I’ve been asked enough times about book recommendations that I figure it’s time to compile the list of books that I have learned the most from on my start-up journey. Books with an asterisk are the books I think people should read regardless of which position you hold in the company.
Start-ups
*Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making by Tony Fadell – Described as a mentor in a box and it’s certainly true. All the most common problems broken down into bite sized chapters that let you pick and choose the current problem. If you’re not sure which book on this list to start with, start here.
*The Lean Startup by Eric Ries – This is the canonical guide in the early days. It’s a bible for trying to figure out that you are doing the right things. Could just as easily be in the product section.
The Hard Thing about Hard Things by Ben Horowitz – This book is invaluable if you hope to be a founder or high-level leader. If your team is small, I wouldn’t start here.
Managing/Leading
*High Output Management by Andrew Grove – This book applies to any knowledge worker that has to make decisions about how they spend their time. Could just have easily fallen into the decisions category below.
*How Google Works by Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg – This book really information dense. They’ve pared down actionable insights across so many areas of working in a tech business.
*Trillion Dollar Coach: The Leadership Playbook of Silicon Valley’s Bill Campbell by Eric Schmidt, Jonathan Rosenberg and Alan Eagle – This book will give you a glimpse of what amazing leadership looks like. Bill Campbell was able to simultaneously focus on both people and results and will make you wish he was your mentor.
Smart and Gets Things Done by Joel Spolsky – Short and sweet guide to hiring. If you add the sections in How Google Works and Principles you effectively have my hiring playbook.
Product
*Crossing the Chasm, 3rd Edition: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers by Geoffrey A. Moore – If you are doing B2B, do yourself a favour and start with this early in your start-up days. It felt like he knew each of our customers and predicted exact scenarios that happened at our first start-up. He talks about it as a marketing book, but it’s really a book about identifying how even customers within a given industry segment behave very differently and why.
Play Bigger: How Pirates, Dreamers, and Innovators Create and Dominate Markets by Al Ramada, Dave Peterson, Christopher Lochhead and Kevin Maney – Makes a fantastic case that you need to occupy a different enough slot in peoples minds that they can’t even think of a product alternative (e.g. GoPro). If you can’t get that level of differentiation, your road is going to be really hard.
*The Inmates Are Running the Asylum by Alan Cooper – Critical for developers and designers who work with developers. Makes a fantastic argument that in order to be a developer, you’re probably someone who likes to figure out how things work. Most other people hate there to be any barrier to usage and just want their problems solved. Developers are too “sympathetic to the code” rather than “sympathetic to the user” because that’s their job. This offers a design process that helps developers solve the customer problem.
Code Complete (2nd Edition) by Steve McConnell – Must read for developers. For developers who haven’t read this book, I ask them to check out “Chapter 7 – High-Quality Routines” and “Chapter 32 – Self Documenting Code”. I don’t know anyone who hasn’t learned a tonne and the rest of the book is gold too. My favourite quote from the book: “Managing complexity is the most important technical topic in software development.” Chapter 5 has an amazing discussion about how your design problem has some inherent complexity to it (this is how the product is supposed to behave). Any added complexity due to poor programming is just making a hard problem even harder.
Agile Software Development, Principles, Patterns, and Practices by Robert Martin – Must read for developers. Code Complete focuses on specific actionable insights at the lowest level (e.g. a function or class). This book focuses on architectural patterns and principles for how to fit those components together.
Decisions
Most people don’t realize that regardless of your role in the organization, the thing you do the most is make decisions. Do I learn more about my craft before I start this big project or do I jump in and start making progress? Do I need the quick and dirty version or should I focus on quality? Talk to more stakeholders to ensure we’re doing what we should be doing or move forward with what we have? What’s the one thing I should be focusing on above all else?
Every single position in an organization requires hundreds of micro-decisions every day. Improving your decision making will ensure you’re focused on doing more of the right things.
*The Four Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss – The reason to read this as someone working in a start-up is not to achieve a four hour work week. I believe this book forces you to ask questions that get you redefine what you’re trying to do rather than just going along with the status quo. The focus on automation and outsourcing is also a great way to start thinking of you are going to be working “on your business” rather than “in your business”.
*Principles: Life and Work by Ray Dalio – The size of this book is intimidating, but you can skip the biography if you aren’t interested. This is the most structured thinking on how to approach work and life that I’ve seen.
*Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder by Nassim Nicholas Taleb – This book describes a way of looking at the world that is really eye opening. The core concepts are interrelated enough that it’s hard to pull out one concept without referencing the others. The easiest is probably about looking for asymmetries in life where the downside risk is capped but the upside has the potential to drastically improve your life.
You
*What to Do When its Your Turn (and its Always Your Turn) by Seth Godin – Seth is the master of getting in your head and firing you up. It’s so much more than motivation. Required reading if you dream of making a ruckus.
*Linchpin by Seth Godin – If you want to get ahead in your company by becoming invaluable and amazing then this is required reading. The best contributors are so much more than their technical skills and this will help you with that mindset.