Those are two of the greatest feats of the english language that I can think of. Then there’s Fortress of Solitude, an amazing book, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, these are great novels. Cold Mountain is a beautiful novel, Snow Falling On Cedars, I mean they’ve been around for a while. But goddamnit, get those under your belt. Those are the novels I think you should read. You know Love In The Time Of Cholera it just makes you ache. Kind of like a Hemingway thing, where Hemingway “ahh!”, it’s the same thing, you know. So I don’t know, I’m a fan of all those books. Those are my 3 slash 20 books. [source]
Graham Duncan
The author looks at a bunch of different cultures. Pixar, Navy SEALs, etc... And he’s looking for patterns among what makes people disproportionately effective as a culture. [source]
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71
UX for Lean Startups
Laura Klein
4.1
Great user experiences (UX) are essential for products today, but designing one can be a lengthy and expensive process. With this practical, hands-on book, you’ll learn how to do it faster and smarter using Lean UX techniques. UX expert Laura Klein shows you what it takes to gather valuable input from customers, build something they’ll truly love, and reduce the time it takes to get your product to market.
No prior experience in UX or design is necessary to get started. If you’re an entrepreneur or an innovator, this book puts you right to work with proven tips and tools for researching, identifying, and designing an intuitive, easy-to-use product.
Determine whether people will buy your product before you build it Listen to your customers throughout the product’s lifecycle Understand why you should design a test before you design a product Get nine tools that are critical to designing your product Discern the difference between necessary features and nice-to-haves Learn how a Minimum Viable Product affects your UX decisions Use A/B testing in conjunction with good UX practices Speed up your product development process without sacrificing quality
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Recommended by Dan Olsen, Laura Klein, Steve Krug, and 1 others.
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72
Explosive Growth: A Few Things I Learned While Growing to 100 Million Users - And Losing $78 Million
Cliff Lerner
4.1
*Awarded 'Best Startup Book Of All Time' by Benzinga.com *Awarded 'Top 5 Growth Hacking Book' by Entrepreneur Magazine
This compelling and inspiring narrative gives entrepreneurs a rare behind-the-scenes look inside a fast-growing startup that created the first online dating app and grew to 100 million users.
Explosive Growth combines lively and often hilarious storytelling, revealing genius growth tactics, numerous case-studies, and its step-by-step playbook to help your startup grow massively.
Due to its raw storytelling style, practical lessons, compelling content, and fast-paced read, Explosive Growth is a one-of-a-kind business book that transcends the narrow entrepreneurial audience to also appeal to readers and business students looking to learn about startup life and entrepreneurship. It holds nothing back while detailing the highest highs and lowest lows of what it's really like to run a startup.
Cliff Lerner's online dating startup, Snap Interactive, was running out of money when he bet the company's fortunes on a then-unknown platform called Facebook. The app suddenly began to acquire 100,000 new users daily for free, and soon after the stock price skyrocketed 2,000 percent, setting off an extraordinary chain of events filled with sudden success and painful lessons.
You will learn how to: • IGNITE EXPLOSIVE GROWTH by creating a remarkable product • Identify the ONLY 3 METRICS THAT MATTER • Explore valuable VIRAL GROWTH strategies to grow rapidly • Execute the GENIUS MEDIA HACKS that helped us acquire 100 million users • Create a thriving culture of PASSIONATE EMPLOYEES and CONSTANT INNOVATION
PRAISE: "A must read for founders and CEOs who want to achieve rapid growth while also building a great product and company." -Payal Kadakia, Founder & Executive Chairman of ClassPass
"Explosive Growth is without question one of the most useful and entertaining business books I have ever read. Cliff gives you a roadmap to massively grow your startup with specific tactical lessons made memorable through engaging stories. This book is a must-read." -David Perry, Digital Sales & Business Development Expert at Google, Adobe, Amazon, Startup Advisor
"Want to know how to grow your startup to 100 million users? Then this is the book for you. Explosive Growth gives step-by-step instructions, case studies and proven tactics on how to explode your growth." -Entrepreneur Magazineby Syed Balkhi
"Lessons for startups and CEOs on growth hacking, marketing, and innovation from one of the smartest founders I know." -Andrew Weinreich, Inventor of Social Networking
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73
The Intelligent Investor: The Classic Text on Value Investing
The greatest investment advisor of the twentieth century, Benjamin Graham taught and inspired people worldwide. Graham's philosophy of "value investing" -- which shields investors from substantial error and teaches them to develop long-term strategies -- has made The Intelligent Investor the stock market bible ever since its original publication in 1949.
To invest successfully over a lifetime does not require a stratospheric IQ, unusual business insights, or inside information. What's needed is a sound intellectual framework for making decisions and the ability to keep emotions from corroding that framework. This book precisely and clearly prescribes the proper framework. You must provide the emotional discipline. [source]
The foundation for investing. A lot of people have used this as their guide to getting into investment, basic strategies. Actually Warren Buffett cites this as the book that got him into investing and he says that principles he learned here helped him to become a great investor. Highly recommend this book. It’s a great way understand what’s going on and how to evaluate different companies out there before you make an investment. [source]
DJ Vlad
The single biggest influence on how I buy and sell stocks. [source]
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74
Anything You Want: 40 Lessons for a New Kind of Entrepreneur
Finally available in bookstores, the Portfolio edition of Derek Sivers’s iconic and bestselling manifesto on lessons learned while becoming an entrepreneur
Most people don’t know what they’re doing. They imitate others, go with the flow, and follow paths without making their own.
Best known for creating CD Baby, the most popular music site for independent artists, founder Derek Sivers chronicles his “accidental” success and failures into this concise and inspiring book on how to create a multimillion-dollar company by following your passion.
Sivers details his journey and the lessons learned along the way of creating CD Baby and building a business close to his heart. In 1997 Sivers was a musician who taught himself to code a Buy Now button onto his band’s Web site. Shortly thereafter he began selling his friends’ CDs on his Web site. As CD Baby grew, Sivers faced numerous obstacles on his way to success. Within six years he had been publicly criticized by Steve Jobs and had to pay his father $3.3 million to buy back 90 percent of his company, but he had also built a company of more than 50 employees and had profited $10 million.
Anything You Want is must reading for every person who is an entrepreneur, wants to be one, wants to understand one, or cares even a little about what it means to be human.
A true manifesto, a guidebook with clear signposts, and a fun ride you'll return to again and again. [source]
Marvin Liao
Partner/500 Startups
My list would be (besides the ones I mentioned in answer to the previous question) both business & Fiction/Sci-Fi and ones I personally found helpful to myself. The business books explain just exactly how business, work & investing are in reality & how to think properly & differentiate yourself. On the non-business side, a mix of History & classic fiction to understand people, philosophy to make sense of life and Science fiction to picture what the future could be like (not always utopian). [source]
Erik Cheong
Easy to read and compact book. Talks about about living life, appreciating enough, and doing what matters. Most importantly, do not be afraid to step out of your comfort zone and take risks! Everyone has great ideas but success only comes through action. [source]
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75
How Google Works
Eric Schmidt
4.0
Both Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg came to Google as seasoned Silicon Valley business executives, but over the course of a decade they came to see the wisdom in Coach John Wooden's observation that 'it's what you learn after you know it all that counts'. As they helped grow Google from a young start-up to a global icon, they relearned everything they knew about management. How Google Works is the sum of those experiences distilled into a fun, easy-to-read primer on corporate culture, strategy, talent, decision-making, communication, innovation, and dealing with disruption.
The authors explain how the confluence of three seismic changes - the internet, mobile, and cloud computing - has shifted the balance of power from companies to consumers. The companies that will thrive in this ever-changing landscape will be the ones that create superior products and attract a new breed of multifaceted employees whom the authors dub 'smart creatives'. The management maxims ('Consensus requires dissension', 'Exile knaves but fight for divas', 'Think 10X, not 10%') are illustrated with previously unreported anecdotes from Google's corporate history.
'Back in 2010, Eric and I created an internal class for Google managers,' says Rosenberg. 'The class slides all read 'Google confidential' until an employee suggested we uphold the spirit of openness and share them with the world. This book codifies the recipe for our secret sauce: how Google innovates and how it empowers employees to succeed.'
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Recommended by Andreas Zhou, Cynthia Johnson, Gary Bury, and 4 others.
Andreas Zhou
After reading How Google Works I just became fascinated with Google culture and I hope to understand a bit more about what unique things they're doing right that we aren't. [source]
Cynthia Johnson
What happens is that we look at things Google, or Facebook, and we see these big corporate enterprises. We don’t see the fact that there are people inside running them, and there have been hurdles. [source]
Gary Bury
How Google Works is a good insight to a large corporate in the tech world. [source]
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76
The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution
Walter Isaacson
4.0
The computer and the internet are among the most important innovations of our era, but few people know who created them. They were not conjured up in a garret or garage by solo inventors suitable to be singled out on magazine covers or put into a pantheon with Edison, Bell, and Morse. Instead, most of the innovations of the digital age were done collaboratively. There were a lot of fascinating people involved, some ingenious and a few even geniuses. This is the story of these pioneers, hackers, inventors, and entrepreneurs—who they were, how their minds worked, and what made them so creative. It’s also a narrative of how they collaborated and why their ability to work as teams made them even more creative.”
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Recommended by Brian Burkhart, Chris Fussell, Chris Oliver, and 4 others.
Brian Burkhart
This book is essentially a biography of all the people who’ve led to the technology of today—it’s fascinating. The most important point of the book is everything is one long, connected chain. There isn’t just one person or one industry that makes anything happen—it all goes way back. For example, the communication theory I have espoused and taught throughout my career is from Aristotle, Socrates, and Plato. Yeah, I’ve got my own spin on it—instead of ethos, pathos and logos, we say “know, feel, and do.” But it’s still based on their philosophies. Reading this book, I realized it’s not just someone like Steve Jobs who’s responsible for the era we live in. Rather, it’s Steve Jobs plus a whole lot of people from the last 200-plus years. [source]
I'm currently reading Innovators by Walter Isaacson. I love reading books like this because you learn about the lives of people who have created amazing things. It teaches you that their lives were often much harder than you realize and the struggles you're going through are very similar to what they had to go through before they were successful. It's really inspirational. [source]
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77
The Miracle Morning: The Not-So-Obvious Secret Guaranteed to Transform Your Life: Before 8AM
What if you could miraculously wake up tomorrow and any—or every area of your life was transformed? What would be different? Would you be happier? Healthier? More successful? In better shape? Would you have more energy? Less Stress? More Money? Better relationships? Which of your problems would be solved?
What if I told you that there is a "not-so-obvious" secret that is guaranteed to transform any—or literally every area of your life, faster than you ever thought possible? What if I told you it would only take 6 minutes a day?
Enter The Miracle Morning. What’s now being practiced by thousands of people around the world could perhaps be the simplest approach to creating the life you’ve always wanted. It’s been right there in front of us, but this book has finally brought it to life.
Are you ready? The next chapter of your life—the most extraordinary life you've ever imagined—is about to begin.
YOU DESERVE AN EXTRAORDINARY LIFE. IT’S TIME TO WAKE UP TO YOUR FULL POTENTIAL
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78
The Innovator's Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth
Clayton M. Christensen, Michael E. Raynor
4.0
A seminal work by bestselling author Clayton M. Christensen, now updated with fresh examples.
In the international bestseller The Innovator’s Dilemma, Clayton Christensen exposed the Achilles’ heel of many companies: by ignoring the disruptive technologies that evolve to displace them, they help initiate their own demise. In The Innovator’s Solution, Christensen and Michael Raynor take the idea of disruption one step further—explaining how companies can and should become disruptors themselves.
Now with several new chapters and updated cases, this revised and expanded edition shows how timely and relevant these ideas continue to be in today’s hyper-accelerated business environment. Christensen (author of the award-winning Harvard Business Review article, “How Will You Measure Your Life?”), Raynor, and new coauthor Derek van Bever give advice on the business decisions crucial to achieving truly disruptive growth and propose guidelines for developing your own disruptive growth engine.
Citing in-depth research and theories tested in hundreds of companies across many industries, The Innovator’s Solution is an important addition to any innovation library and an essential read for entrepreneurs and business builders.
Published by Harvard Business Review Press.
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Recommended by Steve Blank, Ken Norton, Ashley Hathaway, and 2 others.
Ashley Hathaway
When it comes to work books I definitely like to ask my leaders what their favorite books are. There are lots of repeats (Crossing the Chasm, Innovator's Dilemma & Solution, Lean Startup, etc), but every now and then someone will have a really unique one that I’ll read. I always read those right away. I’ve also taken book recommendations & then not read the book for like a year. I’ll go back and say, “Hey I finally read that book you recommended forever ago.” It’s fun. [source]
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79
The Art of Startup Fundraising
Alejandro Cremades, Barbara Corcoran
4.0
The Art of Startup Fundraising takes a fresh look at raising money for startups, with a focus on the changing face of startup finance. New regulations are making the old go-to advice less relevant, as startup money is increasingly moving online. These new waters are all but uncharted—and founders need an accessible guide. This book helps you navigate the online world of startup fundraising with easy-to-follow explanations and expert perspective on the new digital world of finance. You'll find tips and tricks on raising money and investing in startups from early stage to growth stage, and develop a clear strategy based on the new realities surrounding today's startup landscape.
The finance world is in a massive state of flux. Changes are occurring at an increasing pace in all sectors, but few more intensely than the startup sphere. When the paradigm changes, your processes must change with it. This book shows you how startup funding works, with expert coaching toward the new rules on the field.
-Learn how the JOBS Act impacts the fundraising model -Gain insight on startups from early stage to growth stage -Find the money you need to get your venture going -Craft your pitch and optimize the strategy -Build momentum -Identify the right investors -Avoid the common mistakes
Don't rely on the "how we did it" tales from superstar startups, as these stories are unique and applied to exceptional scenarios. The game has changed, and playing by the old rules only gets you left behind. Whether you're founding a startup or looking to invest, The Art of Startup Fundraising provides the up-to-the-minute guidance you need.
PRAISE FOR THE ART OF STARTUP FUNDRAISING:
“The Art of Startup Fundraising is a must read for anyone who even considers starting a business. Fundraising is hard. This book gives you the roadmap to get where you are going. Alejandro Cremades speaks with wisdom and from experience.“
- Tim Draper , Founder of Draper Associates, DFJ, and Draper University.
"The Art of Startup Fundraising should be a mandatory reading for entrepreneurs that are looking to raise capital. This book will enable Alejandro to help many more early stage companies answer the tough questions when fundraising."
- Marco Landi, Former Chief Operating Officer at Apple and Chairman at Atlantis Ventures
"Raising capital is often the most daunting and least understood aspects of starting a new business and there are few people more experienced than Alejandro Cremades to act as a guide. The Art of Startup Fundraising unlocks key secrets of fundraising for newly minted entrepreneurs."
- Jeff Stibel, Chairman of BrainGate, Inc. and Vice Chairman of Dun & Bradstreet, Inc.; New York Times bestselling author of Breakpoint and Wired for Thought.
"This book provides a clear, concise tour of the fundraising game. With his crowdfunding and entrepreneurial expertise in full display, Cremades does a terrific job making a complicated process simple and accessible."
- Jeff Bussgang, General Partner at Flybridge Capital Partners and Senior Lecturer at Harvard Business School
“Entrepreneurs need to be amazing at recruiting, selling and fundraising. The Art of Startup Fundraising provides the essential toolkit for mastering a core skill for any entrepreneur.”
- Gil Penchina, serial entrepreneur and prolific angel investor
“For many entrepreneurs finding the right investor for their venture can be a daunting task. Alejandro's experience with equity crowdfunding gives a unique perspective on the fundraising game. The Art of Startup Fundraising is very insightful for entrepreneurs looking to close a round of financing and changing the world.”
- Anyndya Ghose, Professor at NYU Stern School of Business
“There is no perfect approach to raising investment for a startup, but there is a certain tribal knowledge out there, that most of us had to learn through several failed attempts. The Art of Startup Fundraising captures every bit of advice (and then some!) that I would give to any entrepreneur looking for funding.”
- Paul Murphy, Partner at Betaworks and CoFounder of Playdots
“Alejandro's The Art of Startup Fundraising is a must read for any entrepreneur. Clear and concise, he outlines in today's startup community the steps to successfully fundraise. This is the golden era for entrepreneurs, any good idea with proof of concept can get access to money. Know your options!”
- Angelo J. Robles, Founder and CEO of Family Office Association
“It doesn't matter how great of a business you can build. If you can't raise money, you're toast. Master this book.”
- Ilya Pozin, Forbes Contributor and CoFounder of Pluto TV and CoFounder of Coplex
"The Art of Startup Fundraising translates art into science. By sharing proven formulas, strategies, and case studies that work, Alejandro Cremades provides a needed service to future entrepreneurs."
- Josh Cohen, Managing Partner at City Light Capital
“This ought to be a reading requirement for all entrepreneurs when building a business and raising capital. This is a very well written and informative book, written by a man who is a testament to dedication and creativity when confronted with the challenges of being an entrepreneur and raising capital.”
- Carter Caldwell, serial entrepreneur and Principal at Cross Atlantic Capital Partners
“Alejandro is on the bleeding edge of equity crowdfunding today. When he talks about fundraising, startups listen.”
- Andrew Ackerman, Managing Director at Dreamit Ventures
“Raising capital can be tough. Alejandro provides a step-by-step guidebook to all entrepreneurs that rather spend their time thinking about changing the world instead of thinking of how to raise funds.”
- Tobias P. Schirmer, Managing Partner of JOIN Capital
"A superb book on fundraising. Alejandro's guidance should arm entrepreneurs with the necessary tools to close with success a meaningful round of financing."
- Ellen Weber, Executive Director at Robin Hood Ventures
“The Art of Startup Fundraising is a practical and comprehensive resource for entrepreneurs to use again and again. It captures what startups need to do to be successful in the rapidly evolving financing world, while also providing tips on the fundamentals of building businesses that don’t change over time.”
- Marianne Hudson, Executive Director at Angel Capital Association
“Raising money is hard. But start-up founders all over the world can make it exponentially easier by educating themselves on the process of raising equity capital before they dive into it. The practical, hands-on advice from Alejandro Cremades in this book provides a solid foundation in that self-education process. Delivered in an approachable format with a key lesson to take-away every few pages, “The Art of Startup Fundraising” is essential reading for entrepreneurs everywhere.”
The latest groundbreaking book from Tim Ferriss, the #1 New York Times best-selling author of The 4-Hour Workweek.
From the author:
“For the last two years, I’ve interviewed nearly two hundred world-class performers for my podcast, The Tim Ferriss Show. The guests range from super celebs (Jamie Foxx, Arnold Schwarzenegger, etc.) and athletes (icons of powerlifting, gymnastics, surfing, etc.) to legendary Special Operations commanders and black-market biochemists. For most of my guests, it’s the first time they’ve agreed to a two-to-three-hour interview, and the show is on the cusp of passing 100 million downloads. “This book contains the distilled tools, tactics, and ‘inside baseball’ you won’t find anywhere else. It also includes new tips from past guests, and life lessons from new ‘guests’ you haven’t met. “What makes the show different is a relentless focus on actionable details. This is reflected in the questions. For example: What do these people do in the first sixty minutes of each morning? What do their workout routines look like, and why? What books have they gifted most to other people? What are the biggest wastes of time for novices in their field? What supplements do they take on a daily basis? “I don’t view myself as an interviewer. I view myself as an experimenter. If I can’t test something and replicate results in the messy reality of everyday life, I’m not interested. “Everything within these pages has been vetted, explored, and applied to my own life in some fashion. I’ve used dozens of the tactics and philosophies in high-stakes negotiations, high-risk environments, or large business dealings. The lessons have made me millions of dollars and saved me years of wasted effort and frustration. “I created this book, my ultimate notebook of high-leverage tools, for myself. It’s changed my life, and I hope the same for you.”
Tim is a brilliant thinker. The way he approaches mastery is inspiring in many ways. His latest book is no exception. What I loved about Tools of Titans is that it distills key tactics, routines and habits of the ultra-successful in actionable ways that anyone can take advantage of. Highly recommended. Every chapter is a valuable lesson. [source]
It only came out recently. I had so many questions about it that I flew to California and interviewed him about it for my podcast.It’s the collection of all the knowledge and wisdom he gained from the 100s of people he interviewed.I leave it out on my floor and read a page or two whenever I pass it.It’s already filled with 100s of my notes (see below). It’s maybe the one physical book I keep around. The rest, including my own books, I keep on my Kindle. [source]
I’m reading Tools of Titans which is just amazing. [source]
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81
Startup CEO: How to Build a Company to Success
Matt Blumberg
4.0
A definitive book for any CEO--first time or otherwise--of a high-growth companyWhile big company CEOs are usually groomed for the job for years, startup CEOs aren't--and they're often young and relatively inexperienced in business in general. Author Matt Blumberg, a technology and marketing entrepreneur, knows this all too well. Back in 1999, he started a company called Return Path, which later became the driving force behind the creation of his blog, OnlyOnce--because "you're only a first time CEO once."
Now, more than a decade later, he's written "Startup CEO." As the fifth book in the "StartUp Revolution" series, this reliable resource is based on Blumberg's experience as a startup CEO and covers a number of issues he's faced over the dozen years he's been a CEO.Offers valuable insights into how the CEO sets the overall vision and strategy of the company and communicates it to all stakeholdersDiscusses how to build a company's human capital by recruiting, hiring, and retaining the very best talentExamines how a CEO must align available resources with the company's strategy in order to ensure successAddresses what it takes to master the "How" of being a CEO--from leading an executive team to managing in any type of market
Engaging and informative, this book is essential reading for any, and every, CEO.
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82
The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done
A handsome, commemorative edition of Peter F. Drucker’s timeless classic work on leadership and management, with a foreword by Jim Collins.
What makes an effective executive?
For decades, Peter F. Drucker was widely regarded as "the dean of this country’s business and management philosophers" (Wall Street Journal). In this concise and brilliant work, he looks to the most influential position in management—the executive.
The measure of the executive, Drucker reminds us, is the ability to "get the right things done." This usually involves doing what other people have overlooked as well as avoiding what is unproductive. Intelligence, imagination, and knowledge may all be wasted in an executive job without the acquired habits of mind that mold them into results.
Drucker identifies five practices essential to business effectiveness that can—and must—be mastered:
Managing time; Choosing what to contribute to the organization; Knowing where and how to mobilize strength for best effect; Setting the right priorities; Knitting all of them together with effective decision-making Ranging across the annals of business and government, Drucker demonstrates the distinctive skill of the executive and offers fresh insights into old and seemingly obvious business situations.
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Recommended by Drew Houston, Ev Williams, Guy Kawasaki, and 15 others.
Drew Houston
CEO/Dropbox
I think one of the most valuable concepts from this book is measuring your time. [source]
I think it's much more valuable than 99% of the so-called time management books out there. [source]
Matt Mullenweg
Founder & CEO/Automattic
We're both big fans of Peter Drucker and his book The Effective Executive, as well as Alain de Botton's How Proust Can Change your Life. [source]
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83
The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That is Connecting the World
David Kirkpatrick
4.0
The inside story of Facebook, told with the full, exclusive cooperation of founder Mark Zuckerberg and the company's other leaders.
In little more than half a decade,Facebook has gone from a dorm-room novelty to a company with 500 million users. It is one of the fastest growing companies in history, an essential part of the social life not only of teenagers but hundreds of millions of adults worldwide. As Facebook spreads around the globe, it creates surprising effects—even becoming instrumental in political protests from Colombia to Iran.
Veteran technology reporter David Kirkpatrick had the full cooperation of Facebook’s key executives in researching this fascinating history of the company and its impact on our lives. Kirkpatrick tells us how Facebook was created, why it has flourished, and where it is going next. He chronicles its successes and missteps, and gives readers the most complete assessment anywhere of founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the central figure in the company’s remarkable ascent. This is the Facebook story that can be found nowhere else.
How did a nineteen-year-old Harvard student create a company that has transformed the Internet and how did he grow it to its current enormous size? Kirkpatrick shows how Zuckerberg steadfastly refused to compromise his vision, insistently focusing on growth over profits and preaching that Facebook must dominate (his word) communication on the Internet. In the process, he and a small group of key executives have created a company that has changed social life in the United States and elsewhere, a company that has become a ubiquitous presence in marketing, altering politics, business, and even our sense of our own identity. This is the Facebook Effect.
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Recommended by Dustin Moskovitz, Angela Pham, Craig Pearce, and 2 others.
Dustin Moskovitz
Co-founder/Facebook and Asana
Dustin Moskovitz recommended this book during a Stanford lecture. [source]
Angela Pham
The Facebook Effect by David Kirkpatrick made me a fan of Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg years ago. I didn’t hesitate to take my current role at Facebook because I feel so strongly about their integrity and leadership, no matter the negative sentiments and media narratives the company has endured recently. [source]
Craig Pearce
If you read to maintain motivation and be entertained, I recommend a few books that in addition to telling great stories, also contain lessons and learnings. You won’t gain many step-by-step type lessons from these books but you will come away realizing that not all startups, regardless of what stage they are in, are as well polished as they make you think. You will realize that they make mistakes and struggle through the same things you struggle through when first starting out. I find this helps motivate me. [source]
From the Impresario of NBC’s hit show The Apprentice
TRUMP ON TRUMP: “I like thinking big. I always have. To me it’s very simple: if you’re going to be thinking anyway, you might as well think big.”
And here’s how he does it: the art of the deal.
Beginning with a week in Trump’s high-stakes life, Trump: The Art of the Deal gives us Trump in action. We see just how he operates day to day—how he runs his business and how he runs his life—as he chats with friends and family, clashes with enemies, efficiently buys up Atlantic City’s top casinos, changes the face of the New York City skyline . . . and plans the tallest building in the world.
TRUMP ON TRUMP: “I play it very loose. I don’t carry a briefcase. I try not to schedule too many meetings. I leave my door open. . . . I prefer to come to work each day and just see what develops.”
Even a maverick plays by rules, and here Trump formulates his own eleven guidelines for success. He isolates the common elements in his greatest deals; he shatters myths (“You don’t necessarily need the best location. What you need is the best deal”); he names names, spells out the zeros, and fully reveals the deal-maker’s art: from the abandoned property that became the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center to the seedy hotel that became the Grand Hyatt; from the race to rebuild Central Park’s Wollman Skating Rink to the byzantine saga of the property that became Trump Tower. And throughout, Trump talks—really talks—about how he does it.
TRUMP ON TRUMP: “I always go into a deal anticipating the worst. If you plan for the worst—if you can live with the worst—the good will always take care of itself.”
Donald Trump is blunt, brash, surprisingly old-fashioned in spots—and always, always an original. Trump: The Art of the Deal is an unguarded look at the mind of a brilliant entrepreneur and an unprecedented education in the art of the deal. It’s the most streetwise business book there is—and a sizzling read for anyone interested in money and success.
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Recommended by Jim Hanson, Marc M. Lalonde, Secret Agent Number Six, and 2 others.
Jim Hanson
You already had Trump officials testifythey disagreed w/ @realDonaldTrump Interesting thing about executive power The executive has the power Not the advisers Here's a good book on it https://t.co/KGlUpucCNI Time for the acquittal https://t.co/xICCPPuvM5 [source]
Marc M. Lalonde
The easiest way to Clean Up my Friends List is to post this... I love this book! | Let's get to know each other a little. I'll start... Here's MY Story: https://t.co/o8gIl1TxR7 #AskLalonde #marcmlalonde #wealthy #inspiration https://t.co/6ULSKHiIj3 [source]
Secret Agent Number Six
The failing George W. Washington and his dad George H.W. Washington were fake Presidents. They did not think of The Constitution before I did.They stole all of my ideas for it from "The Art of the Deal" which you should read right now because its the best book ever. No collution! [source]
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85
Purple Cow, New Edition: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable--Includes new bonus chapter
You're either a Purple Cow or you're not. You're either remarkable or invisible. Make your choice.
What do Starbucks and JetBlue and KrispyKreme and Apple and DutchBoy and Kensington and Zespri and Hard Candy have that you don't? How do they continue to confound critics and achieve spectacular growth, leaving behind former tried-and true brands to gasp their last?
Face it, the checklist of tired 'P's marketers have used for decades to get their product noticed -Pricing, Promotion, Publicity, to name a few-aren't working anymore. There's an exceptionally important 'P' that has to be added to the list. It's Purple Cow.
Cows, after you've seen one, or two, or ten, are boring. A Purple Cow, though...now that would be something. Purple Cow describes something phenomenal, something counterintuitive and exciting and flat out unbelievable. Every day, consumers come face to face with a lot of boring stuff-a lot of brown cows-but you can bet they won't forget a Purple Cow. And it's not a marketing function that you can slap on to your product or service. Purple Cow is inherent. It's built right in, or it's not there. Period.
In Purple Cow, Seth Godin urges you to put a Purple Cow into everything you build, and everything you do, to create something truly noticeable. It's a manifesto for marketers who want to help create products that are worth marketing in the first place.
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Recommended by Joe Gebbia, Vinod Khosla, Vinod Khosla, and 21 others.
Joe Gebbia
Co-founder/Airbnb
Make something that’s distinct enough that people want to talk about it. [source]
Marvin Liao
Partner/500 Startups
My list would be (besides the ones I mentioned in answer to the previous question) both business & Fiction/Sci-Fi and ones I personally found helpful to myself. The business books explain just exactly how business, work & investing are in reality & how to think properly & differentiate yourself. On the non-business side, a mix of History & classic fiction to understand people, philosophy to make sense of life and Science fiction to picture what the future could be like (not always utopian). [source]
A few months ago, I was drinking a Noah’s Mill whiskey (cute) with my good buddy Brian Balfour and talking about life... During the conversation, we got on the topic of books that changed our lives. I want to share them with you. I judge a book's success if a year later I'm still using at least 1 thing from the book. [source]
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86
Don't Make Me Think, Revisited: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability
Steve Krug
4.0
Since Don’t Make Me Think was first published in 2000, over 400,000 Web designers and developers have relied on Steve Krug’s guide to help them understand the principles of intuitive navigation and information design.
In this 3rd edition, Steve returns with fresh perspective to reexamine the principles that made Don’t Make Me Think a classic-–with updated examples and a new chapter on mobile usability. And it’s still short, profusely illustrated…and best of all–fun to read.
If you’ve read it before, you’ll rediscover what made Don’t Make Me Think so essential to Web designers and developers around the world. If you’ve never read it, you’ll see why so many people have said it should be required reading for anyone working on Web sites.
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Recommended by Brian Armstrong, Jeff Atwood, Ken Norton, and 13 others.
Anoop Anthony
Krug was teaching usability two decades ago when UX wasn't a buzzword, and the WWW was still in its nascent stages. (The first edition of this book was published in 2000!) I cut my teeth on Don't make me think back when I first started out in the industry. It is now in its third edition and still relevant — it offers compelling insights into building great user experiences into websites and applications. [source]
Auston Bunsen
I’m actually a self-taught programmer, so these books have really helped me with practical skills that I could put to use & yield results. The return on investment for these kinds of books is off the charts for me! [source]
Chris Goward
Here are some of the books that have been very impactful for me, or taught me a new way of thinking: … Don't Make Me Think. [source]
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87
The Start-up of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career
From the co-founder and chairman of LinkedIn and author Ben Casnocha comes a revolutionary new book on how to apply the strategies of successful entrepreneurship to your career: in other words, how to run the 'start-up of you'.
In a world where wages are virtually stagnant, creative disruption is rocking every industry, global competition for jobs is fierce, and job security is a thing of the past, we're all on our own when it comes to our careers. In the face of such uncertainty, the key to success is to think and act like an entrepreneur: to be nimble and self-reliant, to be innovative, and to know how to network and stand out from the crowd. And this is precisely what Hoffman and Casnocha show you how to do in a book that is both inspirational and supremely practical.
Just as LinkedIn is the one online community that no professional can afford not to belong to, this is the book that no professional can afford to be without.
Everyone, women and men alike, needs to think big to succeed. This is a practical book that shows you how to take control and build a career that will enable you to have real impact. [source]
The Startup of You" describes how to take the Silicon Valley approach to building a life: start with an idea, and work over your entire career to turn it something remarkable. In the world today, I think that the startup approach to life is necessary. This book distills the key techniques needed to succeed. [source]
The same extraordinary vision and timing that enabled Reid to found LinkedIn is once again on display with his book "the start-up of YOU." His central thesis, that every individual can benefit from acting as the entrepreneur of their own life and career, has never been more important than it is in today's increasingly globalized, competitive, and networked world. [source]
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88
Innovation Driven Entrepreneurship: 24 Steps to Help Entrepreneurs Launch Successful New Ventures
Bill Aulet
4.0
"Innovation Driven Entrepreneurship "will change the way people think about entrepreneurship. Many believe that it cannot be taught, and those who are successful in starting a business are born with something others do not have. Innovation-based entrepreneurship can be broken down into discreet behaviors and processes that can be taught to the intelligent, hardworking, people using this book.
Eric Ries and Steve Blank were wrong; the road to a successful start-up is not just four steps. "Innovation Driven"" Entrepreneurship "breaks it down into 24 steps which include: Market segmentationQuantify the value propositionDefine your coreMap the process to acquire a paying costumerTest key assumptionsDevelop a product plan, and more.
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Recommended by Maya Zlatanova.
Maya Zlatanova
One of the books that had the biggest impact on Maya. [source]
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89
The 7 Day Startup: You Don't Learn Until You Launch
Dan Norris, Rob Walling
4.0
From generating ideas to gaining your first paying customers, The 7 Day Startup is the bootstrapper� (TM)s bible for launching your next product. In it, you will learn: 1. Why validation isn� (TM)t the answer 2. How to evaluate your business idea 3. How to choose a business name, fast 4. How to build a website in 1 day for under $100 5. 10 proven ways to market a business quickly And much, much more. "People who say there� (TM)s nothing to learn from failure don� (TM)t see the big picture. Dan was literally 2 weeks away from insolvency and ready to look for a 9-5 job when he stumbled upon an amazing, yet simple discovery. It doesn� (TM)t take months to launch a new (and profitable) business. In fact� ] it might be better if you didn� (TM)t spend very much time at all. If you� (TM)ve struggled in the past to launch a profitable business and are tired of reading stories about founders who swung for the fences and succeeded, then you need to listen to Dan� (TM)s story. Dan founded WP Curve and launched it from scratch in just 7 days, turning it into a successful seven figure business. This isn� (TM)t a puffball story. Dan� (TM)s journey is common for most of us. Swing and miss. You start to feel like a failure, but listen to what Dan has to say.You� (TM)ll see that much of what you thought about building a startup simply isn� (TM)t true. Through Dan, you� (TM)ll quickly see that launching a profitable startup doesn� (TM)t have to take years, or even months. It can be done in just 7 days." -- Mike Taber, author of Startups For The Rest Of Us
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90
Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It...and Why the Rest Don't (Rockefeller Habits 2.0)
Winner of the 2015 International Book Awards for General Business
Winner of the 2015 National Indie Excellence Award for General Business
Winner of the 2015 Readers' Favorite International Book Award Gold Medal for Non-Fiction Business
Winner of the 2015 Paris Book Festival Award for Business
Winner of the 2015 Amsterdam Book Festival Award for Business
Winner of the 2015 San Francisco Book Festival Award for Business
Finalist of the 2015 International Book Awards for Best New Non-Fiction
It's been over a decade since Verne Harnish's best-selling book Mastering the Rockefeller Habits was first released. Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It...and Why the Rest Don't is the first major revision of this business classic. In Scaling Up, Harnish and his team share practical tools and techniques for building an industry-dominating business. These approaches have been honed from over three decades of advising tens of thousands of CEOs and executives and helping them navigate the increasing complexities (and weight) that come with scaling up a venture. This book is written so everyone -- from frontline employees to senior executives -- can get aligned in contributing to the growth of a firm. There's no reason to do it alone, yet many top leaders feel like they are the ones dragging the rest of the organization up the S-curve of growth. The goal of this book is to help you turn what feels like an anchor into wind at your back -- creating a company where the team is engaged; the customers are doing your marketing; and everyone is making money. To accomplish this, Scaling Up focuses on the four major decision areas every company must get right: People, Strategy, Execution, and Cash. The book includes a series of new one-page tools including the updated One-Page Strategic Plan and the Rockefeller Habits ChecklistTM, which more than 40,000 firms around the globe have used to scale their companies successfully -- many to $1 billion and beyond. Running a business is ultimately about freedom. Scaling Up shows business leaders how to get their organizations moving in sync to create something significant and enjoy the ride.
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Recommended by Patrick Lencioni, Graham Weston, Alexandra Stroe, and 3 others.
Verne Harnish is more committed to helping companies grow than any other person on the planet. Really. He's also radically practical in his approach and that is reflected throughout this terrific book. [source]
Graham Weston
CEO/Rackspace
Fast-growing companies - not small ones or big ones - create almost all the jobs and innovation in our economy, and Verne has been an invaluable guide to leaders of such companies, like me. Scaling Up helps us put in place the disciplines critical to building a significant business. [source]
Alexandra Stroe
I'd recommend Scaling Up by Verne Harnish, The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz and Measure what Matters by John Doerr for scaling and managing the business. [source]
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91
Mastering the VC Game: A Venture Capital Insider Reveals How to Get from Start-up to IPO on Your Terms
Jeffrey Bussgang
4.0
"Read this book right now so you can look your potential VC in the eye with confidence." -David Meerman Scott, author of "The New Rules of Marketing & PR"
Finding the right venture capitalist to back your start-up is a challenge. Even if you manage to get backing, you want your VC to be a partner, not some dictator who will undermine your vision and take control of your life's work.
Jeffrey Bussgang is one of a very few people who have played on both sides of this high-stakes game. Now he draws on his unique perspective to offer high-level insights, colorful stories, and practical advice gathered from his own experience as well as from interviews with dozens of the most successful entrepreneurs and VCs. He reveals how to get noticed, perfect a pitch, and negotiate a partnership that works for everyone.
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92
Scaling Lean: Mastering the Key Metrics for Startup Growth
Ash Maurya
4.0
A hands-on guide to the metrics that matter most to young tech startups.
In the early stages of a tech startup's life, it's hard to decipher the meaningful metrics from the distractions. How do you know if your product is working? Is it the number of new signups? Average amount of time spent on the site? Revenue, even if you don't have a revenue model yet?
In Scaling Lean, serial entrepreneur and author of the startup cult classic Running Lean Ash Maurya offers a tactical handbook for measuring and scaling a tech startup with maximum efficiency and efficacy. Maurya pairs real-world examples of startups like Airbnb and Dropbox with techniques and language from the manufacturing world to create a new model for measuring and describing an early stage startup's success. Scaling Lean is an indispensable handbook for startup founders graduating from the incubator stage to build their business in the real world.
Follow up to his book Running Lean, that shows how to successfully make the leap from startup to sustainable business. [source]
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93
Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble
Dan Lyons
4.0
For twenty-five years Dan Lyons was a magazine writer at the top of his profession--until one Friday morning when he received a phone call: Poof. His job no longer existed. "I think they just want to hire younger people," his boss at Newsweek told him. Fifty years old and with a wife and two young kids, Dan was, in a word, screwed. Then an idea hit. Dan had long reported on Silicon Valley and the tech explosion. Why not join it? HubSpot, a Boston start-up, was flush with $100 million in venture capital. They offered Dan a pile of stock options for the vague role of "marketing fellow." What could go wrong?
HubSpotters were true believers: They were making the world a better place ... by selling email spam. The office vibe was frat house meets cult compound: The party began at four thirty on Friday and lasted well into the night; "shower pods" became hook-up dens; a push-up club met at noon in the lobby, while nearby, in the "content factory," Nerf gun fights raged. Groups went on "walking meetings," and Dan's absentee boss sent cryptic emails about employees who had "graduated" (read: been fired). In the middle of all this was Dan, exactly twice the age of the average HubSpot employee, and literally old enough to be the father of most of his co-workers, sitting at his desk on his bouncy-ball "chair."
Mixed in with Lyons's uproarious tale of his rise and fall at Hubspot is a trenchant analysis of the start-up world, a de facto conspiracy between those who start companies and those who fund them, a world where bad ideas are rewarded with hefty investments, where companies blow money lavishing perks on their post-collegiate workforces, and where everybody is trying to hang on just long enough to reach an IPO and cash out.
With a cast of characters that includes devilish angel investors, fad-chasing venture capitalists, entrepreneurs and "wantrapreneurs," bloggers and brogrammers, social climbers and sociopaths, Disrupted is a gripping and definitive account of life in the (second) tech bubble.
The book starts like a punch in the gut, but the story and the reality dose of this book are something that we all need from time to time in the Tech Startup Age. It helped me look beyond the excitement of working on new projects as a goal in itself and keep at least one foot on the ground. Plus the writing is extraordinary! [source]
@DannySkarka Lots had been written about that but always a great topic. I recommend Dan Lyon’s book [source]
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94
Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal
Nick Bilton
4.0
Twitter seems like a perfect start-up success story. In barely six years, a small group of young, ambitious programmers in Silicon Valley built an $11.5 billion business out of the ashes of a failed podcasting company. Today Twitter boasts more than 200 million active users and has affected business, politics, media, and other fields in innumerable ways.
Now Nick Bilton of the New York Times takes readers behind the scenes with a narrative that shows what happened inside Twitter as it grew at exponential speeds. This is a tale of betrayed friendships and high-stakes power struggles as the four founders—Biz Stone, Evan Williams, Jack Dorsey, and Noah Glass—went from everyday engineers to wealthy celebrities, featured on magazine covers, Oprah, The Daily Show, and Time’s list of the world’s most influential people.
Bilton’s exclusive access and exhaustive investigative reporting—drawing on hundreds of sources, documents, and internal e-mails—have enabled him to write an intimate portrait of fame, influence, and power. He also captures the zeitgeist and global influence of Twitter, which has been used to help overthrow governments in the Middle East and disrupt the very fabric of the way people communicate.
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Recommended by Casey Neistat, Ron Conway, Craig Pearce, and 3 others.
Its was reading his Nick's book Hatching Twitter that literally motivated me, inspired me, gave me the confidence to start my own technology company. [source]
Craig Pearce
If you read to maintain motivation and be entertained, I recommend a few books that in addition to telling great stories, also contain lessons and learnings. You won’t gain many step-by-step type lessons from these books but you will come away realizing that not all startups, regardless of what stage they are in, are as well polished as they make you think. You will realize that they make mistakes and struggle through the same things you struggle through when first starting out. I find this helps motivate me. [source]
Under Andy Grove's leadership, Intel has become the world's largestchipmaker, the fifth-most-admired company in America, and theseventh-most-profitable company among the Fortune 500. You don't achieverankings like these unless you have mastered a rare understanding of the art ofbusiness and an unusual way with its practice.Few CEOs can claim this level of consistent record-breaking success. Groveattributes much of this success to the philosophy and strategy he reveals in "Only the Paranoid Survive--" a book that is unique in leadership annalsfor offering a bold new business measure, and for taking the reader deep insidethe workings of a major corporation.
Grove's contribution to business thinking concerns a new way of measuring thenightmare moment every leader dreads--the moment when massive change occurs andall bets are off. The success you had the day before is gone, destroyed byunforeseen changes that hit like a stage-six rapid. Grove calls such momentsStrategic Inflection Points, and he has lived through several. When SlPs hit, all rules of business shift fast, furiously, and forever. SlPs can be set offby almost anything--megacompetition, an arcane change in regulations, or aseemingly modest change in technology.
Yet in the watchful leader's hand, SlPs can be an ace. Managed right, a companycan turn a SIP into a positive force to win in the marketplace and emergestronger than ever.
To achieve that level of mastery over change, you must know its propertiesinside and out. Grove addresses questions such as these: What are the stages ofthese tidal waves? What sources do you turn to in order to foresee dangersbefore trouble announces itself? When threats abound, how do you dealwith youremotions, your calendar, your career--as well as with your most loyal managersand customers, who may cling to tradition?
No stranger to risk, Grove examines his own record of success and failure, including the drama of how he navigated the events of the Pentium flaw, whichthreatened Intel in a major way, and how he is dealing with the SIP brought onby the Internet. The work of a lifetime of reflection, "Only the ParanoidSurvive" is a contemporary classic of leadership skills.
"This terrific book is a dangerous book. It will make people think." --Peter Drucker
"This books is about one super-important concept. You must learn about Strategic Inflection Points, because sooner or later you are going to live through one." --Steve Jobs, Pixar Animation Studios
In my whole life, I have known no wise people (over a broad subject matter area) who didn't read all the time -- none, zero. You'd be amazed at how much Warren reads -- and at how much I read. My children laugh at me. They think I'm a book with a couple of legs sticking out. [source]
This book is about one super-important concept. You must learn about Strategic Inflection Points, because sooner or later you are going to live through one. [source]
Do you have a hobby you wish you could indulge in all day? An obsession that keeps you up at night? Now is the perfect time to take that passion and make a living doing what you love. In Crush It! Why NOW Is the Time to Cash In on Your Passion, Gary Vaynerchuk shows you how to use the power of the Internet to turn your real interests into real businesses. Gary spent years building his family business from a local wine shop into a national industry leader. Then one day he turned on a video camera, and by using the secrets revealed here, transformed his entire life and earning potential by building his personal brand. By the end of this book, readers will have learned how to harness the power of the Internet to make their entrepreneurial dreams come true. Step by step, Crush It! is the ultimate driver’s manual for modern business.
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Recommended by Eric Schmidt, Tony Hsieh, Ryan Hoover, and 8 others.
Tony Hsieh
CEO/Zappos.com
Gary Vaynerchuk is one of those entrepreneurs who has discovered the secret to combining passion with business. He is always an inspiration and always entertaining. You owe it to yourself to read this book! [source]
For anyone interested in my career path, I’d recommend books in various genres. On a real practical level, I’d certainly recommend reading any and all plant/mushroom/tree/ecology/nature books you can acquire. It’s even more helpful to read the books that pertain specifically to your ecosystem and bioregion. Additionally, I’d also recommend reading a plethora of business and marketing books — both old and new alike. Think And Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill, Crush It! by Gary Vaynerchuk, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini, and anything by Seth Godin would be my top recommendations. And of course, every book I mentioned in the previous answers are strongly recommended as well. [source]
Do you have a grip on your business, or does your business have a grip on you?
All entrepreneurs and business leaders face similar frustrations—personnel conflict, profit woes, and inadequate growth. Decisions never seem to get made, or, once made, fail to be properly implemented. But there is a solution. It’s not complicated or theoretical.The Entrepreneurial Operating System® is a practical method for achieving the business success you have always envisioned. More than 2,000 companies have discovered what EOS can do.
In Traction, you’ll learn the secrets of strengthening the six key components of your business. You’ll discover simple yet powerful ways to run your company that will give you and your leadership team more focus, more growth, and more enjoyment. Successful companies are applying Traction every day to run profitable, frustration-free businesses—and you can too.
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98
Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions
Why do our headaches persist after taking a one-cent aspirin but disappear when we take a 50-cent aspirin?
Why does recalling the Ten Commandments reduce our tendency to lie, even when we couldn't possibly be caught?
Why do we splurge on a lavish meal but cut coupons to save twenty-five cents on a can of soup?
Why do we go back for second helpings at the unlimited buffet, even when our stomachs are already full?
And how did we ever start spending $4.15 on a cup of coffee when, just a few years ago, we used to pay less than a dollar?
When it comes to making decisions in our lives, we think we're in control. We think we're making smart, rational choices. But are we?
In a series of illuminating, often surprising experiments, MIT behavioral economist Dan Ariely refutes the common assumption that we behave in fundamentally rational ways. Blending everyday experience with groundbreaking research, Ariely explains how expectations, emotions, social norms, and other invisible, seemingly illogical forces skew our reasoning abilities.
Not only do we make astonishingly simple mistakes every day, but we make the same "types" of mistakes, Ariely discovers. We consistently overpay, underestimate, and procrastinate. We fail to understand the profound effects of our emotions on what we want, and we overvalue what we already own. Yet these misguided behaviors are neither random nor senseless. They're systematic and predictable--making us "predictably" irrational.
From drinking coffee to losing weight, from buying a car to choosing a romantic partner, Ariely explains how to break through these systematic patterns of thought to make better decisions. "Predictably Irrational" will change the way we interact with the world--one small decision at a time.
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Recommended by Max Levchin, Vinod Khosla, Vinod Khosla, and 22 others.
Max Levchin
Co-founder/PayPal, CEO/Affirm, Investor
Max Levchin recommended this book as an answer to "What business books would you advise young entrepreneurs read?" [source]
Andra Zaharia
'While I was thinking of the best books to add to this short list, I realized that not even half of them are directly related to digital marketing. This is because I believe that the best marketers are people who understand human nature deeply and aim to bring out the best in it. Call me naive, but that’s how I see it. If I were to want to pursue a career in marketing, I’d read … Predictably Irrational. [source]
Chris Goward
Here are some of the books that have been very impactful for me, or taught me a new way of thinking: … Predictably Irrational. [source]
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99
The Entrepreneur's Guide to Customer Development: A cheat sheet to The Four Steps to the Epiphany
Brant Cooper, Patrick Vlaskovits
4.0
"This is a must read for all startups and stakeholders." - Steve Blank, author of The 4 Steps to the Epiphany, creator of Customer Development methodology
"The Entrepreneur's Guide is an easy read. It is written in a conversational tone, doesn't take itself too seriously, and avoids extraneous fluff."
- Eric Ries, Author & Creator of the Lean Startup methodology
"Get the CustDev book to dive deep into customer interviews and understand how your product can be developed to meet your customers' needs."
- Dan Martell, Founder of Flowtown, angel investor
Customer Development is a four-step framework for helping startups discover and validate their customers, product, and go-to-market strategy, developed by Steve Blank and an integral part of Eric Ries' Lean Startup methodology. Focused on the Customer Discovery step, The Entrepreneur's Guide to Customer Development is an easy to follow guide for finding early adopters, building a Minimum Viable Product, finding Product-Market fit, and establishing a sales and marketing roadmap.
Deemed a "must-read" by Steve Blank and Eric Ries, inside you will find detailed customer development and lean startup concept definitions, a step-by-step approach to best practices, a business model analysis guide, case studies, rich graphics, as well as worksheets and exercises. No matter the stage of your business, you will return often to this guide to learn how to build a product people want;"get out of the building;" foster strong customer relationships; test business model risk; reach out to early adopters; conduct startup marketing; create a customer funnel based on buyers' process; and prepare your startup to scale up.
The Entrepreneur's Guide to Customer Development: A Cheat Sheet to The Four Steps to the Epiphany, affectionately known as the "CustDev book," serves as course text for classes at Stanford University, University of Chicago, Boston University, DePaul University, University of Minnesota and University of Norway.
"Our UCL (University College London) students love The Entrepreneur's Guide to Customer Development. Thanks to Brant & Patrick for writing this helpful book. "
- Dave Chapman, Deputy Head of the Department of Management Science and Innovation at UCL (University College London)
"Love it! Required reading for all NYU entrepreneurs."
- Frank Rimalovski, Managing Director of NYU Innovation Venture Fund
This book is both an introduction for those unfamiliar with lean concepts and highly actionable for lean practitioners. It is a user friendly guide, written to be accessible to marketing professionals, Engineers startup founders and entrepreneurs, VCs, angels, and anyone else involved in building scalable startups.
Existing companies will benefit to from applying Customer Development principles described in detail herein: for example, startups struggling to achieve market traction, or well established companies seeking to spark new innovation.
This is a business book for startups like no other. No fluff, but rather sound principles and concrete steps to take to build your business. Get up to speed on Customer Development now.
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Lost and Founder: The Mostly Awful, Sometimes Awesome Truth about Building a Tech Startup
Rand Fishkin
4.0
Rand Fishkin, the founder and former CEO of Moz, reveals how traditional Silicon Valley "wisdom" leads far too many startups astray, with the transparency and humor that his hundreds of thousands of blog readers have come to love.
Everyone knows how a startup story is supposed to go: A young, brilliant entrepreneur has an cool idea, drops out of college, defies the doubters, overcomes all odds, makes billions, and becomes the envy of the technology world.
This is not that story.
It's not that things went badly for Rand Fishkin; they just weren't quite so Zuckerberg-esque. His company, Moz, makers of marketing software, is now a $45 million/year business, and he's one of the world's leading experts on SEO. But his business and reputation took fifteen years to grow, and his startup began not in a Harvard dorm room but as a mother-and-son family business that fell deeply into debt.
Now Fishkin pulls back the curtain on tech startup mythology, exposing the ups and downs of startup life that most CEOs would rather keep secret. For instance: A minimally viable product can be destructive if you launch at the wrong moment. Growth hacking may be the buzzword du jour, but initiatives can fizzle quickly. Revenue and growth won't protect you from layoffs. And venture capital always comes with strings attached.
Fishkin's hard-won lessons are applicable to any kind of business environment. Up or down the chain of command, at both early stage startups and mature companies, whether your trajectory is riding high or down in the dumps: this book can help solve your problems, and make you feel less alone for having them.
You won't find a more honest, raw, and helpful look into the trenches of founding a tech startup than this book. Rand Fishkin shares the rare hard-won insight no one else dares tell you. [source]
Rand Fishkin is the real deal. This book is an honest, generous and useful look at what actually happens when you build a company, including the downs as well as the ups... I wish I had read it thirty years ago. [source]
This is a truly courageous book. It's one part business-building guide and two parts Indiana Jones-style adventure memoir. And if you've ever wondered if the 'timeless wisdom' you often hear about startups is bullsh*t, here's the proof. [source]
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