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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?

#101
post #49

Hourly Billing Is Nuts by Jonathan Stark From all the "business" books I've read this one is just packed with actionable advice instead of motivational gibberrish. I've built my productivized consulting offer based on these tips, and it helped me quit full-time job over 3 years ago. So far no plans to go back.

What’s the alternative model?

Value-based pricing.

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

#102
Any book about org structure and incentivizing people? I always find it hard to incentivize people in a large org, and building culture is all about implementing the right incentives. Different incentives have different trade-offs, and in turn lead to different culture.

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

#103

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-effic…

Thanks for the list!

Your last phrase hits home. At the moment, one of the things I'm very focused on is understanding why do I want to become an entrepreneur in the first place.

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

#104
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.

Thanks for echoing that one, I agree. I think a lot of the dismissal of her is due to second and third-hand knowledge of what she talks about (i.e., they hate the caricature of her, not her or her ideas).

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

#105

Founders at Work. Just gave me a good sense of how near death and growth are just part of the game. But also tipped me to decide to move to SF Bay Area.

startups are like fentanyl -- the gap between the lethal and the effective dose is v small.

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

#106
post #31

1. "Lean Startup" (pretty standard) 2. "Spin Selling" (sales) 3. "The Four-Hour Work Week" (not because of the way of life promised in the misleading title, but because of the links to useful Websites, and for motivational reading) 4. "The One Billion Dollar App" (silly title but fantastic book from an actual taxi app product manager - I almost didn't buy it because of the title, thank God I opened it anyway and star…

The One Billion Dollar App by Alex Bretton?

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

#107
I found that the biggest barrier to successful entrepreneurship is discipline.

Therefore I recommend Constructive Living by David K. Renolyds and All the books by James Allen.

Those books changed the way I thought about the world. IMHO a world view change needs to happen to sustain a business for the long term.

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

#109

Any book about org structure and incentivizing people? I always find it hard to incentivize people in a large org, and building culture is all about implementing the right incentives. Different incentives have different trade-offs, and in turn lead to different culture.

“Team Topologies” https://teamtopologies.com/

“Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard” https://www.amazon.com/Switch-Change-Things-When-Hard/dp/038...

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

#110

Founder of a bootstrapped 17 year-old SaaS company here. I've read countless books on this topic. The book that helped me the most was "Good to Great" by Jim Collins. It has memorable nuggets of advice, summarised neatly into insightful chapters. Once you learn these nuggets you never forget them, and you end up leveraging them regularly in your day-to-day entrepreneurial decisions. It's a bit like Covey's 7 Habits b…

Do you have an example nugget that stuck with you?

The three I’ve used most frequently:

1. Get the right people on the bus.

2. The hedgehog concept.

3. The flywheel.

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