6 Books to Read Before Starting Your Business
- The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses by Eric Reis
The Lean Startup is a new approach to business that’s being adopted around the world. It is changing the way companies are built and new products are launched.
The Lean Startup is about learning what your customers really want. It’s about testing your vision continuously, adapting and adjusting before it’s too late. Now is the time to think Lean.
2. The Founder’s Dilemmas: Anticipating and Avoiding the Pitfalls That Can Sink a Startup, by Noam Wasserman
Often downplayed in the excitement of starting up a new business venture is one of the most important decisions entrepreneurs will face: should they go it alone, or bring in cofounders, hires, and investors to help build the business? More than just financial rewards are at stake. Friendships and relationships can suffer. Bad decisions at the inception of a promising venture lay the foundations for its eventual ruin. The Founder’s Dilemmas is the first book to examine the early decisions by entrepreneurs that can make or break a startup and its team. Drawing on a decade of research, Noam Wasserman reveals the common pitfalls founders face and how to avoid them. He looks at whether it is a good idea to cofound with friends or relatives, how and when to split the equity within the founding team, and how to recognize when a successful founder-CEO should exit or be fired. Wasserman explains how to anticipate, avoid, or recover from disastrous mistakes that can splinter a founding team, strip founders of control, and leave founders without a financial payoff for their hard work and innovative ideas. He highlights the need at each step to strike a careful balance between controlling the startup and attracting the best resources to grow it, and demonstrates why the easy short-term choice is often the most perilous in the long term. The Founder’s Dilemmas draws on the inside stories of founders like Evan Williams of Twitter and Tim Westergren of Pandora, while mining quantitative data on almost ten thousand founders. People problems are the leading cause of failure in startups. This book offers solutions.
3. Before You Start-Up: How to Prepare to Make Your Startup Dream a Reality
Are you a:
“Wannabe” entrepreneur in school or college with big dreams in your eyes?
“Friday-night-after-drinks” aspiring entrepreneur in your 20s/30s?
“Ready-to-go” soon-to-be entrepreneur?
“Already-on-the-train” entrepreneur?
Loved ones of any of the above (wife/husband, boyfriend/girlfriend, friend, parents)?
An aspiring VC/angel investor who has never built a business?
This book has been especially written for you.
If you’ve played sports, you already know how you prepare is as important as how you play. Starting up a business is no different — it needs preparation.This preparation is about understanding your “why”; about generating and testing business ideas; about building your founding team; about talking to your family; about taking care of your career and your finances. It is about getting mentally prepared to get started.
This book will help you ask the right questions. It will guide you, steer you towards finding your answers.
You are ambitious. You are a go-getter. You are destined to win. This book will help get you what you deserve.
4. The Peter Principle: Why Things Always Go Wrong, by Laurence J. Peter and Raymond Hull
“The Peter Principle has cosmic implications.”
— New York Times
Back in 1969, Lawrence J. Peter created a cultural phenomenon with his brilliant, outrageous, hilarious, and all-too-true treatise on business and life, The Peter Principle — and his words and theories are as true today as they were then. By posing — and answering — the eternal question, “Why do things always go wrong?” Peter explores the incompetence that runs so rampant through our society, our workplace, and our world in an outrageously funny yet honest and eye-opening manner. With a new foreword by Robert I. Sutton, bestselling author of The No Asshole Rule, this twenty-first century edition of Peter’s classic is set to shake up the business world all over again.
5. Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers
Business Model Generation is a handbook for visionaries, game changers, and challengers striving to defy outmoded business models and design tomorrow’s enterprises. If your organization needs to adapt to harsh new realities, but you don’t yet have a strategy that will get you out in front of your competitors, you need Business Model Generation.
Co-created by 470 “Business Model Canvas” practitioners from 45 countries, the book features a beautiful, highly visual, 4-color design that takes powerful strategic ideas and tools, and makes them easy to implement in your organization. It explains the most common Business Model patterns, based on concepts from leading business thinkers, and helps you reinterpret them for your own context. You will learn how to systematically understand, design, and implement a game-changing business model — or analyze and renovate an old one. Along the way, you’ll understand at a much deeper level your customers, distribution channels, partners, revenue streams, costs, and your core value proposition.
Business Model Generation features practical innovation techniques used today by leading consultants and companies worldwide, including 3M, Ericsson, Capgemini, Deloitte, and others. Designed for doers, it is for those ready to abandon outmoded thinking and embrace new models of value creation: for executives, consultants, entrepreneurs, and leaders of all organizations. If you’re ready to change the rules, you belong to “the business model generation!”
6. Behind the Cloud: The Untold Story of How Salesforce.com: The Customer Success Platform To Grow Your Business Went from Idea to Billion-Dollar Company-and Revolutionized an Industry, by Marc Benioff and Carlye Adler
How did Salesforce.com: The Customer Success Platform To Grow Your Business grow from a start up in a rented apartment into the world’s fastest growing software company in less than a decade? For the first time, Marc Benioff, the visionary founder, chairman and CEO of Salesforce.com: The Customer Success Platform To Grow Your Business, tells how he and his team created and used new business, technology, and philanthropic models tailored to this time of extraordinary change. Showing how Salesforce.com: The Customer Success Platform To Grow Your Business not only survived the dotcom implosion of 2001, but went on to define itself as the leader of the cloud computing revolution and spark a $46-billion dollar industry, Benioff’s story will help business leaders and entrepreneurs stand out, innovate better, and grow faster in any economic climate. In Behind the Cloud, Benioff shares the strategies that have inspired employees, turned customers into evangelists, leveraged an ecosystem of partners, and allowed innovation to flourish.
