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.
17 books on Fundraising & VC
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The wildest corporate takeover battle of the 1980s, told in full.
Barbarians at the Gate is a detailed account of the 1988 leveraged buyout of RJR Nabisco, the largest of its era. It follows the egos, bankers, and executives who...
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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,...
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The biography of the man who invented venture capital.
Spencer Ante tells the life story of Georges Doriot, the French immigrant, Harvard Business School professor, and World War II general who founded American Research...
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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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Venture capital's founding figures recount how it all began.
Udayan Gupta gathers first-person accounts from more than thirty leading venture capitalists, from early pioneers like Eugene Kleiner and Arthur Rock to later top...
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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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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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An insider's field guide to how venture capital really works.
Scott Kupor of Andreessen Horowitz pulls back the curtain on how venture capital firms raise money, choose startups, and structure deals. He walks founders through...
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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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A clause-by-clause walkthrough of a real VC term sheet.
This short, practical guide breaks down a venture capital term sheet section by section, explaining what each clause means and what can be negotiated. It includes an...
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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...
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A practitioner's manual for the inner workings of a VC fund.
Mahendra Ramsinghani offers a comprehensive look at venture capital from the investor's operational side, covering how funds are raised, deals are structured, value is...
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Inside secrets on venture capital from the people who run it.
Romans compiles advice and insider perspectives from leading venture capitalists, angel investors, and entrepreneurs on how startup funding really works. The book...
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Lessons in private investing straight from the field's pioneers.
The book collects interviews and case studies with leading private equity and venture capital investors, drawing out the management lessons behind their biggest deals....
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How risk-taking with other people's money built modern venture capital.
Tom Nicholas traces the origins of American venture capital from nineteenth century whaling voyages and cotton mills through the rise of firms like Kleiner Perkins and...
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Decode the term sheet so you can negotiate as an equal.
Two experienced venture capitalists walk founders through exactly how a venture deal works, from term sheets and valuations to the economics and control provisions...
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Everything is negotiable if you know how power and time work.
Cohen argues that negotiation is a pervasive part of daily life and that almost everything is negotiable. He frames every negotiation around three variables: power,...
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