The Entrepreneur’s Reading List

Continuous learning is a common trait of all successful entrepreneurs. To succeed in any competitive space, you’ll need to arm yourself with knowledge. Whether its the most up to date insight, new tools that can help you excel, or changing trends in marketing and managerial thinking. One thing about entrepreneurship is that ideas by themselves won’t cut it no matter how good.

To bring your idea to market, you need to have a strategy, plan and be able to execute, and these books will help you create those. They are selected to provide you with information on what to expect, going into your entrepreneurship journey. And they will give you those tools to keep you from making common mistakes and give you the insight to build a great business.

Check back often as we’ll be updating this page with additional reading material.

General Entrepreneurship

: The Beermat Entrepreneur: Turn Your Good Idea into a Great Business
: Business Stripped Bare: Adventures of a Global Entrepreneur
: The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers
: Zero to One by Peter Thiel and Blake Masters
: Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days

Pitching

: Get Backed: Craft Your Story, Build the Perfect Pitch Deck, and Launch the Venture of Your Dreams

Finance

: Venture Capital Due Diligence: A Guide to Making Smart Investment Choices and Increasing Your Portfolio Returns
: Term Sheets & Valuations – A Line by Line Look at the Intricacies of Term Sheets & Valuations (Bigwig Briefs)
: Getting Between the Balance Sheets: The Four Things Every Entrepreneur Should Know About Finance

Innovation

: Learner-Centered Innovation: Spark Curiosity, Ignite Passion and Unleash Genius (done)
: Beyond: Business and Society in Transformation
: From Innovation to Cash Flows: Value Creation by Structuring High Technology Alliances
: The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

Strategy
: Blue Ocean Strategy, Expanded Edition: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make the Competition Irrelevant
: The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail (Management of Innovation and Change)
: Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance
: Crossing the Chasm, 3rd Edition (Collins Business Essentials)
: Seeing What’s Next: Using Theories of Innovation to Predict Industry Change
: Competitive Strategy: Techniques for Analyzing Industries and Competitors
: Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco

Agencies / Professional Services Companies

: Agency: Starting a Creative Firm in the Age of Digital Marketing
: Managing The Professional Service Firm
: The Art of Managing Professional Services: Insights from Leaders of the World’s Top Firms

History

: Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age