Useful Books for Founders

[Originally posted in November 2010, updated in March 2014]

Photo source: Otis Wheeler

"The Babel fish" said The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy quietly, "is a small, yellow and leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe... The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything in any form of language." - Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

Here’s a list of books that I recommend to founders.  Having been a founder myself, I think founders have most to learn from other founders and their actual experiences, like these books describe in elaborate detail.  I wish I could take these lessons and just feed them into my brain, like popping a Babel fish into my ear.

If you have other books that you believe are must-haves for founders, let me know what they are (and perhaps why) in the comments section below.  

Stories about startups

• Founders at Work by Jessica Livingston
• The Paypal Wars by Eric Jackson
• Softwar: An Intimate Portrait of Larry Ellison and Oracle by Matthew Symonds
• The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder
• Startup: A Silicon Valley Adventure by Jerry Kaplan
• The Startup Game by Bill Draper

Advice/strategy for startups

• Hooked by Nir Eyal
• The Hard Thing about Hard Things by Ben Horowitz
• Lean Startup by Eric Ries
• Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore
• Do More Faster, edited by David Cohen and Brad Feld
• The Four Steps to Epiphany by Steve Blank
• Innovator’s Dilemmma by Clayton Christensen

Overview/stories about venture investors

• Done Deals: Venture Capitalists Tell Their Stories, edited by Udayan Gupta
• Venture Capital and Private Equity: A Case Book, edited by Josh Lerner, Felda Hardymon and Ann Leamon

In addition to these books, there are some bloggers that have turned their very useful and voluminous blog posts into books - Venturehacks, Startup Lessons Learned etc.