Entrepreneurship and Startups
Founding, financing and scaling new ventures, including venture capital, product-market fit and the founder's own experience of building something. Read by founders, early employees and investors in young companies.
351 books
Books 351
Peter F. Drucker · 1985 · Includes Drucker's typology of pricing and delivery strategies.
Sam Walton, John Huey · 1992 · Insider account: the founder's memoir, dictated as he was dying.
Clayton Christensen · 1997 · Open Library unreachable this run; title not machine-verified.
Jim CollinsMohnish PabraiAaron LevieAndrew ChenAndrew GroveBen HorowitzBill GurleyBrant CooperBrett AdcockCaterina FakeChris DixonDrew HoustonEv WilliamsFred SchebestaGuy KawasakiJeff BezosJensen HuangKevin KellyMarc AndreessenMarc BenioffMark CubanMax LevchinMichael BloombergNir EyalPaul GrahamReid HoffmanRyan HooverSophie BakalarSteve JobsTim O’Reilly
Clayton Christensen, Michael E. Raynor · with Michael E. Raynor · 2003 · Open Library unreachable this run; title not machine-verified.
Donald L. Barlett, James B. Steele · 2004 · Reissue of Empire (1979); the definitive investigative biography.
Alexander Osterwalder, Yves Pigneur · 2010 · The canvas: the common vocabulary for describing any business model.
Brad Feld, Jason Mendelson · with Jason Mendelson · 2011 · Multiple editions since 2011; grew out of the 2005 term sheet series
Nick Bilton · 2013 · The founding and the serial CEO coups; the canonical early account.
Peter Thiel, Blake Masters · with Blake Masters · 2014 · Open Library records first_publish_year as 2001; actual publication 2014
Balaji S. SrinivasanEric WeinsteinMohnish PabraiNat EliasonPatrick O'ShaughnessyAlfred LinAna FabregaAnna ChengBen HorowitzBrad FeldBrett AdcockCasey NeistatChris DixonCodie SanchezDustin MoskovitzElon MuskEric JorgensonGuy ProopsJames AltucherJeff BezosJoel ConnollyKeith RaboisLuis von AhnMarc AndreessenMatt MullenwegMax LevchinMichael WongNassim Nicholas TalebNiki ScevakPaul GrahamPeter ThielReid HoffmanRyan PetersonSam AltmanSatya NadellaSophie BakalarSteph SmithSuperbook reading listsTom Bilyeu
T1 Shoe Dog
Phil Knight · 2016 · Insider account: Knight's founder memoir, the best-known Nike book.
Andrew WilkinsonBill GatesMohnish PabraiWarren BuffettAlexis OhanianAlfred LinAnthony PomplianoAusten AllredBill GurleyBrad FeldBrian ArmstrongDavid CancelEric JorgensonJason CalacanisJeff BezosMichael BatkoMorgan HouselNick HuberNick MolnarPatrick O'ShaughnessyRan SegallReed HastingsSamantha WongSatya NadellaSteph SmithTerrance McArthurTrevor NcubeVlad Tenev
John Carreyrou · 2018 · By the WSJ reporter who exposed the fraud; no serious rival account exists.
T1 Super Pumped
Mike Isaac · 2019 · The definitive account of Kalanick's rise and ouster.
Sebastian Mallaby · 2022 · Open Library unreachable during build; title confirmed on his CFR expert page
Ray Kroc, Robert Anderson · 1977 · Insider account: Kroc's own telling of the takeover and expansion.
Michael Moritz · 1984 · Contemporary account of Apple's founding; reissued 2009 as Return to the Little Kingdom.
John F. Love · 1986 · The standard business history of the franchise and property model.
Geoffrey A. Moore · 1991 · Why technology products stall between early adopters and the mainstream.
Frederick Lewis Allen, Frederick Allen · 1994 · Woodruff, the bottlers' contract, and the making of the brand.
Michael E. Gerber · 1995 · Build the business as a replicable prototype; the franchise mindset generalised.
Thomas K. McCraw · 1997 · National business systems compared through the firms that defined them.
Muhammad Yunus · 1998 · Founder's account of Grameen Bank and the economics of unsecured lending at scale.
Bernie Marcus, Arthur Blank · 1999 · Home Depot's founders on building the big-box hardware category
Michael Lewis · 1999 · OL lists title as 'New New Thing, The'
Paul Gompers, Josh Lerner · 2004 · The empirical work that established how venture returns and cycles behave.
Yvon Chouinard · 2005 · Patagonia's founder on running a business against conventional growth logic
T2 Small Giants
Bo Burlingham · 2005 · Firms that deliberately chose to be great rather than big.
Danny Meyer · 2006 · Restaurateur on hospitality as an operating system for service businesses
Spencer E. Ante · 2008 · Georges Doriot and the invention of the modern VC firm.
Marc Benioff, Carlye Adler · 2009 · Salesforce's founder on inventing the SaaS sales and pricing model.
Josh Lerner · 2009 · Why state attempts to manufacture a venture asset class mostly fail.
Dan Senor, Saul Singer · 2009 · The standard explanation of the technology cluster and its military roots.
Tony Hsieh · 2010 · Zappos: service as the customer-acquisition budget.
T2 Steve Jobs
Walter Isaacson · 2011 · Authorised biography; the default account of Jobs and Apple.
William H. Janeway · 2012 · A venture veteran on the state, bubbles and how innovation gets funded
Gina Keating · 2012 · The Netflix-Blockbuster fight, including the declined acquisition.
Brad Stone · 2013 · The canonical Amazon history through 2013.
T2 The Frackers
Gregory Zuckerman · 2013 · How wildcatters and shale debt rewrote US supply.
T2 Elon Musk
Ashlee Vance · 2015 · Contains the fullest early narrative of SpaceX's founding.
Sam Zell · 2017 · Subtitled Straight Talk From a Business Rebel.
Richard S. Ruback, Royce Yudkoff · 2017 · The search-fund method, from the professors who teach it.
Leigh Gallagher · 2017 · The standard company history, with founder access.
T2 The Upstarts
Brad Stone · 2017 · Airbnb's founding told alongside Uber's; strong on the early years.
T2 Blitzscaling
Reid Hoffman, Chris Yeh · with Chris Yeh · 2018 · Open Library lists Hoffman alone; Chris Yeh is co-author
Michael Ovitz · 2018 · CAA's founder on building the agency that repriced Hollywood talent
April Dunford · 2019 · Positioning for software that serves one industry rather than everyone.
Scott Kupor · 2019 · An a16z partner explaining fund economics to founders.
Lawrence Ingrassia · 2020 · Dollar Shave Club, Warby Parker and the DTC assault on incumbents.
Reeves Wiedeman · 2020 · Character-driven and closest to Neumann himself.
Jeff Bezos, Walter Isaacson · 2020 · Insider: Bezos's collected shareholder letters and speeches.
Andrew Chen · 2021 · Free tiers used as the tool for reaching network critical mass.
Eliot Brown, Maureen Farrell · 2021 · The fullest account, by the two WSJ reporters on the story.
Jimmy Soni · 2022 · PayPal's fraud-detection work, from which Palantir was directly spun.
T2 Elon Musk
Walter Isaacson · 2023 · Authorised biography with substantial Starship and Starlink material.
Ashlee Vance · 2023 · The small-launch competitors created in SpaceX's wake.
Lionel Barber · 2024 · The SoftBank side of the WeWork bet, from Son's biographer.
T2 Behind the Cloud: The Untold Story of How Salesforce.com Went from Idea to Billion-Dollar Company
Marc Benioff, Carlye Adler
unverified
Geoffrey A. Moore
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Donald Trump, Tony Schwartz · 1987 · Insider account of a New York developer's own deals.
Alan Weiss · 1992 · Value pricing for solo and boutique consultancies.
George Gilder · 1992 · Supply-side case for entrepreneurs as the actual source of growth
Anthony B. Chan · 1995 · The only dedicated English biography; stops before the handover.
Gail DeGeorge · 1996 · The one dedicated book: Huizenga's roll-up and the sale to Viacom.
Howard Schultz, Dori Jones Yang · 1997 · Insider account: Schultz on building the company to 1997.
Michael Dell, Catherine Fredman · 1999 · Insider account of build-to-order, negative working capital and cutting the channel.
T3 Done Deals
Udayan Gupta · 2000 · Oral history interviews with the first generation of VCs.
Harvey S. Firestone, Samuel Crowther · 2003 · Founder's account of building Firestone; business sense from the tyre trade
Paul Graham · 2004 · Subtitled 'Big Ideas from the Computer Age'; collects early essays
Eric M. Jackson · 2004 · Insider account by an early PayPal marketing hire; partisan but first-hand.
Andrew Metrick, Ayako Yasuda · 2006 · The textbook treatment of valuation, terms and expected returns.
Jessica Livingston · 2007
T3 Rework
David Heinemeier Hansson · 2010
Mark W. Johnson · 2010 · Business-model innovation as a discipline, with a profit-formula framework.
Rob Walling, Mike Taber · 2010 · Deliberately niche software businesses and their unit economics.
James L. Witherell · 2011
Aaron Ross, Marylou Tyler · 2011 · The outbound-SDR machine that most SaaS sales teams copied.
Greg Crabtree, Beverly Herzog · 2011 · Owner-operator economics: labour efficiency and the four keys.
Mahendra Ramsinghani · 2011 · Fund mechanics, LP terms and how the return actually reaches an investor.
Randall E. Stross · 2012 · Inside Y Combinator in the years before Altman ran it.
T3 Dream Big
Cristiane Correa · 2013 · 3G Capital's meritocracy-and-zero-based-budgeting playbook, from AmBev to Heinz.
T3 Traction
Gabriel Weinberg, Justin Mares · 2014
Edward Tse · 2015 · How Chinese private champions including Alibaba actually built scale.
John Warrillow · 2015 · How to bolt a recurring-revenue layer onto an ordinary business.
Bitange Ndemo, Tim Weiss · 2016 · Edited by the regulator who enabled M-Pesa; founder interviews throughout.
Mark Siebert · 2016 · The practitioner manual on franchising an existing operation.
Aaron Ross, Jason Lemkin · 2016 · The SaaS growth playbook: niche, funnel, hiring cadence.
Julian Guthrie · 2016 · The Ansari X Prize and the origin of commercial human spaceflight.
Chris Zook, James Allen · 2016 · Bain's account of what founder-led companies lose as they scale.
Diane Mulcahy · 2016 · The worker's-side manual; useful on how the platforms price labour.
T3 Angel
Jason Calacanis · 2017 · The individual's version of the power law, written from a small sample of wins.
Joseph F. Coughlin · 2017 · MIT AgeLab on what older consumers actually buy, against the stereotype.
T3 Wild Ride
Adam Lashinsky · 2017 · Reported from inside Uber just before the 2017 crisis broke.
Walker Deibel · 2018 · Acquisition entrepreneurship as an alternative to founding.
Elad Gil · 2018 · Operating manual for scaling a company from fifty to thousands
Tim Fernholz · 2018 · The commercial-space policy fight that let SpaceX in.
Christian Davenport · 2018 · SpaceX against Blue Origin and the legacy contractors.
T3 Alpha Girls
Julian Guthrie · 2019 · Four women venture capitalists and the deals the industry forgot
Wes Bush · 2019 · How a free tier is designed to convert rather than merely to attract.
Marc Randolph · 2019 · Insider account: Netflix co-founder, including the Blockbuster pitch.
T3 Obsessed
Emily Heyward · 2020 · Brand-building for the modern direct-to-consumer cohort.
T3 Aiming High
Atsuo Inoue · 2021 · Authorised, translated from Japanese; admiring in tone.
T3 Going Public
Dakin Campbell · 2021 · On direct listings and the alternatives to the traditional IPO, SPACs included.
Ali Tamaseb · 2021 · Data on 30,000 companies testing what actually predicts a billion-dollar outcome.
Rob Walling, Jason Cohen · 2022 · Bootstrapped SaaS economics: pricing, churn, plateau.
T3 Who Knew
Barry Diller · 2024 · Media executive's memoir spanning Paramount, Fox and IAC
T3 AI Valley
Gary Rivlin · 2025 · The founder scene around OpenAI, reported from inside the funding rounds.
Harvey Samuel Firestong, Samuel Crowther · 1926
Les Schwab · 1986 · Tire-shop founder's memoir on profit sharing and dealer economics
Jim Collins, William C. Lazier · with William C. Lazier · 1992 · Open Library unreachable this run; title not machine-verified.
Jean-Philippe Deschamps, P. Ranganath Nayak · 1995
Doris Christopher · 1996
Randy Komisar · 2000
Richard Foster, Sarah Kaplan · 2001
David B. Yoffie, Mary Kwak · 2001
Barnett C. Helzberg Jr. Barnett Helzberg · 2003
Barbara Peterson · 2004
Frans Johansson · 2004
Clayton Christensen, Scott D. Anthony, Erik A. Roth · with Scott D. Anthony, Erik A. Roth · 2004 · Open Library unreachable this run; title not machine-verified.
Felix Dennis · 2006
Sam Wyly · 2008 · Entrepreneur's memoir of building and selling successive companies
Ken Fisher, Lara Hoffmans · with Lara Hoffmans · 2008 · Open Library records first publication as 2009.
John Warrillow · 2010
Brad Feld, David G. Cohen · with David G. Cohen · 2010 · Techstars lessons for accelerating a startup
Stephen H. Greer · 2010
Derek Sivers · 2011
Suchitra Shenoy, Pavithra K. Mehta · 2011
T4 One Click
Richard L. Brandt · 2011 · Short Bezos biography written before the Everything Store era.
Rick Bisio · 2011 · Buyer's-side guide to picking and vetting a franchise.
Clayton Christensen, Jeff Dyer, Hal Gregersen · with Jeff Dyer, Hal Gregersen · 2011 · Open Library unreachable this run; title not machine-verified.
Nirmalya Kumar, Phanish Puranam · 2012
Brad Feld · 2012 · Subtitled 'Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City'
Philip Auerswald · 2012
Noam Wasserman · 2012 · The data on founder control, dilution and succession.
Brad Feld, Mahendra Ramsinghani · with Mahendra Ramsinghani · 2013 · Open Library lists Feld alone; second edition 2022 adds Matt Blumberg
T4 Startup Life
Brad Feld, Amy Batchelor · with Amy Batchelor · 2013 · Open Library lists Feld alone; written with Amy Batchelor
Linda Rottenberg · 2014
T4 Profit First
Mike Michalowicz · 2014 · Cash discipline for small businesses; a system, not an accounting theory.
Hiroshi Mikitani, Ryoichi Mikitani · 2014
Bill McDermott · 2014
Stef Wertheimer · 2015
Keith J. Cunningham · 2017
Avi Jorisch · 2018 · Case studies of Israeli technologies and how they were commercialised.
Ken Langone · 2019
Safi Bahcall · 2019 · Open Library unreachable this run; edition OL28720236M seen in search only.
Clayton Christensen, Efosa Ojomo, Karen Dillon · with Efosa Ojomo, Karen Dillon · 2019 · Open Library unreachable this run; title not machine-verified.
Ben Horowitz · 2019 · Subtitled 'How to Create Your Business Culture'
Jim Collins, William C. Lazier · with William C. Lazier · 2020 · Expanded edition of the 1992 book; not machine-verified.
Robert C. Jacobson · 2020 · One of the few attempts at a survey of the commercial sector.
Reid Hoffman, June Cohen, Deron Triff · with June Cohen, Deron Triff · 2021 · Book drawn from the Masters of Scale podcast
T4 Give First
Brad Feld · 2023 · Open Library records it as '#GiveFirst' with a 2017 date; published 2023
Jessica Livingston
unverified
Aaron Ross, Jason Lemkin
unverified
Ben Horowitz
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Gabriel Weinberg, Justin Mares
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