The Founder Bookshelf
Books founders recommend to each other. Browse by topic or by where you are as you grow, mark what you've read, and add what's next.
39 books for finding pmf
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A blunt playbook for getting into early-stage tech investing.
Jason Calacanis lays out how an outsider can break into angel investing in technology startups. He covers building deal flow, evaluating founders, picking winners, and...
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Design and reinvent your business model on a single canvas.
A visually rich, co-created handbook that introduces the Business Model Canvas, a one-page framework of nine building blocks for describing how an organization...
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Customers do not buy products, they hire them to do a job.
Christensen and co-authors lay out the Jobs to Be Done theory: people hire products and services to make progress in specific circumstances of their lives. By...
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How great designers turn ideas into products people actually love.
Hurff distills how successful product designers think and work, drawing on interviews with practitioners across the industry. He covers everything from finding what to...
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Practical startup wisdom distilled from Techstars mentors and founders.
Built from the Techstars accelerator experience, the book collects short, punchy lessons from mentors, founders, and investors. It is organized into themes like idea,...
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In a content-flooded world, clear writing is your competitive edge.
A practical handbook for producing high-quality marketing content across every channel. Handley argues that in the digital age everyone is a writer, and the quality of...
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A plain-language crash course in valuing your early-stage startup.
This concise pocket guide walks first-time founders through the core concepts behind early-stage startup valuation. It explains how investors think about pre-money and...
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What really happened in the earliest days of famous tech startups.
A collection of candid interviews with founders of companies like Apple, PayPal, Hotmail, Flickr, and Adobe about the chaotic beginnings of their startups. Rather than...
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A short primer on marketing as product-driven, testable growth.
A concise introduction to the growth hacker mindset, arguing that the line between product and marketing has blurred. Holiday walks through a simple sequence: achieve...
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Run a fast, data-driven experiment engine to drive breakout growth.
Ellis and Brown lay out the operating system for growth teams: a rapid, cross-functional experimentation process that pulls together product, marketing, data, and...
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Short, sharp essays on building the right product.
This compact book collects essays from Intercom's team on how to do product management well. It covers deciding what to build, ruthlessly prioritizing, saying no, and...
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Find the one metric that matters at each stage of your startup.
Part of the Lean Series, this book gives founders a framework for choosing and tracking the metrics that actually move a startup forward. Croll and Yoskovitz introduce...
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A practical playbook for validating B2B products fast.
Lean B2B adapts lean startup and customer development specifically to the business-to-business context, where buyers and users differ and sales cycles are long....
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Design as a fast, collaborative, hypothesis-driven team activity.
Lean UX applies the principles of Lean Startup and agile to the practice of user experience design. It reframes design as a collaborative, hypothesis-driven process...
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Hand employees real freedom and watch the company thrive.
Semler recounts how he tore up the rulebook at Semco, letting workers set their own hours, choose their managers, and even decide their pay. The book chronicles the...
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How economics learned that humans are not perfectly rational.
Thaler tells the story of how behavioral economics grew from a fringe idea into a mainstream discipline. He recounts his own career and the resistance he faced arguing...
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Fighting poverty by testing what actually works.
Poor Economics draws on years of randomized controlled trials to examine how the world's poor actually make decisions about health, education, savings, and risk....
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Take your profit first, then run the business on what is left.
Profit First flips the conventional accounting formula from Sales minus Expenses equals Profit to Sales minus Profit equals Expenses. Michalowicz lays out a behavioral...
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A toolkit for how VCs value, structure, and fund a company.
Berkery lays out the mechanics of how venture capitalists finance companies: what they look for in a business plan, how they value an early-stage venture, and how they...
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Run your own usability tests, cheaply and often.
Rocket Surgery Made Easy is a practical, step-by-step guide to doing your own usability testing without a lab or specialists. Krug shows how a few users a month can...
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Treat advertising as a measurable, testable science.
A foundational 1923 text arguing that advertising should be judged by measurable results, not opinion or art. Hopkins champions testing, tracking, coupons, and sales...
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Build organizations that learn from customers and adapt continuously.
Sense and Respond argues that software is reshaping every industry and that successful organizations are those that sense customer behavior and respond quickly with...
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A dynamic, fair way to split startup equity among founders.
Slicing Pie introduces a dynamic equity-split model for early-stage startups that have no cash to pay people. Contributions of time, money, and resources are converted...
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Test everything; the audience decides what works.
A foundational text on direct-response advertising built on rigorous split-testing of real campaigns. Caples shows that small changes, especially to headlines, can...
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How a doubted idea became Netflix, told by its first CEO.
Marc Randolph recounts the founding of Netflix, from the brainstorming that produced the idea through the scrappy early days of a DVD-by-mail startup. He is candid...
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Build teams where people speak up without fear.
Edmondson argues that psychological safety, the shared belief that it is safe to take interpersonal risks, is the foundation of high-performing teams. Drawing on...
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The chaotic origin story of PayPal and the people it launched.
The Founders chronicles the turbulent early years of PayPal, drawing on extensive interviews and internal material. It traces how a fractious group including Peter...
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Get out of the building and validate before you scale.
Blank argues that startups fail not from product flaws but from a lack of customers, and proposes Customer Development as a parallel process to product development. He...
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Cheap, fast experiments beat big, untested ideas.
Schrage argues that organizations get more innovation value from running many cheap experiments than from chasing a few good ideas. He introduces the 5x5 framework:...
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A step-by-step process for reaching product-market fit.
The Lean Product Playbook offers a concrete, six-step process for achieving product-market fit using minimum viable products and rapid customer feedback. Olsen...
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Treat your startup as an experiment, not a leap of faith.
Eric Ries argues that startups are organizations built to find a sustainable business model under extreme uncertainty, not just to execute a plan. He introduces...
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Ask about their life, not your idea, to get honest answers.
Fitzpatrick teaches founders how to interview potential customers without biasing the answers, even when people are inclined to be polite and lie to you. The core idea...
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A field manual for surviving and thriving in your product role.
Steven Haines offers a practical, no-nonsense guide to the realities of the product manager job, from understanding the role to working across functions. It covers...
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Run your career like a startup: adapt, network, and take smart risks.
Hoffman and Casnocha argue that everyone should manage their career with the same strategies entrepreneurs use to build companies: permanent beta, competitive...
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The exhaustive playbook for finding customers before building the product.
A dense, step-by-step manual that lays out the Customer Development process for taking a startup from idea to scalable business. It walks founders through customer...
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Most startups fail from lack of customers, not lack of product.
Weinberg and Mares lay out nineteen traction channels, from SEO and content marketing to community building and unconventional PR, that startups can use to grow. They...
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Stop giving orders, start creating leaders at every level.
Marquet recounts how he took the worst-performing submarine in the U.S. fleet and made it one of the best by abandoning the traditional leader-follower model. Instead...
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Build what customers actually want using the value proposition canvas.
A companion to Business Model Generation that zooms into the value proposition and customer segment blocks of the canvas. It introduces the Value Proposition Canvas,...
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When everybody zigs, zag.
Neumeier's central thesis is radical differentiation: when everyone else zigs, the winning brand zags. The book offers a 17-step checklist for finding and executing a...
eChai Partner Brands
eChai Ventures partners with select brands as their growth partner. Together we explore new ideas, open doors, and build momentum across the startup ecosystem.
