Books Recommended by Erik Cheong

I will strongly recommend anyone who wants to run his or her own startup to get this book. The Lean Startup method teaches you how to drive a startup, how to steer, when to turn, and when to persevere-and grow a business with maximum acceleration. I applied the Build-Measure-Learn model into my own startup Park N Parcel, the key is to validate all your assumptions and gather market feedback of your services/product via minimum viable product (MVP). To me, this book is like a bible. I keep reading it to constantly remind myself about the lean startup approach.

Previously, I was reading this book called “Hooked” by Nir Eyal. It’s about how to build habit forming products, another must read for founders who care about driving customer engagement. This book showed me the case study of how Facebook, Youtube & Uber turn technologies into compulsions if not fully-fledged addictions. It provided me the step by step on how I can position my product into a “painkiller” that solves real problems, instead of a “vitamin” that appeals to users’ emotional rather than functional needs.

I am a big fan of Jack Ma, I have 4 different books talking about Jack. He is a top entrepreneur & visionaire, who started out as a modest English teacher and built Alibaba into one of the world’s largest companies, an e-commerce empire on which hundreds of millions of Chinese consumers depend on. I am impressed about how he overcame his humble origins and early failures to achieve massive success with Alibaba.

I love history and am very curious how South East Asia economies are dominated by only fifty families whose interests range from banking to real estate, shipping to sugar, gambling to lumber etc. It is so amazing to know how all these groups of entrepreneurs overcome both political and economic challenges by turning it into opportunity, grow their business and becoming who they are today.

I will only recommend you read these books if you are into collaborative & shared resources startups. They talk about the rise of crowd based capitalism - a new way of organizing economic activity that may supplant the traditional corporate-centered model. They allow you to make quick comparisons & brainstorm ideas with the existing peer-to-peer platforms such as Airbnb, Uber, TaskRabbit, China's Didi Kuaidi, and India's Ola.

I will only recommend you read these books if you are into collaborative & shared resources startups. They talk about the rise of crowd based capitalism - a new way of organizing economic activity that may supplant the traditional corporate-centered model. They allow you to make quick comparisons & brainstorm ideas with the existing peer-to-peer platforms such as Airbnb, Uber, TaskRabbit, China's Didi Kuaidi, and India's Ola.