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.

If you're interested in high tech as a career path then I'd recommend a series of case studies around the development of products / founding of companies. Here are four examples:

• Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder (1981)
• Startup: A Silicon Valley Adventure by Jerry Kaplan (1996)
• Show Stopper by G Pascal Zachary (1994)
• The Launch Pad: Inside Y Combinator by Randall Stross (2013)
• The Everything Store by Brad Stone (2014)

These books all tell the tale of starting a company or building a product and despite covering a time span of 30+ years and multiple generations of technology the remarkable thing is just how very, very similar they are. While the technology changes, the process of creating something from whole cloth doesn't. That's a great lesson for people to learn.

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

If you're interested in high tech as a career path then I'd recommend a series of case studies around the development of products / founding of companies. Here are four examples:

• Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder (1981)
• Startup: A Silicon Valley Adventure by Jerry Kaplan (1996)
• Show Stopper by G Pascal Zachary (1994)
• The Launch Pad: Inside Y Combinator by Randall Stross (2013)
• The Everything Store by Brad Stone (2014)

These books all tell the tale of starting a company or building a product and despite covering a time span of 30+ years and multiple generations of technology the remarkable thing is just how very, very similar they are. While the technology changes, the process of creating something from whole cloth doesn't. That's a great lesson for people to learn.

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.

It's actually written by startup executives, developers and techies — all of them women.

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.

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!

Sorrell, CEO of the communications house/ad agency, WPP, has a rather eclectic mix this summer:

• Powerhouse: The Untold Story of Hollywood’s Creative Artists Agency—James Andrew Miller
• Universal Man: The Seven Lives of John Maynard Keynes—Richard Davenport-Hines
• Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future—Ashlee Vance

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.

• The E-Myth by Michael E. Gerber
• Zero to One by Peter Thiel
• The Lean Startup by Eric Ries
• Scrum and XP from the Trenches by Henrik Kniberg
• ReWork – Jason Fried

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.

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.

Question: What five books would you recommend to young people interested in your career path & why?

Answer:

• Rich Dad Poor Dad - Robert Kiyosaki
• Second Chance - Robert Kiyosaki
• Why the Rich Are Getting Richer - Robert Kiyosaki
• The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs: How to Be Insanely Great in Front of Any Audience - Carmine Gallo
• The Little Voice Mastery - Blair Singer

If you're interested in high tech as a career path then I'd recommend a series of case studies around the development of products / founding of companies. Here are four examples:

• Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder (1981)
• Startup: A Silicon Valley Adventure by Jerry Kaplan (1996)
• Show Stopper by G Pascal Zachary (1994)
• The Launch Pad: Inside Y Combinator by Randall Stross (2013)
• The Everything Store by Brad Stone (2014)

These books all tell the tale of starting a company or building a product and despite covering a time span of 30+ years and multiple generations of technology the remarkable thing is just how very, very similar they are. While the technology changes, the process of creating something from whole cloth doesn't. That's a great lesson for people to learn.

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

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

Question: What books would you recommend to young people interested in your career path?

Answer:

• Rework, Getting real and Remote - The combo from Fried and DHH.
• Girlboss by Sophia Amoruso
• From Impossible To Inevitable by Aaron Ross & Jason Lemkin
• How To Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie
• Predictable Revenue by Aaron Ross
• Content Machine by Dan Norris
• Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future by Ashlee Vance
• Contagious by Jonah Berger