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 Startups & Entrepreneurship for growth & scaling
-
The best businesses create something new, not copies of what exists.
Peter Thiel contends that real progress comes from going from zero to one, creating something genuinely new, rather than copying what works (one to n). He argues that...
1 founder recommend Get the book ↗
-
The definitive handbook for designing software people can use.
About Face is a comprehensive guide to interaction design, introducing goal-directed methods and the use of personas to design software around real user goals. First...
-
Prioritize speed over efficiency to win winner-take-all markets.
Hoffman and Yeh define blitzscaling as a set of techniques for igniting and managing breakneck growth, deliberately accepting inefficiency and risk to capture a market...
-
Hard-won advice on building products, teams, and a career worth having.
Build is part memoir, part mentorship manual from one of the people behind the iPod, iPhone, and Nest. Fadell shares blunt advice on careers, product design, startups,...
-
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...
-
Hard-won scaling lessons distilled from iconic founders.
Built on Hoffman's hit podcast, the book gathers stories and lessons from founders and leaders of companies like Netflix, Nike, Spotify, Google, and Instagram. It is...
-
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...
-
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,...
-
Turn a passion and a tiny budget into a real income business.
Drawing on case studies of 1,500 people who built businesses on small investments, often a hundred dollars or less, the book distills how ordinary people created...
-
A modern, step-by-step playbook for raising startup capital.
Cremades offers a practical guide to startup fundraising in the post-JOBS Act era, covering everything from crafting a pitch and building a deck to identifying...
-
Solve the empty-network trap and scale network effects.
Chen tackles the chicken-and-egg cold start problem that every network product faces when it has no users yet. Drawing on interviews with teams behind LinkedIn,...
-
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...
-
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...
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.
