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Ask HN: What books helped you in your entrepreneurship journey?

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Re: Ask HN: What books helped you in your entrepreneurship journey?

#61

Post by grepLeigh »

Most posts offer the obvious suggestions (The Mom Test, High Growth Handbook, The Personal MBA, The Power Law, Hard Thing about Hard Thing, Will It Fly, etc), so I'll focus on some non-obvious suggestions.

For tactical advice, I find talks/podcasts and mastermind groups more useful than books. My favorite podcast (by far) is Rob Walling's Startups for the Rest of Us, which is oriented towards building a capital-efficient bootstrapped business. The archive is full of extremely valuable tactical advice.

The books I've found most helpful on my entrepreneurship journey are about mental health, emotional intelligence, and relationships of all kinds. Sharing a few that have had a profound impact, since they helped me metabolize and understand what drove me to become a founder in the first place.

1. The Self-Compassion Skills Workbook by Tim Desmond

2. Path of Compassion by Thich Nhat Hanh

3. The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read, Philippa Perry

4. Burnout, Emily Nagoski

5. Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents, Lindsay C. Gibson

6. Self-Compassion, Dr. Kristin Neff

7. How to Keep House While Drowning, KC Davis

8. Deploy Empathy, Michele Hansen

9. The Body Keeps the Score, Bessel A. Van der Kolk

10. Atlas of the Heart, Brene Brown

11. What Happened to You? Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing by Bruce D. Perry and Oprah Winfrey

Re: Ask HN: What books helped you in your entrepreneurship journey?

#63

Post by paulorlando »

Here are a few others I haven't seen mentioned. - The Price Whisperer (pricing is important and mostly ignored by startups) - Startup Myths and Models (title explains it) - Measure What Matters (using OKRs) - Growth Units (figure out your unit economics - LTV and CAC)

Re: Ask HN: What books helped you in your entrepreneurship journey?

#64

Post by ranabuzdar »

Here are some of the most popular ones:

The Lean Startup by Eric Ries Zero to One by Peter Thiel The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber Good to Great by Jim Collins The Art of Possibility by Rosamund Stone Zander and Benjamin Zander The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz The Innovator's Dilemma by Clayton Christensen Rework by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson These books cover various aspects of entrepreneurship, from idea generation and innovation to leadership and management. Each one offers a unique perspective and valuable insights that can help entrepreneurs navigate the challenges and opportunities of starting and growing a business.

Re: Ask HN: What books helped you in your entrepreneurship journey?

#65

Post by nukenuke »

As a technical founder this book on negotiation was highly valuable: "Never Split the Difference: Negotiating as if Your Life Depended on It". Negotiation is a skill you need as a startup founder that is not necessarily needed for technical work.

"Innovators Dilemma" - helps put in perspective acceptable state of early products and good strategies for deploying new innovative products

Re: Ask HN: What books helped you in your entrepreneurship journey?

#66

Post by jacktribe »

As someone who is more interested in building the product than marketing it, I found the following recent reads helpful in achieving a balance:

1. Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey A. Moore - making your product work for the masses

2. The Cold Start Problem by Andrew Chen - achieving escape velocity, getting viral referral traffic

3. Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss - it might seem a bit gimmicky but negotiation always comes off gimmicky

Motivational stories:

4. The Almanack Of Naval Ravikant by Eric Jorgenson

5. The Founders by Jimmy Soni

6. The Upstarts by Brad Stone

7. Hatching Twitter by Nick Bilton

8. That Will Never Work by Marc Randolph

9. Grinding It Out: The Making of McDonald's by Ray Kroc

Can't skip:

10. Zero To One by Peter Thiel

Re: Ask HN: What books helped you in your entrepreneurship journey?

#67

Post by rigmarole »

“Badass: Making Users Awesome” by Kathy Sierra. I don’t see it often in lists like these. But it’s an awesome and approachable book for framing your products, services, user journey, and marketing from the viewpoint of how they’ll make your users successful and feeling amazing.

Re: Ask HN: What books helped you in your entrepreneurship journey?

#68

Post by jackconsidine »

For me, I'd be nowhere without these.

In sort of curriculum order:

- Built to Sell - really easy gateway

- The E-Myth Revisited (withstand the writing style, glib observations)

- The Business Model Generation book- massive leap in understanding after this

- Traction (Gabriel Weinberg). Marketing entrypoint zeroed into today

- Managing the Professional Service Firm (Maiser) (incidentally related to what I do but so useful)

- Thinking in Systems (Meadows)

- An Elegant Puzzle (Engineering management book by Will Larson. Actionable and bite-sized)

- Measure What Matters (Doerr)

- Crossing the Chasm

- Blue Ocean Strategy

- Never Split the difference (eh)

- Design of everyday things (not as niche as I thought, perspective altering)

Some sales books (I held my nose while reading, but useful insights)

- The Science of Selling

- S.P.I.N. Selling

- The Challenger Sale

Re: Ask HN: What books helped you in your entrepreneurship journey?

#69

Post by mindcrime »

rglover wrote: post #13

- Awareness by Anthony DeMello - The Courage to Be Disliked by Ichiro Kishimi - The Virtue of Selfishness by Ayn Rand - Only the Paranoid Survive by Andy Grove --- More stuff here: http://www.ryanglover.net/library/ (not flagged specific to entrepreneurship but all have had an influence in one way or another).

The Virtue of Selfishness by Ayn Rand

I love seeing this on your list. Firstly because it's a great book, and secondly just because Rand is so under-appreciated in general. Especially here on HN where her name seems to be all but verboten for some strange reason.

Re: Ask HN: What books helped you in your entrepreneurship journey?

#70

Post by shw1n »

wpietri wrote: post #38
shw1n wrote: post #23

The E-Myth - creating systems and processes The Personal MBA - crash course MBA Founders At Work - understanding how different startups survived Buy Back Your Time - management and delegation The Charisma Myth - to help w/ charm for sales SPIN Selling - this + The Charisma Myth more than doubled our sales conversion rate These books were the most crucial for me

I second E-Myth and Founders at Work. And let me add Crossing the Chasm, which totally shaped my understanding of who buys what when.

Wow completely forgot about crossing the chasm, good call
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