Here are some best books for startup founders, especially if you’re just starting out! I’ve read them all and highly recommend them.
A gripping account of PayPal’s origins and a vivid portrait of the geeks and contrarians who made its meteoric rise possible. His richly reported narrative includes corporate intrigue, workplace hijinks, breakthrough innovation and first-class nerdiness.
Filled with his trademark humor and straight talk, The Hard Thing About Hard Things is invaluable for veteran entrepreneurs as well as those aspiring to their own new ventures, drawing from Horowitz’s personal and often humbling experiences.
Super Founders dissects startups from every single angle, just like the best investors do. It provides an unparalleled lens for angel investors, VCs, and startup founders to analyze startups, and includes riveting exclusive interviews for anyone interested in understanding how billion-dollar companies happen.
[The book] has everything you’d expect from a book on Musk—stories of tragedy, triumph, and turmoil… While the stories are fascinating and guaranteed to spark a mountain of coverage, founders and entrepreneurs will also unearth valuable lessons.
In Zero to Sold, Arvid shares his experiences, learnings, and insights from building a Software-as-a-Service business from start to finish. He shows what worked and what didn’t work. If you want to build your own bootstrapped business and stay sane while doing it, Zero to Sold will be your guide.
If you aren’t sure about how to ask the “right” questions to ascertain whether there is real customer pain, the best book on the subject is The Mom Test. I highly recommend it.
This book is specifically targeted for founders who find themselves at the point where they need to transition into a selling role.
A 360-degree perspective on the venture capitalist-entrepreneur virtuous cycle. Read this to understand what it takes to be a catalyst to the best economic driver the world has ever known.
Nothing can be as discouraging as a slow startup. When you finally take the plunge to start a project you have always believed in, only to see little to no growth, self-doubt can take over. Instead of suffering through this period, struggling and wondering if your startup is going to make it, you need to figure out a way to make it work…but you won’t find it through traditional marketing routes.
A fascinating analysis of Netflix… Highly recommended for leaders eager to build innovative, fast, and flexible teams.
The Startup Playbook is a startup’s fundamental mentor-in-a-box. It’s an incredible resource for all new startups that includes just about everything they need to know.
A detailed, unsparing account of entrepreneurial arrogance, breathtaking excess, and cutthroat competition at one of the tech industry’s most vaunted, loathed, and socially transformative companies. In tracking Uber’s turbulent trajectory and Kalanick’s eventual fall from grace, Mike Isaac illuminates―and indicts―some of the business practices, cultural values, and mythologies shaping our new social infrastructure.
This book doesn’t describe a way for a founder to scale a company. It describes the way for a founder to scale a company.
An engaging and fascinating read… An excellent chronicle of Amazon’s rise… A gift for entrepreneurs and business builders of the new generation.
This is a book that all first time entrepreneurs must read. Getting to repeatable selling in an early stage company is by far the biggest challenge startups face and Amos provides an experience-based, prescriptive approach to getting it right the first time.
If you have an idea and a dream, read Do More Faster! It offers a unique opportunity to hear first-hand what to do (and what not to do) to build and scale your business.
Useful, business-minded reporting on an unconventional corporate magnate, containing both corporate and human-interest perspectives.