Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

71–80 of 116 posts

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

#72
High Stakes, No Prisoners by Charles Ferguson:

"Charles Ferguson started Vermeer Technologies and turned his very cool, very big idea into FrontPage, the first software product for creating and managing a website. A mere twenty months after starting the company, he sold it to Microsoft for $133 million, making a fortune for himself and his associates. FrontPage now has millions of users and is bundled with Microsoft Office. But getting there wasn't always fun."

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

#73
Advice to Founders and CEOs

- Dear Founder (Maynard Webb) - The Hard Things About Hard Things (Ben Horowitz) - Straight Talk for Startups (Randy Komisar and Jantoon Reigersman) - The Founders’ Dilemmas (Noam Wasserman) - The Entrepreneur’s Daily Nietzsche (Brad Feld and Dave Jilk) - Build (Tony Fadell) - Zero to IPO (Frederic Kerrest) - The Great CEO Within (Matt Mochary)

Finance

- Wharton's Introduction to Financial Accounting course: [https://www.coursera.org/learn/wharton-accounting](https://w... - How Finance Works: The HBR Guide to Thinking Smart About the Numbers (Mihir Desai) - Financial Intelligence for Entrepreneurs: What You Really Need to Know About the Numbers (Karen Berman and Joe Knight)

Open-Book Company (Employee Ownership, Financial Literacy, Goal-setting)

- The Great Game of Business (Jack Stack and Bo Burlingham)

Legal

- Acceleration (Ryan Roberts) - The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Law and Strategy (Constance Bagley and Craig Dauchy)

Company Strategy and Direction (post-product/market fit)

- Crossing the Chasm (Geoff Moore) - Zone to Win (Geoff Moore) - Only the Paranoid Survive (Andy Grove) - Blitzscaling (Reid Hoffman and Chris Yeh) - The Innovator's Dilemma (Clayton Christensen) - Good to Great (Jim Collins) - Playing to Win (A.G. Lafley and Roger Martin) - Tape Sucks (Frank Slootman) - Strategy vol. 1&2 (Harvard Business Review)

Pricing

- Monetizing Innovation (Georg Tacke and Madhavan Ramanujan) - Confessions of the Pricing Man (Hermann Simon)

Startup Phase

- The Lean Startup (Eric Ries) - The Four Steps to the Epiphany (Steve Blank) - Zero to One (Peter Thiel)

Management/Leadership

- The Effective Executive (Peter Drucker) - Managing Humans (Michael Lopp) - The Art of Leadership (Michael Lopp) - High Output Management (Andy Grove) - Managing Oneself (Peter Drucker) - Essentials: Management (First Round Capital) - The Making of a Manager (Julie Zhuo) - The Powell Principles (Oren Harari) - Radical Candor (Kim Scott) - Leading Matters (John L. Hennessy) (fantastic book list in the coda) - Turn the Ship Around (L. David Marquet) (this is THE book on delegation) - Principles (Ray Dalio)

COO/Succession Planning

- Riding Shotgun (Nathan Bennett and Stephen A. Miles)

People Performance/HR/Culture

- Powerful (Patty McCord) - No Rules Rules (Reed Hastings and Erin Meyer) - Netflix culture deck - The Five Dysfunctions of a Team (Patrick Lencioni) - Work Rules! (Laszlo Bock) - It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work (DHH and Jason Fried) - The Culture Map (Erin Meyer) - The Talent War (Mike Sarraille and George Randle) - Great People Decisions (Claudio Fernández-Aráoz) - The Holloway Guide to Technical Recruiting and Hiring (Ozzie Osman) - Punished by Rewards (Alfie Kohn)

Purpose, Passion, and Self

- Start with Why (Simon Sinek) - What You Do is Who You Are (Ben Horowitz) - Drive (Daniel Pink) - Mindset (Carol Dweck) - Grit (Angela Duckworth) - The Almanack of Naval Ravikant (Eric Jorgenson)

Fundraising/VC

- Secrets of Sand Hill Road (Scott Kupor) - Venture Deals (Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson) - Raising Venture Capital (Andy Sparks) - The Business of Venture Capital (Mahendra Ramsinghani) - Done Deals (Udayan Gupta) - The Power Law (Sebastian Mallaby) - VC (Tom Nicholas)

Board

- Boardroom Excellence (Paul Brountas) - Startups Boards (Brad Feld and Mahendra Ramsinghani)

M&A

- Winning (Jack Welch) - M&A chapter - Connecting the Dots (John Chambers) - M&A chapter

Marketing

- Data-Driven Marketing (Mark Jeffery) - Positioning (Al Ries and Jack Trout) - Scientific Advertising (Claude Hopkins) - Traction (Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares) - Behind the Cloud (Marc Benioff and Carlye Adler) - Ogilvy on Advertising (David Ogilvy) - Marketing High Technology (William Davidow)

Psychology

- Influence (Robert Cialdini)

Negotiation

First, read Influence (under Psychology), then, in order

- Thinking in Bets (Annie Duke) - Getting to Yes (Roger Fisher and William Ury) - Never Split the Difference (Chris Voss) - The Bald Truth (David Falk)

Self

- The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (Stephen Covey)

Design and UX

- Creative Confidence (Tom Kelley and David Kelley)

AI (Machine Learning, Deep Learning/Neural Networks)

- Andrew Ng's AI for Everyone course: [https://www.coursera.org/learn/ai-for-everyone](https://www....

Growth (Data Science, etc.)

- Hacking Growth (Sean Ellis and Morgan Brown)

Graph Theory

Product

- Inspired (Marty Cagan) - Joel on Software (Joel Spolsky)

Customer Loyalty/Customer Success

- Delivering Happiness (Tony Hsieh) - Setting the Table (Danny Meyer)

Finding a Startup Job

- Entering StartupLand (Jeffrey Bussgang)

CIO as ICP

- The CIO Paradox (Martha Heller) - Be the Business (Martha Heller)

Stories

- Made in America (Sam Walton) - Shoe Dog (Phil Knight) - The Everything Store (Brad Stone) - Built from Scratch (Bernie Marcus and Arthur Blank) - Hard Drive (James Wallace) - Steve Jobs (Walter Isaacson) - Elon Musk (Ashlee Vance) - Creativity, Inc. (Ed Catmull) - The Ride of a Lifetime (Bob Iger) - Valley of Genius (Adam Fisher) - The Idea Factory (Jon Gertner) - Dealers of Lightning (Michael Hertzik) - Idea Man (Paul Allen) - Pour Your Heart Into It (Howard Schultz)

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

#76
Tiny Habits by BJ Fogg.

It's unconventional, because it's not strictly about businesses or startups or selling.

But if you think about, running a business is doing predictable things over and over again. Problem is, it's so complicated and there's so many things you need to take care of. Breaking them down into smallest possible steps and making habits out of them kept me moving. Write one sentence. Dial one number. Open one email. Process one invoice. It quickly snowballed.

Later, when I started scaling and delegating, I had a blueprint ready for someone else. Because they would struggle too.

And that's just a business side. The book also helped me with personal habits.

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

#78
post #19

“The Mom Test” by Rob Fitzpatrick - How to talk to customers & learn if your business is a good idea when everyone is lying to you. https://a.co/d/8KzUk8b It ended up saving us a lot of time.

I also think this is a must-read for would-be entrepreneurs. Probably nine times out of ten when someone tells me about their startup idea looking for advice I point them to this book first because they haven't done the basic validation yet and want to jump right into building something that no one actually wants.

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

#79

The Hard Thing About Hard Things. We bought a copy for every employee at my last company to help convey the messages that startups are not designed to be tons of fun but rather a tough (yet rewarding) grind. This was especially important for people who were coming from bigger companies to understand.

It's a good book, but the part where he says to collude with your friends on hiring (no poaching, no cold calling, informing the other when someone applies, etc)... that's what Google/Adobe/Apple/etc were sued for a while back. Don't do that.

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

#80

‘The Millionaire Fastlane’ by MJ DeMarco. Laughable title aside, the content is life changing.

I joined their forums about 10 years ago and asked a question about a business idea. Basically I was asking about starting a gold/silver business directory thing based on some business described in the book. I was trying to understand some basics of what was being said. My post was not well received and MJ himself came in to tell me what an idiot I was.

I don't think I asked any more questions, and I left the PDF in the ash heap of my reading pile.

Post reply on HN