Books founders recommend to each other.
Browse by topic or by where you are as you grow, mark what you have read, and add what is next.
Topic
As you grow
20 books on Leadership & Management for growth & scaling
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A systems toolkit for the messy problems of engineering management.
Will Larson treats engineering management as a series of solvable systems problems, from sizing teams and managing growth to handling technical debt and succession...
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Build a company where everyone grows on the job.
Kegan and Lahey study Deliberately Developmental Organizations, companies that treat employees' personal growth as central to the business rather than a side benefit....
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Leadership starts with developing yourself before leading others.
Maxwell's first and most enduring leadership book frames leadership as influence that can be cultivated through deliberate growth. He walks through traits and...
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The leadership and coaching that turns teams into product powerhouses.
Empowered, the follow-up to Inspired, focuses on product leadership: how managers create the conditions for ordinary teams to build extraordinary products. Cagan and...
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A manager's output is the output of their whole organization.
Andy Grove distills the management principles he used to run Intel into a practical operating manual for managers at any level. He frames management around leverage:...
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Set audacious goals that actually get done with OKRs.
Doerr lays out Objectives and Key Results (OKRs), the goal-setting system he carried from Intel into Google and dozens of other organizations. Through first-person...
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How to build and run a design team that actually delivers.
This guide covers how to create, structure, and lead in-house design organizations as design becomes central to product companies. Merholz and Skinner address hiring,...
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Great leaders move people through emotional intelligence, not just strategy.
The authors argue that a leader's primary task is emotional: setting the mood that drives everyone else's. Drawing on brain science and corporate research, they...
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A blueprint for organizations run without traditional hierarchy.
Laloux maps the history of organizational models and identifies an emerging stage he calls Teal, built on self-management, wholeness, and evolutionary purpose. Through...
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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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Lead a network, not a machine, in a fast world.
McChrystal recounts how his task force in Iraq defeated a nimble enemy by abandoning rigid command structures for a flexible, networked team of teams. He blends...
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Lead by asking better questions, not giving answers.
Stanier distills coaching into seven essential questions that managers can use to build a daily coaching habit. The premise is that leaders should stay curious a...
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Build a business that runs without you by working on it, not in it.
Gerber dismantles the myth that most small businesses are started by entrepreneurs, arguing instead that they are started by technicians who get trapped doing the...
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How Bezos turned a bookstore into an everything machine.
Brad Stone chronicles Amazon's rise from a 1990s online bookstore through the dot-com crash to the inventions of Prime, Kindle, and AWS. Drawing on interviews with...
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A stage-by-stage map from engineer to technical executive.
Camille Fournier walks through each step of the technical leadership ladder, from mentoring and tech lead to manager, director, and CTO. Each chapter gives practical,...
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Leadership lessons from reinventing a media giant.
Robert Iger shares the leadership principles he relied on while running Disney for fifteen years. He recounts the negotiations and bold bets behind acquiring Pixar,...
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Every organization is a set of tribes, and culture is the lever.
Drawing on an eight-year study of roughly 24,000 people across two dozen organizations, the authors argue that every company is made up of tribes of 20 to 150 people....
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The coaching principles behind Silicon Valley's most valuable mentor.
The authors distill the leadership lessons of Bill Campbell, the executive coach who quietly guided leaders at Google, Apple, and beyond. They show how Campbell built...
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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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How Google hires, manages, and frees its people.
Bock shares the people-operations practices that shaped Google, from rigorous, structured hiring to giving employees freedom and using data to make management...
Questions, answered
What books do founders recommend?
Founders on the eChai network recommend titles like An Elegant Puzzle, An Everyone Culture, and Developing the Leader Within You. The bookshelf ranks books by how many founders have read them.
Where can I find a startup reading list?
The eChai founder bookshelf is a curated, founder-recommended reading list you can browse by topic (fundraising, product, hiring) and by stage.
How is the bookshelf ordered?
By recommendation: the more founders mark a book read, the higher it ranks. You can also sort by newest or A to Z.
