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Books for Startups

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For Books on Silicon Valley History see here

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Entrepreneurial Management Stack
Over the last few years we’ve discovered that startups are not smaller versions of large companies. The skills founders need are not covered by traditional books for MBA’s and large company managers. There are now a few books that specifically address founders needs. Alexander Osterwalder’s Business Model Generation is the first book that allows you to answer “What’s your business model?” intelligently and with precision. Make sure this one is on your shelf.

Osterwalders follow-on book Value Proposition Design describes how to get product/market fit right.  It’s another “must have” for your bookshelf.  And Testing Business Ideas, is the best summary of how to run Customer Discovery and Validation experiments in print.

Eric Ries was the best student I ever had. He took the Customer Development process, combined it with Agile Engineering, and actually did the first implementation in a startup. His insights about the combined Customer Development/Agile process and its implications past startups into large corporations is a sea change in thinking. His book, The Lean Startup is a “must have” for your shelf.

Ben Horowitz’s The Hard Thing About Hard Things is a series of essays about what CEO face in the “Build” phase – the transition from searching for a business model into a company.

It’s impossible to implement any of this if you don’t understand Agile Development. Extreme Programming Explained by one of the pioneers of Agile, Kent Beck, is a great tutorial. If you don’t understand Values, Principles and Practices in XP it makes Customer Development almost impossible.

If you’re in a large company, The Other Side of Innovation makes sense of how to actually insert innovation into an execution organization.  If you’re starting a medical device company Biodesign:The Process of  Innovating Medical Technologies is a must have. It has a great customer discovery process.

Talking to Humans is a great simple primer on Customer Discovery.


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And my newest book, The Startup Owners Manual

The Founders Workbook – The Checklist Companion to the Startup Owners Manual

Must Read Books
The subtitle of Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital is the “dynamics of bubbles and golden ages”.  A must read to understand the long 50-year innovation cycle we’re in. The other side of innovation is the closest recipe I’ve read for getting entrepreneurship right in large companies. Innovator’s Dilemma and Innovator’s Solution helped me refine the notion of the Four types of Startup Markets.  I read these books as the handbook for startups trying to disrupt an established company. The Innovators DNA rings true about the skills founders need to have. Crossing the Chasm made me understand that there are repeatable patterns in early stage companies. It started my search for the repeatable set of patterns that preceded the chasm.  The Tipping Point has made me realize that marketing communications strategies for companies in New Markets often follow the Tipping Point. Blue Ocean Strategy is a great way to look at what I’ve called “market type.”

Strategy Books for Startups
The Marketing Playbook gives marketers five strategy options, teaches you gap analysis and offer tactical marketing campaign advice. Do More Faster identifies issues that first-time entrepreneurs encounter and offer useful advice. Getting Real is web-focussed. Wasserman’s Founders Dilemma is essential reading to building a great startup team.

These books are classics but timeless. The Entrepreneurial Mindset articulates the critically important idea that there are different types of startup opportunities.  The notion of three Market Types springs from here and Christensen’s work.  The book provides a framework for the early marketing/sales strategies essential in a startup.  Delivering Profitable Value talks more about value propositions and value delivery systems than you ever want to hear again.  However, this is one of the books you struggle through and then realize you learned something valuable. Schumpeter’s book Theory of Economic Development is famous for his phrase “creative destruction”  and its relevance to entrepreneurship. Peter Drucker’s Concept of the Corporation was the first insiders view of how a decentralized company (GM) works. His Practice of Management defined “management by objective” and Innovation and Entrepreneurship is a classic. While written for a corporate audience, read it for the sources of innovation. If you write software you already know about Fred Brooks classic text the Mythical Man Month. If you manage a software company you need to read it so you don’t act like Dilbert’s pointy-haired boss. Peppers and Rogers, The One to One Future opened my eyes to concepts of lifetime value, most profitable customers and the entire customer lifecycle of “get, keep and grow.” Bill Davidow’s Marketing High Technology introduced me to the concept of “whole product” and the unique needs of mainstream customers. Michael Porter is the father of competitive strategy. His books Competitive Strategy, Competitive Advantage, and On Competition are still the standards.

Startups Entering a Regulated Market
Regulated marketplaces are ones that have significant government regulation to promote (ostensibly) the public interest. In theory regulations exist to protect the public interest for the benefit of all citizens. In a regulated market, the government controls how products and services are allowed to enter the market, what prices may be charged, what features the product/service must have, safety of the product, environmental regulations, labor laws, domestic/foreign content, etc.

If you’re a startup trying to disrupt an existing business you need to read The Fixer by Bradley Tusk and Regulatory Hacking by Evan Burfield. These two books, one by a practitioner, the other by an investor, are must-reads.

The Fixer is 1/3rd autobiography, 1/3rd case studies, and 1/3rd a “how-to” manual. Regulatory Hacking is closer to a “step-by-step” textbook with case studies.

Innovation and Entrepreneurship in the Enterprise
How large companies can stay innovative and entrepreneurial has been the Holy Grail for authors of business books, business schools, consulting firms, etc.  There’s some great work from lots of authors in this area but I’d start by reading the other side of innovation. Next I’d read The Alchemy of Growth to understand the three horizons of innovation and The Future of Mangement and consider its implications.  Rita McGrath’s The End of Competitive Advantage shows companies how to take advantage of transient competitive advantage.  Stanley Mcchrystal’s Team of Teams is a real world example of chapter 6 of the Four Steps to the Epiphany.  Ed Catmull’s description of the Pixar innovation process in Creativity, Inc is a great synthesis of how founders in startup innovate translated into a corporate continuous innovation process.

Then I’d read the short Harvard Business Review articles. Eric Von Hippel work on new product introduction methodologies and the notion of “Lead Users” offer many parallels with Customer Discovery and Validation. But like most books on the subject it’s written from the point of view of a large company. Von Hippel’s four steps of 1) goal generation and team formation, 2) trend research, 3) lead user pyramid networking and 4) Lead User workshop and idea improvement is a more rigorous and disciplined approach then suggested in our book, the Four Steps to the Epiphany.  If you’re a mid-level manager in a company or government agency trying to figure out how to your ideas adopted, you need to own a copy of Rebels@Work – it will save your sanity. And Corporate Cultures is a classic about the stories, heroes, values, and rituals that build a corporate culture.

Books

Harvard Business Review Articles

“War as Strategy” Books
The metaphor that business is war is both a cliché and points to a deeper truth.  Many basic business concepts; competition, leadership, strategy versus tactics, logistics, etc. have their roots in military affairs. The difference is that in business no one dies.  At some time in your business life you need to study war or become a casualty.  Sun Tzu covered all the basics of strategy in The Art of War until the advent of technology temporarily superseded him. Also, in the same vein try The Book of Five Rings by Miyamoto Musashi.  These two books have unfortunately turned into business clichés but they are still timeless reading.  Carl Von Clausewitz’s On War is a 19th century western attempt to understand war. The “Boyd” book, The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War is a biography and may seem out of place here, but John Boyd’s OODA loop is at the core of Customer Development and the Pivot. Read it and then look at all the web sites for Boyd papers, particularly Patterns of Conflict. The New Lanchester Strategy is so offbeat that it tends to be ignored.  Its ratios of what you require to attack or defend a market keep coming up so often in real life, that I’ve found it hard to ignore.

Marketing Communications Books
Ries and Trout positioning books can be read in a plane ride, yet after all these years they are still a smack on the side of the head.  Regis McKenna has always been a favorite of mine. However, as you read Relationship Marketing separate out the examples Regis uses into either startups or large sustainable businesses.  What worked in one, won’t necessarily work in another.  Read these books first before you dive into the 21st century stuff like Seth Godin.

Seth Godin “gets deeply” the profound changes the internet is having in the way we think about customers and communicating with them.  Godin’s All Marketers are Liars talks about the power of storytelling in marketing. His Permission Marketing book crystallized a direct marketing technique (permission marketing), which was simply impossible to achieve pre-internet.  Read his Ideavirus after you’ve read Permission Marketing. Made to Stick gives you the tools to make your messages “sticky.” I put Sway here because great marketers know how to find these irrational behaviors Lakoff’s book, Don’t Think of an Elephant! while written for a political audience has some valuable insights on framing communications.

Sales/Marketing
Trustworthy On-line Controlled Experiments is a detailed guide to A/B testing from the guys who ran it at Amazon and Google. Lean Analytics is a great discussion about metrics that matter for web/mobile startups. Predictable Revenue is one of those short, smart, tactical books that you need to read if you have a direct sales force. Thomas Freese is the master of consultative selling. Both his books are a great start in understanding how a pro sells. Cracking the Sales Management Code provides a best practice approach to on how to effectively manage a sales force. Jeff Thull’s Mastering the Complex Sale has a lot of elements of Customer Discovery and Validation, but skip the first 50 pages. Many of the ideas of Customer Validation are based on the principles articulated by Bosworth, Heiman and Rackham. Bostworth’s Solution Selling and it’s successor, The New Solution Selling are must reads for any executive launching a new product.  Its articulation of the hierarchy of buyers needs as well its description of how to get customers to articulate their needs, makes this a “must read”, particularly those selling to businesses. Yet in his new book What Great Salespeople Do he says, ignore those books follow this advice. Heiman’s books are a bit more tactical and are part of a comprehensive sales training program from his company Miller-Heiman.  If you are in sales or have a sales background you can skip these.  But if you aren’t they are all worth reading for the basic “blocking and tackling” advice.  The only bad news is that Heiman writes like a loud salesman – but the advice is sound. Rackham’s Spin Selling is another series of books about major account, large ticket item sales, with again the emphasis on selling the solution, not features.  Lets Get Real is of the Sandler School of selling (another school of business to business sales methodology.) Jill Konrath has great strategies and insights for large sales. Baseline Selling uses baseball metaphors but it’s an effective explanation of how to do consultative selling. I sure could have used the Complete Idiots Guide to Cold Calling when it was just me and the telephone. The Strategy and Tactics of Pricing provides a great framework for thinking about “how much should I charge for this?”

Startup Law and Finance
If you don’t pay attention to the law from the day you start your company it can kill you. But most books (and lawyers) speak in their own arcane language. David Weekly’s An Introduction to Stock and Options should be your first read (unfortunately its Kindle only.)  The Entrepreneurs Guide to Business Law is the one book you ought to have on your shelf.  While not written explicitly for Silicon Valley startups it demystifies the most common areas you need to know. Term Sheets and Valuations is a great read if you’re faced with a term sheet and staring at words like “liquidation preferences and conversion rights” and don’t have a clue what they mean.  Read this and you can act like you almost understand what you are giving away.

Silicon Valley/Regional Clusters
Brad Feld’s Startup Communities posits a big idea: startup communities are driven by entrepreneurs who are the leaders and everyone else is a feeder. Essential reading if you’re trying to build your own cluster. Anna Lee Saxenian’s Regional Advantage  is the definitive text of why Silicon Valley beat Boston as the hub of U.S. entrepreneurship. Startup Nation is the story of how the Israeli government engineered the country into becoming the hottest cluster outside the U.S. for startups. In contrast, Josh Lerner’s Boulevard of Broken Dreams describes the multiple ways governments can screw up a cluster. Jessica Livingston’s Founders At Work are the best case studies/vignettes without a PR rewrite of how founders really start companies. The Startup Playbook  also does a good job of offering founders advice. An Engineer’s Guide to Silicon Valley Startups is one of those quirky books that perfectly match Silicon Valley culture. If you’re an engineer in the valley or coming out, this is a useful read. It describes what types of startups are there, how to get a job at one, negotiating your salary, stock options, etc. Geek Silicon Valley is part history and part travel guide. Also useful.

Venture Capital
If you buy one book to understand how VC’s and fund raising works, Venture Deals is the one. Wish I had it when I did startups. Same for Mastering the VC Game. If you read two books about how to deal with VC’s start here. The rest of the books are personal stories. Bill Draper’s book is both history and advice from a VC pioneer. If you have never experienced a startup first hand, Jerry Kaplan’s bookStartup and Michael Wolff’s book Burn Rate are good reads of a founder’s adventure with the venture capitalists.  Eboys is the story of Benchmark Capital during the Internet Bubble.  Ferguson’s book is a great read for the first time entrepreneur.  His personality and views of the venture capitalists and “suits” are a Rorschach ink blot test for the reader.

Venture Capital History

These books tell the story of the formation of the Venture Capital Industry.

Startup Nuts & Bolts
Nesheim’s book High Tech Startup is the gold standard of the nuts and bolts of all the financing stages from venture capital to IPO’s. If you promise to ignore the marketing advice he gives you, Baird’s book, Engineering Your Startup is the cliff notes version in explaining the basics of financing, valuation, stock options, etc. Gordon Bells’ book High-Tech Venturesis incomprehensible on the first, second or third read.  Yet it is simply the best “operating manual” for startups that has been written.  (The only glaring flaw is Bell’s assumption that a market exists for the product and that marketing’s job is data sheets and trade shows.)  Read it in doses for insight and revelation and make notes, (think of reading the bible) rather than reading it straight through.

Startup Textbooks
If you take an entrepreneurship class in a Business School or University you’ll probably encounter one of these textbooks.The reason you don’t see them on the desks of working entrepreneurs is that at $100-$150+ they’re all priced for a captive student audience. (Some do have paperback versions for $50-$85.) The other uncomfortable fact is that most startups in Silicon Valley ignore these textbooks once they leave school. In the real-world startups are now built using the business model/customer development/agile engineering stack. Not one of these textbooks teach that.

Of all the texts, Technology Ventures is “the gold standard” of entrepreneurship textbooks. Jeff Timmons’ New Venture Creation has too much great stuff in it to ignore. At first read it is simply overwhelming but tackle it a bit a time and use it to test your business plan for completeness. Business Plans that Work summarizes the relevant part of Timmons’ New Venture Creation book and teaches how to write a document (the business plan) that no one ever reads. However, both books are worth having if you’re in a large company thinking about introducing follow-on products.

Manufacturing
I’ve yet to meet a manufacturing person that does not reference The Goal when talking about lean manufacturing principles first. It’s a book inside a novel – so it humanizes the manufacturing experience.  Lean Thinking is the best over all summary of the lean manufacturing genre. Toyota Production System is the father of all lean manufacturing – it’s simple tone is refreshing.

Presentation and Product Design
Nancy Duarte’s two books, Slid:eology and Resonate are about presentation design. These are the two books I refer entrepreneurs to who want to build a killer customer presentation. The advice may not work for all audiences but it’s a great place to start. Cooper’s book, The Inmates are Running the Asylum, is about product design. It had the same impact on me as Moore’s Crossing the Chasm – “why of course, that’s what’s wrong.”  It’s important and articulate.

Culture/Human Resources
What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20 and InGenious are the books I give all young entrepreneurs.If you are in a large company and wondering why your company isn’t going anywhere your answers might be found in Good to Great.  Written by Jim Collins, the same author who wrote Built to Last, both are books that “you should be so lucky” to read.  What differentiates good companies versus great?  How do you institutionalize core values into a company that enable it to create value when the current management is long gone?  When I first read these, I thought they were only for companies that were lucky enough to get big.  Upon reflection, these books were the inspiration for the “Mission-Oriented Culture.”  Read these two books together.

Ironically, the best HR stuff for anyone in a startup to read is not a book.  It is the work James Baron at Stanford has done.    Download his slides on the Stanford Project on Emerging Companies.  Baron’s book, Strategic Human Resources – is a classic HR textbook. Finally, if you are working at a startup and wondering why the founder is nuts, The Founder Factor helps explain a few things.

I’m not sure how to characterize The Checklist Manifesto so I stuck it here. It’s a quick read with some insights that match why Business Model strategy need to be translated into Customer Development checklists.

Business History (See here for Silicon Valley History)
Alfred Sloan’s My Years with General Motors is a great read, but not for the traditional reasons.  Read it from the point of view of an entrepreneur (Durant) who’s built a great company by gut and instinct, got it to $200M and is replaced by the board.  Then watches as a world-class bureaucrat grows into one of the largest and best run companies in the world.  Make sure you read it in conjunction with Sloan Rules and A Ghost’s Memoir. If you’re an entrepreneur the one founder you probably never heard of but should is William Durant. Read Madsen’s biography. The Nudist on the Late Shift is a book you send to someone who lives outside of Silicon Valley who wants to know what life is like in a startup. If you want to understand how the modern corporation formed Chandlers’ Strategy and Structure is the “Ur text.”

Silicon Valley – Books

Terman/Shockley/Fairchild/Intel/National

Silicon Valley History

Books/Articles on the Entrepreneurial University
Stephen Spinelli President of Philadelphia University offered this great reading list on the activity of the university in tech transfer/collaborations with business, community and government.  The list also covers the activity/behavior/leadership of the university president.

All of the following four chapters are in the:  Journal of the Programme on Institutional Management in Higher Education, Higher Education Management. Vol. 13, No. 2, 2001.  Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

Also see Tom Eisenmann’s Reading list from his Harvard Lean Startup class.

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