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.
7 books on Operations & Scaling for idea & validation
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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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Leaders own everything in their world, no excuses.
Two former SEAL officers translate combat leadership into business principles, pairing battlefield stories with management applications. The core idea is extreme...
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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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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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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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Five evidence-based practices that exemplary leaders share.
Based on research into what people did when at their personal best as leaders, Kouzes and Posner distill leadership into five practices: Model the Way, Inspire a...
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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...
Questions, answered
What books do founders recommend?
Founders on the eChai network recommend titles like Designing Products People Love, Extreme Ownership, and High Output Management. 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.
