Best Startup Books – More than 150 books to read

Recommended by Bogdan Iordache (Co-Founder/How to Web)

Source: Bogdan Iordache: Recommended Books and Learnings

Peter Thiel has built multiple breakthrough companies, and Zero to One shows how.

Elon Musk

Founder/SpaceX

I read this book at a time when Udemy was rapidly growing—over the 18 months where we went from 30 to 200 people. It was helpful to read about Horowitz's challenges, worries, and triumphs when addressing the same types of issues at a similar stage of growth. There are so many big decisions you need to make where there's just no clear-cut, right or wrong answer. There are a lot of gray areas. You gather information from your team, but the hard decisions rest with you. This book helped me realize that while I needed to carefully and objectively consider feedback, I was responsible for making a decision in the end—even when it was an unpopular one.

Dennis Yang

CEO/Udemy

Recommended by Sir Martin Sorrell (CEO/WPP)

Source: Books CEOs Will Be Reading This Summer

Recommended by Ryan Holiday (Founder/Brass Check)

Source: Books That Changed My Mind This Year: CEO Selections

Ray Dalio has provided me with invaluable guidance and insights that are now available to you in Principles.

Bill Gates

CEO/Microsoft

As a general rule, most new memoirs are mediocre and most business memoirs are even worse. Shoe Dog by Phil Knight is an exception to that rule in every way and as a result, was one of my favorite books of the year and favorite business books ever. I started reading it while on the runway of a flight and figured I’d read a few pages before opening my laptop and working. Instead, my laptop stayed in my bag during the flight and I read almost the entire book in one extended sitting. Ostensibly the memoir of the founder of Nike, it’s really the story of a lost kid trying to find meaning in his life and it ends with him creating a multi-billion dollar company that changes sports forever. I’m not sure if Knight used a ghostwriter (the acknowledgements are unclear) but his personal touches are all over the book—and the book itself is deeply personal and authentic. The afterward is an incredibly moving reflection of a man looking back on his life. I loved this book. It ends just as Nike is starting to turn into the behemoth it would become, so I hold out hope that there may be more books to follow.

Ryan Holiday

Founder/Brass Check

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.

Steve Jobs

Founder/Apple

Follow these precepts and you will revolutionise your life.

Steven Pressfield

Author/The War of Art

"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.

Jeff Bezos

CEO/Amazon

It’s unusual for modern biographies to be this good. It’s especially unusually for the subject of the biography to approach the biographer in the way that Steve Jobs did (thinking that he was the intellectual heir of Benjamin Franklin and Albert Einstein). But despite those two things, this bio is and will likely forever be a classic. It shows Jobs at his best–determined, creative, prophetic–and at his worst–petty, selfish, tyrannical and vicious. You can learn just as much about what kind of leader you probably don’t want to be from this book as you can from anything else. That’s what is so strange about Jobs and this biography. You read it and you’re blown away and impressed but I think very few of us think: yeah, I want to be that guy. I want to treat my kids that way, I want to be obsessed with trivial design things that way, I want to hate that way, and so on. You admire him but you also see him as a tragic figure. That’s how you know that Isaacson did an amazing job with this book. TC mark

Ryan Holiday

Founder/Brass Check

Recommended by Marc Goodman in "Tools of Titans".

Marc Goodman

Founder/Future Crimes Institute

I chose this book because it taught me how important it is that your business represents you and that you passionately believe in it. I also learned from it the importance of organizational culture, and that the endpoint of a sale should always be customer's happiness, not the money-product/service exchange.

Robert Hajnal

Founder/Trail Running Academy

Recommended by Dragos Novac (CEO/Nordic 9)

Source: Dragoș Novac Sharing His Favorite Books

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.

Seth Godin

Author & Entrepreneur

Recommended by Ola Olusoga (Co-founder/Populum)

Source: Interview with Ola Olusoga: How Books Have Guided His Path To Self-Discovery

The Purpose Is Profit provides the roadmap and motivation needed to win the startup game. It is required reading for every entrepreneur committed to building a profitable business.

Barbara Corcoran

Founder/The Corcoran Group

I really enjoyed Brad Stone's The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon. Anyone who wants to better understand the dynamics of disruption or just gain a better understanding of the website we've come to love, must read this book.

Shane Parrish

Founder/Syrus Partners

I've seen so many people thrust into management in high-growth companies with so little guidance. From now on, I will hand them this book. Its practical wisdom is immediately useful for the newly minted manager — and us old ones.

Evan Williams

Co-Founder/Twitter, CEO/Medium

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.

Daymond John

Founder/FUBU

This book lays out a framework to help any startup brainstorm ways to gain more customer traction.

Gunhee Park

Co-Founder/Populum

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.

Brad Feld

Co-Founder/Foundry Group

I loved Mark Manson’s The Subtle Art of Not Giving A Fuck. There’s a reason this book is blowing up. It’s that good.

Ryan Holiday

Founder/Brass Check

Now this one is certainly a little less historical than the others, if only because most of the profiles are about companies founded in the last ten years. Written by Jessica Livingston, a founder of YCombinator, the book profiles some of the hottest and most successful startups in Silicon Valley history. It shows how the founders manage to create massive growth, usually with very few resources. Now I’m not saying that companies like Hot or Not compare with the accomplishments of Pericles or Da Vinci, but you can certainly see how this book captures a moment in time—and its leading men and women—and what that means. This is the most current book on the list (besides mine) but I think many of you will like it. Plus you can learn a lot about the tech scene in one swoop.

Ryan Holiday

Founder/Brass Check

Continuous innovation is the key to long-term impact and success. Eric shows how organizations of all kinds—not just startups—can be built to learn and adapt. In the pivot-or-perish networked world of twenty-first-century business, this is mission critical reading.

Reid Hoffman

CEO/Linkedin

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.

Sheryl Sandberg

COO/Facebook

Kim Perell has written a very personal and compelling guidebook on entrepreneurship, how to execute with excellence, and on the importance of resilience. It's an extremely readable, powerful, and personal narrative that I would highly recommend to all aspiring entrepreneurs. I already have a dozen people in mind with whom I'm going to share this work.

Jonathan Auerbach

Chief Strategy and Growth Officer/PayPal

My good friend @tferriss is back with another great book. Tribe of Mentors features some of the most influential moguls across industries who offer advice on how to navigate life. It comes out Monday, so make sure you add this to your reading list.

Daymond John

Founder/FUBU

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.

Tim Ferriss

Author & Entrepreneur

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.

Bill Gates

Founder/Microsoft

Winston Ma

Managing Director/China Investment Corporation

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.

Craig Pearce

Co-Founder/Kid Genius

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.

Tony Hsieh

CEO/Zappos

Downes and Nunes provide some very thought-provoking guidance to existing businesses about how to compete, innovate, and win in this new world of the disruptive startup.

Michael Dell

CEO/Dell

Gotta say, I'm pretty flattered every time asks me if I've read @AdamMGrant book Give and Take. Good guy. Good book

Simon Sinek

Best-selling Author

Recommended by Ola Olusoga (Co-founder/Populum)

Source: Interview with Ola Olusoga: How Books Have Guided His Path To Self-Discovery

I'm not someone that chooses favourites, however, the most recent book that I got a lot out of and which, for me, spans both business and non-business is 'Ready Player One' by Ernest Cline.

It was recommended by the VP of Labs at Unity as a book to help appreciate the potential of how virtual reality can impact our future. It certainly achieved that. There's no doubt that it helped my mind delve into the potential opportunities that VR will provide both for Artomatix (an AI for art creation company I helped co-found) and many other startups.

It also is a fun read that references a lot of classic games from the 1980's and I'm looking forward to the movie that's coming out. Hopefully, the movie will be as good as the book.

Neal O'Gorman

Serial Entrepreneur

In addition to walking you through, in great detail, how a board functions, Brad has adopted many of the Lean Startup approaches to building, operating, and managing your board in a way that resembles continuous deployments. Any practitioner of Lean Startup would do well to use this approach to building their board.

Eric Ries

Founder/Long-Term Stock Exchange

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.

Seth Godin

Author & Entrepreneur

There is so much great content packed into this book across all aspects of a start: ideas, execution, culture, hiring, firing, fundraising, product, metrics, incorporation, work-life balance. It is a book I can highly recommend if you're interested in or are getting started with a startup. Brad Feld and David Cohen are super smart and have a lot of experience, and it shows. I especially loved the chapter titled "If you want money, ask for advice". It's something I've tried to apply ever since reading the book. I've found that genuinely seeking advice is often more productive and leads to more opportunities than asking for money or a partnership or a sale.

Joel Gascoigne

Co-founder/Buffer

As someone who’s helped a small company become a huge, valuable company, I know firsthand the power of the startup ecosystem and entrepreneurship. This book is the definitive book on navigating VC as part of that.

Eric Schmidt

Ex-CEO/Google

The book is new (2017) and growthhacking is a real trend right now.

Kyrylo Taranenko

Head of Marketing/Y-Productive

It was wonderful to read these two provocative books of essays by two incredibly wise and compassionate women. [...] Anne Lamott’s book is ostensibly about the art of writing, but really it too is about life and how to tackle the problems, temptations and opportunities life throws at us. Both will make you think and both made me a better person this year.

Ryan Holiday

Founder/Brass Check

Jerry and I learned how to be VCs together. But more importantly, we learned how to be humans to the leaders who are entrepreneurs. Leadership is extremely difficult, and great leaders are intensely introspective, as they must learn about themselves to be effective long-term. With this book, Jerry helps any leader go deep on all aspects of their journey.

Brad Feld

Investor, Co-Founder/Foundry Group

Finally, a book that tells you how to put up a velvet rope in front of your business and get more of the clients you want and deserve! Whether you're building a services business or a personal brand, this book provides a roadmap to making bank, in a smart and authentic way. Pia is a total pro (and a laugh riot). I can't wait to recommend this book to every entrepreneur who feels stuck. Pia got unstuck, and so can you.

Julia Pimsleur

Founder/Little Pim

Audrey Niffenegger's "The Time Traveler's Wife" and Garth Stein's "The Art Of Racing In The Rain" made me cry.

Gabriel Coarna

Founder/Readable

Entrepreneurs largely celebrate the end of the dreaded 9-to-5 and are ready to dive headfirst into a world where they call the shots. The End of Jobs argues that rapid advancements in technology and globalization are leveraging points in the accumulation of wealth, meaning and freedom. This eye-opening book will give reluctant entrepreneurs the nudge they need, with sobering statistics on why the century-long growth in wages stopped in 2000, and why MBAs and JDs can't land jobs, let alone pay off their significant debt.

Sujan Patel

Co-Founder/Web Profits

Recommended by Bryan Callen (Co-Host/The Fighter and the Kid)

Source: Tools of Titans

Growth has been hacked to simply mean “more”. More revenue, more customers, more employees, more products, more, more, more. That’s a tragically myopic view of growth. Paul Jarvis will help you open your eyes to a broader, wiser definition of growth. One of learning, one of betterment, one of contentment. There’s never been a more opportune time to launch or run companies that embrace having and being “enough”. The most important ingredient is a new worldview. Company of One can give you just that.

David Heinemeier Hansson

Co-Founder/Basecamp

New to Big is a great how-to book for change leaders seeking to drive scalable, profitable growth in big companies, reminding us how to use deep questioning, masterful listening, and a learning culture to discover the ‘commercial truth’!

Kate Johnson

President/Microsoft U.S.

Sell More Faster is the sales playbook every startup founder needs to read. Whether you're searching for product-market fit or have found it and are starting to scale, this book will give you the play by play approach of what you need to do to build an awesome sales organization.

Brad Feld

Co-Founder/Foundry Group

Just as the The Lean Startup has become a must-read for founders, Entering StartUpLand should be required reading for any joiner. The book is a sweeping and insightful view into a startup's full range of operations and entry points. I highly recommend it.

Eric Ries

Founder/Long-Term Stock Exchange

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.

Roxana Bitoleanu

Founder/Taraba Virtuala

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.

Eric Ries

Founder/Long-Term Stock Exchange

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.

Ashley Hathaway

Enterprise Product Manager

Rich20Something reminded me that my goals aren't too far off, and that, regardless of my age, I can create a business that gives me freedom and great income!

Arne Giske

Founder/The Millennial Entrepreneur podcast

Chaos Monkeys was a fun one that I read recently. About kind of M&A, and growing a business in Silicon Valley over the last five years.

Mike Dudas

Co-founder/Button

Unstoppable Teams proves that with the right leadership ordinary people can do the extraordinary. Drawing from against-the-odds successes in business ventures and military missions, Mills shares the secrets for building a team that can do the seemingly impossible. Read it and take your team from stuck to unstoppable.

Liz Wiseman

Researcher, Executive Advisor, Author

I am currently reading The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google. I was introduced to the author, Scott Galloway during his appearance on the aforementioned Recode Decode podcast, specifically episode released on September 14. His opinion and thoughts on the big 4 (Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google) lead me to research him. I put a hold on his book from my local library and waited a few weeks. A great thing about this book is its recency, for example, it includes Amazon’s recent acquisition of WholeFoods. So far, it has covered, in entertaining detail, Amazon and Apple. The author writes with great knowledge, mixed with the right amount of wit. The author argues that Apple is sex, Google is God, Facebook is love and Amazon is our gut. By aligning with these roles in our lives, they have become wildly successful. I hope to hear an expansion of his positions he discussed on the podcast, and hope to apply some of strategies into my own startup.

Craig Pearce

Co-Founder/Kid Genius

Another book that has helped me in a specific moment was “Creative Confidence”. I don’t remember which part helped me, but I can remember that I had some mornings in which I woke up at 5 or 6 o'clock in the morning just to start my day reading something creative.

Robert Katai

Founder/Instagramology

Recommended by Richard Branson (Founder/Virgin Group)

Source: My top 65 books to read in a lifetime

When he got to high school, the president said, his tastes changed and he learned to enjoy classics like “Of Mice and Men” and “The Great Gatsby.”

Barack Obama

Former USA President

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 [...] Lateral Thinking.

Andra Zaharia

Freelance Content Marketer/The Content Habit

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.

Tim Ferriss

Author & Entrepreneur

Work the System (Carpenter), which is one of the best books you can get on scaling yourself & your business. It’s excellent & wish I had read it earlier in my career.

Marvin Liao

Partner/500 Startups

With Dare to Lead, Brené brings decades of research to bear in a practical and insightful guide to courageous leadership. This book is a road map for anyone who wants to lead mindfully, live bravely, and dare to lead.

Sheryl Sandberg

COO/Facebook

Recommended by Craig Pearce (Co-Founder/Kid Genius)

Source: Interview with Craig Pearce

Recommended by Marvin Liao (Partner/500 Startups)

Source: Book-Talk with Marvin Liao, Partner at 500 Startups, Avid Reader & Tsundoku

How do you explain Warren Buffett? Everyone knows that in a deep and liquid capital market like that of the US, it is just about impossible to beat the stock market averages over anything more than the short term. But Buffett has been ahead of the curve for most of the past 50 years, making him one of the world’s richest people. Alice Schroeder’s massive authorised biography, The Snowball, provides some clues about how he’s done it.

Richard Lambert

Director-General/Confederation of British Industry

My favourite book in 2018 was HEDGE by Nicolas Colin. The book resonated with me in many ways, but the two most important angles would be:

As a corporate strategist in the fintech vertical, the book has captured my imagination by surfacing a few important paradigm shifts, such as the rise of the multitude as a power structure in the corporate value-chain (end-users are now both consumers and suppliers), the implications of increasing returns to scale to business models, and the imperative of reinventing consumer finance and insurance based on how people will live and work in the future (more hunting, less settling, changing jobs faster, the new reality of continuous risks that are now part of people’s lives). As I grasped with this perspective, and then re-assessed the current fintech landscape, it gave me a new theory about the startups that might be the winners in this space – because there’s a difference between radical reinvention of finance and the simple digitization of it, by applying a layer of tech on top of existing practices.

Personally, the book resonated with me mostly by flagging the asymmetry between today’s job market realities (people hunt more and the career is re-defined as a series of gigs across the world), versus the policymakers’ failure to grasp with these new realities and create new institutions that are designed to remove the friction that comes with this unprecedented geographical and economic dynamism. Having changed countries twice in the past 2 years, I experienced first-hand the downside of economic-hunting and the failure of the current societal infrastructure to serve us – from banking services, to housing, to governmental institutions. But this vacuum creates opportunity, especially for existing or future entrepreneurs as the book clearly illustrates, and this opportunity is what has been keeping me up at night, lately.

Dan Colceriu

Creator/Strategy, Digested newsletter

Growing up, I loved fantasy worlds - Middle Earth, Discworld and Narnia were where I loved to let my mind wander. I think if I had to pick a favourite then, it would be Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett. That was the first Discworld book I read where I realised there was another level to it - that Discworld was satirical. I went back and started reading the whole collection from The Colour of Magic onwards, and haven't missed one since.

Dave Child

Founder/Readable.io

The 10% Entrepreneur and Girlboss. Both empower people to create a strategic plan and risk-taking that are needed for considering entrepreneurship. A lot of it is experimenting, learning and just doing.

Andrea Loubier

CEO/MailBird

Recommended by Scott Johnson (Freelance Software Engineer)

Source: Interview with Scott Johnson

It's solid, realistic advice from someone who definitely knows what he's talking about.

Kristen Hamilton

Co-founder/Koru

Recommended by Bogdana Butnar (Head of Strategy/Poke)

Source: Bogdana Butnar - The Ultimate Books to Read List

Recommended by Dragos Novac (CEO/Nordic 9)

Source: Dragoș Novac Sharing His Favorite Books

One thing I have learned is that some books don’t stick or I’m not ready for them at that time and that’s ok. Now if I get 50 or 100 pages in and lose interest I don’t struggle through the rest of it. I put it down and find another book. I try to just stick with books that I think about when I’m not reading. When I’m standing in line somewhere or walking and think “I wonder what’s next.” That’s a good book. I’m in the middle of Brene Brown’s new book right now.

Ashley Hathaway

Enterprise Product Manager

I’m currently reading The Devils by Dostoevsky, and I expect to glean absolutely nothing from it but the pleasure of disconnecting from any other literature that requires me to learn a skill for the company. The overburdening characters and plethora of words for something that could otherwise be said in an instant is a type of therapeutic brain massage in an environment where saying as little as possible with maximum effect is the plow that tills the soil in startup atmosphere.

Ari Iaccarino

Co-Founder/Ridj-it

This [reading something helpful] happens with pretty much every book I read. Most recently it happened to me when I was reading “Mastering Bitcoin” by Andreas Antonoupolous. I had no idea what the components of a Bitcoin wallet address were and he elegantly explains them in detail in chapter 4. It’s particularly relevant because we started CBlocks and we focus almost exclusively on wallet generation for our customers.

Auston Bunsen

Co-Founder/CBlocks

If you want to find a niche and adapt to the marketing, one of my favorite techniques is Inbound Marketing. Great book to understand what's inbound marketing and how you can use effectively this technique for your business or clients.

Ionut Danifeld

Co-Founder/DevMark.co

Recommended by Ola Olusoga (Co-founder/Populum)

Source: Interview with Ola Olusoga: How Books Have Guided His Path To Self-Discovery

I first heard the term 'deferred life plan' in this fantastic book by Randy Komisar. It has been especially relevant for me, since it is a story about a silicon valley entrepreneur and teaches the idea that there are many things more important than money. The book poses the question "what would you be willing to do for the rest of your life?" and persuasively argues that if you will do that, the money will follow.

Joel Gascoigne

Co-founder/Buffer

I am currently reading "The Education of a Value Investor- Guy Spier". I am very interested in Value Investing and I tried reading The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham but it was too difficult for me to understand. So I decided to read this first before revisiting the Holy Grail of Value Investing.

Benjamin Kwan

Co-Founder/TravelClef

Recommended by Marvin Liao (Partner/500 Startups)

Source: Book-Talk with Marvin Liao, Partner at 500 Startups, Avid Reader & Tsundoku

Recommended by Craig Pearce (Co-Founder/Kid Genius)

Source: Interview with Craig Pearce

Recommended by Marvin Liao (Partner/500 Startups)

Source: Book-Talk with Marvin Liao, Partner at 500 Startups, Avid Reader & Tsundoku

Brin said he is a big sci-fi fan, and Stephenson's acclaimed 1992 novel "Snow Crash" is one of his favorites. The book "was really 10 years ahead of its time," Brin said. "It kind of anticipated what's going to happen, and I find that really interesting."

Sergey Brin

Co-Founder/Google

Novels: The Windup Girl and Pattern Recognition are chock full of images and ideas that will stick with you for months.

Seth Godin

Author & Entrepreneur

Recommended by Marvin Liao (Partner/500 Startups)

Source: Book-Talk with Marvin Liao, Partner at 500 Startups, Avid Reader & Tsundoku

Will your business be disrupted? Definitely. Do the disruptors have to be a small band of hackers in a garage? Definitely not. This book is full of practical tips for big companies to get a leg up on scrappy startups.

Adam Grant

Author

Recommended by Marvin Liao (Partner/500 Startups)

Source: Book-Talk with Marvin Liao, Partner at 500 Startups, Avid Reader & Tsundoku

After working at many startups and now running my own company, the one difference I have observed between good and great companies (and products) is how oriented the org is toward learning, The more people in an organization learn, the more value they create for the whole company.

Josh Brewer

Co-founder/Abstract

Recommended by Marvin Liao (Partner/500 Startups)

Source: Marvin Liao, Partner at 500 Startups, Shares a List of More Than 40 Books That Inspired Him

Kelly is a legitimate fantasy and sci-fi nerd. He knows Dune by Frank Herbert and The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson inside and out. Kelly has daughters and texted me about the latter book, which follows a young female protagonist: "How do you raise girls that are of the system but crush the system while rebuilding a better one?"

Kelly Starrett

Owner/CrossFit

This insightful book blends academic rigor with practical, step-by-step tools that can help you design innovative business models for the Networked Age. Connected Strategy shows how to leverage continuous connectivity and emerging AI to make deep relationships that benefit customers and businesses alike. Read this book if you want to build a business model of the future.

Reid Hoffman

Co-Founder/LinkedIn

Recommended by Vincenzo Ruggiero (CEO/Prospect.io)

Source: Vincenzo Ruggiero, CEO of Prospect.io, Shares an Emotional, Entertaining, Educational Book List

For a long time, I didn't see myself as an entrepreneur. I worked for an organization where I felt fulfilled, loved the work I got to do, and was amazed by who I got to do it with. Then five years ago, my husband started our first gym and I began to see behind the curtain of entrepreneurship. I stumbled upon Startup Life by Brad Feld and Amy Batchelor, it gave me great perspective on how to support my husband, how business affects a couple on multiple levels, and how we could evolve our roles and relationship.

AnneMarie Schindler

Founder/Small Wins Consulting

Currently, as I'm focused on marketing for my startup, I’m using “Startup Evolution Curve” by Dr. Donatas Jonikas, which is a marketing study full with real-world examples of startups and how they tackled specific marketing issues. I’m using this book as an inspiration, as five minutes into reading from it, I’m full of new ideas and committed to trying them.
PS: Proud to say that my startup, Echoz, it’s also featured in the book.

Nicolae Andronic

Founder/Echoz

High Tech Startup: The Complete Handbook for Creating Successful New High Tech Companies by John L. Nesheim is a bit dated, but because of that, its very revealing as to how investment has changed over the years. I have always felt unease about the trend of “unicorns”, and subscribe more to the approach of being a “cockroach”. This book helped me better understand how to strategize for being a cockroach.

Lucas Morales

Founder & CEO/Zeall.us

Recommended by Maya Zlatanova (Co-Founder & CEO/FindMeCure)

Source: Maya Zlatanova, Co-Founder & CEO of FindMeCure: Favorite Books & Reading Habits

Start Small, Stay Small by Rob Walling is good for getting some actionable tactics towards building and selling software products

Turgay Birand

Founder/Edition Guard

Recommended by Cody McLain (CEO/SupportNinja)

Source: Cody McLain, CEO of SupportNinja, Shares the Books that Provide the Right Business Framework

Recommended by Ola Olusoga (Co-founder/Populum)

Source: Interview with Ola Olusoga: How Books Have Guided His Path To Self-Discovery

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

Bill Earner

Founder/Connect Ventures

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!

Irina Marinescu

Product Manager & Co-Founder/Save Potatoes

For people interested in designing or building software products: The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman and The Lean Product Playbook by Dan Olsen. Both books have informed my product sense and helped me make decisions about great UX.

Julia Enthoven

Co-Founder/Kapwing

Recommended by Scott Johnson (Freelance Software Engineer)

Source: Interview with Scott Johnson

The tale of Uber, the queen of the so-called ‘unicorns,’ is a parable about power―and the lengths to which some startup founders will go to amass it and hold onto it. Aside from being a delicious read, Mike Isaac’s account is also teeming with new revelations that will shock and outrage you.

John Carreyrou

Author, Journalist

A book called Design to Grow studies the difference of large corporations who have scale versus small startups who have agility. As the CEO of Mailbird, a small tech startup looking to take on email domination for the world, there were some valuable lessons to learn from how big corporations like Coca Cola learned to design their systems, localize them and iterate to scale their business going from a cola company to an all beverage company.

Andrea Loubier

CEO/MailBird

Favourite non-business book would be Der Steppenwolf, by Hermann Hesse. It's a book that's often read by privileged people who feel misunderstood (usually teens), so everyone focuses on the first part about loneliness in the bourgeois world and forgets about the whole second part of the book that's about overcoming that and finding a sense of humour, a shift in perspective, and a bit of distance. Jack Kerouac even dismisses the book in the fashion of the precisely same intellectual hypocrisy this book talks about, which to me sounds like hipsters talking about how other people are hipsters and fake, because they themselves "have been listening the band before it was popular". Also, Steppenwolf is very relevant today - especially in the often lonely world of startup founders, where everyone talks about how great they're doing. So, the message still resonates with me.

Sanja Zepan

Co-Founder/Homey

I was completely moved and impressed by him and his team. The fact that they were adamant in overcoming all obstacles and negativities despite all odds were against them. They were relentless. I was facing many problems during my first startup. Reading up on the book allowed me to understand that my problems were not good enough to make me fail but giving up was.

Jose He

Chief Performance Officer/Bountie.io

It's not only an exciting novel but opened my eyes, how close to reality his predictions were in 1936 in which direction the Nazi dictatorship was shifting.

Originally Mann was asked by his publisher to write a sci-fi novel about Europe in the future. However, he rejected the proposal stating that he could not write an apolitical book at that point in history and wanted to reveal the racism and cruelties in the Third Reich.

If more people would have been as brave as him many wars could have been prevented. Read it!

Florian Hubner

CEO/Decondia, Startup Creator

I have a long list of books that I would like to get to soon. For now, as a female, first-time entrepreneur, I would recommend Lean In, The Lean Startup and The Material World.

Meenakshi Sharma

Founder/DateFyx

Recommended by Jeff Gibbard (Chief Brand Officer/From The Future)

Source: Social Business Strategist Jeff Gibbard Shares the Books That Formed His Business Perspective

Recommended by Ashley Hathaway (Enterprise Product Manager)

Source: Interview with Ashley Hathaway

Recommended by Mircea Scarlatescu (Co-Founder/123flori.ro)

Source: Mircea Scarlatescu interview

I donʼt think a single book changed the way I see things or my career path. Iʼm trying hard to think now of something that impacted me in such a way… Maybe to some extent James Altucher did (James Altucher - How to be the Luckiest Person Alive!). Heʼs kind of a recognized author nowadays, but I remember following him on Twitter 7-8 years ago, when he was still up and coming, and his almost comical, seemingly self-destructive advice on just doing your thing and not paying attention to others made a lot of sense to me.

I was at that time in the midst of my first company, which looking back did alright, and all of us co-founders have done well, but as it was developing it was really the proverbial roller-coaster from the startup war stories. And much like with Richard Feynman whom I already mentioned above, Altucherʼs witty observations on living life and doing business were a great source of support.

Later, in 2011, the book came out based on his earlier blog posts and I remember pre-ordering it just out of gratitude for those earlier writings. And I have to admit, I havenʼt really been reading him since then.

Max Gurvits

Director/Cross Border Angels

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.

Dean Roller

Founder/Bliss Bean Bags

There is nothing better than doing what you were born or created to do. This book is all about that journey of learning what you were born to do.

Michael Woodward

CEO & Founder/jumbleThink

John thinks that Digital Marketer founding CEO Ryan Deiss' 2015 book is a great introduction to sales tactics for the new entrepreneur.

Daymond John

Founder/FUBU

Recommended by Jack H. M. Wong (Trainer & Author)

Source: Jack H. M. Wong, Trainer & Author, Shares Knowledge & Inspiration Taken From Robert Kiyosaki’s Books

This book is my favorite thing he has produced. Unlike most non-fiction books, This Is Marketing does a good job of not going on too long or belaboring the point. Seth deliver succinct actionable insights, some of which I’ve already implemented with the Piper and Going Deep brands.

Aaron Watson

CEO/PiperCreative

Recommended by Scott Johnson (Freelance Software Engineer)

Source: Interview with Scott Johnson

A book called the Motivation Hacker by Nick Winter is written well and too the point. We all struggle with motivation and building positive habits, and the book made me see habits in a new light with the idea of building success spirals.

Cody McLain

CEO/SupportNinja

For business insight, check out Alibaba's World by Porter Erisman and Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World by Adam Grant.

Vanessa Keng

Co-Founder/The Golden Concepts

Recommended by Marvin Liao (Partner/500 Startups)

Source: Book-Talk with Marvin Liao, Partner at 500 Startups, Avid Reader & Tsundoku

Chris Guillebeau often says, 'Inspiration is good, but inspiration combined with action is so much better,' and this collection of side hustles is an invaluable resource for both inspiration and action. It’s packed with practical and engaging ideas, tips, strategies, and, most helpful, real-life examples of people who have succeeded.

Gretchen Rubin

Author

Recommended by Marvin Liao (Partner/500 Startups)

Source: Book-Talk with Marvin Liao, Partner at 500 Startups, Avid Reader & Tsundoku

Recommended by Marvin Liao (Partner/500 Startups)

Source: Book-Talk with Marvin Liao, Partner at 500 Startups, Avid Reader & Tsundoku

Recommended by Marvin Liao (Partner/500 Startups)

Source: Book-Talk with Marvin Liao, Partner at 500 Startups, Avid Reader & Tsundoku

Recommended by Marvin Liao (Partner/500 Startups)

Source: Book-Talk with Marvin Liao, Partner at 500 Startups, Avid Reader & Tsundoku

Recommended by Marvin Liao (Partner/500 Startups)

Source: Book-Talk with Marvin Liao, Partner at 500 Startups, Avid Reader & Tsundoku

Recommended by Marvin Liao (Partner/500 Startups)

Source: Book-Talk with Marvin Liao, Partner at 500 Startups, Avid Reader & Tsundoku

Recommended by Marvin Liao (Partner/500 Startups)

Source: Book-Talk with Marvin Liao, Partner at 500 Startups, Avid Reader & Tsundoku

Recommended by Marvin Liao (Partner/500 Startups)

Source: Book-Talk with Marvin Liao, Partner at 500 Startups, Avid Reader & Tsundoku

Recommended by Marvin Liao (Partner/500 Startups)

Source: Book-Talk with Marvin Liao, Partner at 500 Startups, Avid Reader & Tsundoku

Recommended by Marvin Liao (Partner/500 Startups)

Source: Book-Talk with Marvin Liao, Partner at 500 Startups, Avid Reader & Tsundoku

Recommended by Marvin Liao (Partner/500 Startups)

Source: Book-Talk with Marvin Liao, Partner at 500 Startups, Avid Reader & Tsundoku

Recommended by Marvin Liao (Partner/500 Startups)

Source: Book-Talk with Marvin Liao, Partner at 500 Startups, Avid Reader & Tsundoku

Recommended by Marvin Liao (Partner/500 Startups)

Source: Book-Talk with Marvin Liao, Partner at 500 Startups, Avid Reader & Tsundoku

Recommended by Marvin Liao (Partner/500 Startups)

Source: Book-Talk with Marvin Liao, Partner at 500 Startups, Avid Reader & Tsundoku

Recommended by Marvin Liao (Partner/500 Startups)

Source: Book-Talk with Marvin Liao, Partner at 500 Startups, Avid Reader & Tsundoku

Recommended by Marvin Liao (Partner/500 Startups)

Source: Book-Talk with Marvin Liao, Partner at 500 Startups, Avid Reader & Tsundoku

Recommended by Marvin Liao (Partner/500 Startups)

Source: Book-Talk with Marvin Liao, Partner at 500 Startups, Avid Reader & Tsundoku

Recommended by Marvin Liao (Partner/500 Startups)

Source: Book-Talk with Marvin Liao, Partner at 500 Startups, Avid Reader & Tsundoku

Recommended by Marvin Liao (Partner/500 Startups)

Source: Book-Talk with Marvin Liao, Partner at 500 Startups, Avid Reader & Tsundoku

Recommended by Marvin Liao (Partner/500 Startups)

Source: Book-Talk with Marvin Liao, Partner at 500 Startups, Avid Reader & Tsundoku

This is the bible for starting and running a restaurant. I recommend you get the printed version and the Kindle version. Use the Kindle version for quick reference and the printed version for study.

Chuck Rogers

Owner/Chuck Rogers Consulting

Recommended by Marvin Liao (Partner/500 Startups)

Source: Book-Talk with Marvin Liao, Partner at 500 Startups, Avid Reader & Tsundoku

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.

Erik Cheong

Co-Founder/Park N Parcel

Probably Idea to Execution: How to Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything in Your Business, because it’s by Ari Meisel who interviewed me on his podcast in 2014 on the topic of "less doing".

Andrea Loubier

CEO/MailBird

I'll give you two books that changed my life. I've probably only read four but, first one "The Freaks Shall Inherit the Earth" by Chris Brogan, my good friend Chris. That book changed my life. That book was the beginning of me falling in love with who I truly was versus what I tried to be.

Scott Oldford

Founder/LeadCraft

Here are some of the books that have been very impactful for me, or taught me a new way of thinking: [...] Turning the Flywheel.

Chris Goward

Founder/WiderFunnel & GO Group Digital

Recommended by Marvin Liao (Partner/500 Startups)

Source: Book-Talk with Marvin Liao, Partner at 500 Startups, Avid Reader & Tsundoku

If you know an entrepreneur, give them a copy of @jjramberg new book to help them on their journey.

Simon Sinek

Best-selling Author

Prior to getting into books about business and startups, I read mostly fictional books, and mostly about dogs (think Marley and Me or The Art of Racing In The Rain).

Craig Pearce

Co-Founder/Kid Genius

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.

Erik Cheong

Co-Founder/Park N Parcel

‘Execution’ by Lawrence Bossidy and Ram Charan is a book that talks about decentralization and the fact that you are supposed to relinquish control to get things done. However, It’s one of the key learnings that most startups fail to understand. Luckily, the book has taught me great things about entrepreneurship.

Faisal Amin

Co-Founder/Fruitbowl Digital