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.
13 books on Sales for growth & scaling
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Building a company where culture and service drive profit.
Tony Hsieh recounts his journey from childhood ventures and selling LinkExchange to Microsoft, through building Zappos into a billion-dollar business. He argues that...
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Win customers by telling a different story, not selling harder.
A strategic blueprint for attracting and retaining customers by creating valuable, consistent content rather than interruptive advertising. Pulizzi lays out how to...
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Win people over by genuinely caring about them first.
Carnegie distills timeless principles for getting along with and influencing others: avoid criticism, give honest appreciation, see things from the other person's...
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How to scale a startup by building a platform, not a product.
Choudary argues that today's fastest-scaling startups build platforms where others create and exchange value, rather than selling a product directly. The book offers...
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Build a repeatable outbound engine for predictable sales growth.
Drawing on the system Ross built at Salesforce, the book lays out the Cold Calling 2.0 outbound process and the case for specializing sales roles into prospectors,...
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Let the product, not the sales team, drive your growth.
Product-Led Growth explains how SaaS companies can use the product itself as the main engine of acquisition, conversion, and expansion. Bush walks through choosing a...
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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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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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A field guide to working across cultural differences.
Meyer presents an eight-scale framework for decoding how cultures differ in communicating, evaluating, persuading, leading, deciding, trusting, disagreeing, and...
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Split your budget roughly sixty-forty between brand and activation.
Drawing on the IPA Effectiveness Databank, Binet and Field show that marketing works on two timescales: short-term sales activation and long-term brand building, which...
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Why network businesses outgrow asset-heavy incumbents.
Drawing on research across fifteen hundred companies, the authors show that network-based firms consistently outperform traditional asset and product businesses. They...
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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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Turn sales from an art into a repeatable, data-driven machine.
Mark Roberge shares the metrics-driven playbook he used to scale HubSpot's sales organization from zero to over $100 million in revenue. He breaks the formula into...
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.
