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.
45 books on Sales
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A profane, insider tell-all of building, selling, and surviving Silicon Valley.
A first-person account of the author's path from Goldman Sachs to founding the adtech startup AdGrok, raising money through Y Combinator, selling to Twitter, and then...
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Bridging the gap between early adopters and the mainstream market.
No standalone book titled Crossing the Chasm and Beyond could be verified as a distinct published work by Geoffrey A. Moore. The exact title appears to reference...
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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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The fastest way to fill a pipeline is relentless prospecting.
Jeb Blount argues that the number one reason salespeople fail is an empty pipeline, and the cure is consistent, disciplined prospecting across every channel. The book...
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Sell by closing the gap between the buyer's current and future state.
Keenan presents a problem-centric selling method built around uncovering the gap between a customer's current state and their desired future state. He argues that deep...
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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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Six universal principles quietly drive people to say yes.
Cialdini distills years of research into six principles of persuasion: reciprocity, commitment and consistency, social proof, liking, authority, and scarcity. He shows...
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Give value repeatedly, then make the ask that converts.
A practical guide to social media marketing built on the boxing metaphor of jabs (value-giving content) leading to a right hook (the ask). Vaynerchuk argues that...
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A practical playbook for validating B2B products fast.
Lean B2B adapts lean startup and customer development specifically to the business-to-business context, where buyers and users differ and sales cycles are long....
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An insider's account of 1980s bond-trading excess.
Liar's Poker is Michael Lewis's memoir of his years as a bond salesman at Salomon Brothers during the boom of the 1980s. It captures the brash, money-obsessed culture...
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People do not like to be sold, but they love to buy.
Gitomer lays out twelve and a half blunt principles of sales greatness, arguing that lasting success comes from value, relationships, and earning loyalty rather than...
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Small shifts in wording can dramatically change how people respond.
Berger shows how subtle choices of words can change minds, build relationships, and drive action. He identifies categories of language (such as words that signal...
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The foundational textbook that defined modern marketing as a discipline.
Kotler's landmark text frames marketing as an analytical, managerial discipline built around analysis, planning, implementation, and control. It introduces the...
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Indian society read through fifty years of its advertising.
Ambi Parameswaran analyzes over a hundred Indian advertisements to trace how the country's culture, politics, and economy evolved over fifty years. He shows how...
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A no-nonsense playbook for proactively winning new business.
Weinberg delivers a practical handbook for the unglamorous work of prospecting and new business development. He covers building a target list, crafting a compelling...
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The legendary adman's practical playbook for advertising that sells.
A richly illustrated, opinionated guide to advertising from one of its most successful practitioners. Ogilvy covers how to write copy and headlines, make effective...
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Win the deal by controlling the frame, not just the facts.
Klaff presents his STRONG method for pitching, built on the idea that every interaction is a collision of psychological frames and the stronger frame wins. He draws on...
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How platforms beat pipelines in the networked economy.
The authors explain how platform businesses that connect producers and consumers are displacing traditional pipeline firms across industries. They cover how to design,...
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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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Win the war for a spot in your customer's mind.
Ries and Trout argue that marketing is a battle fought not in the market but in the prospect's mind, where being first and owning a single clear idea beats having a...
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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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Turn your product demo into a closing tool.
This short, tactical book teaches SaaS founders and sales teams how to run product demos that actually convert into deals. Efti covers preparation, qualification,...
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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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Build a sales story that makes your difference the obvious choice.
Dunford presents a step-by-step structure for a sales pitch that helps customers make confident buying decisions while positioning your product to win. She argues the...
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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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Marketing a service means selling a promise, not a product.
Harry Beckwith offers short, punchy lessons on marketing services, which cannot be touched, tasted, or test-driven before purchase. He argues that service marketing is...
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Win big deals by asking the right questions, not by pitching harder.
Based on a twelve-year study of thousands of sales calls, Rackham shows that techniques that work for small sales backfire in large, complex deals. He introduces the...
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Twenty-five IIM graduates who chose the hard road of building businesses.
Stay Hungry Stay Foolish tells the stories of 25 MBAs from IIM Ahmedabad who left secure, lucrative jobs to become entrepreneurs. Through their journeys, the book...
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Stop pushing harder and start removing the barriers to change.
Berger argues that the best way to change minds is not to push harder but to reduce the barriers and friction that hold people back. Drawing on research and real...
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Top reps win by teaching and challenging customers, not just building rapport.
Based on a study of thousands of sales reps, the authors identify five seller profiles and find that Challengers, who teach, tailor, and take control, consistently...
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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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Why economies get stuck and how demand drives employment.
Keynes challenges classical economics by arguing that aggregate demand, not just supply and self-correcting markets, determines overall output and employment. He...
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Honest advice for the brutal decisions running a company forces on you.
Ben Horowitz shares hard-won lessons from building, running, and selling Opsware through dot-com collapse and constant crisis. Rather than offering tidy formulas, he...
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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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The core of a business education without the tuition.
The book argues that the essential ideas of business can be learned on your own, and it organizes them into clear mental models across value creation, marketing,...
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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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Your inner game of selling matters more than any technique.
Tracy argues that the psychology and self-image of the salesperson drive results more than tactics do. He covers building confidence, understanding buyer motivations,...
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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...
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Great storytellers turn passion into performance.
Gallo profiles entrepreneurs, TED speakers, and business legends to reveal how compelling storytelling drives ideas, brands, and movements forward. He argues that...
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Win more deals by being honest about your flaws, not hiding them.
Todd Caponi makes the case that transparency, including proactively sharing weaknesses, builds trust and accelerates deals. Drawing on behavioral science and the way...
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Everyone is in sales now, whether they admit it or not.
Pink argues that we all spend much of our day in non-sales selling: persuading, convincing, and moving others. Drawing on social science, he replaces the old ABCs of...
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Hire A players with a disciplined, repeatable method.
Smart and Street argue that hiring mistakes are the costliest problem in business and offer the A Method to fix them. The process centers on writing a scorecard,...
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.
