Entrepreneurship and Startups

Innovation as a learnable discipline, with seven sources of opportunity to search.

How Walmart grew from one Arkansas store by cutting costs and prices.

Why well-run firms lose to cheaper, worse products that enter at the market's bottom.

How a company can build new businesses through low-end and new-market disruption.

Howard Hughes as aviator, film producer and Las Vegas hotel owner, and his decline.

The Business Model Canvas: nine blocks for how a firm creates and captures value.

The story of how Twitter was founded and of the founders who built it.

Why startups should build something new and own a small market before growing.

How a running-shoe importer became Nike, surviving one cash crisis after another.

How Theranos reached a $9 billion value with blood tests that never worked.

How Uber grew on subsidies and aggression until its founder was pushed out in 2017.

Venture capital from Arthur Rock to SoftBank, and why a few big bets pay for all.

A milkshake-machine salesman finds the McDonald brothers and builds the franchise.

Apple's growth from a garage workshop to a company with over $1 billion in sales.

McDonald's to the mid-1980s, from the brothers' stand to Kroc's franchise system.

Why tech products stall between early adopters and the mainstream, and how to cross.

How Asa Candler built Coca-Cola and Robert Woodruff made it a global brand.

210 short pieces of business advice for a fast-changing early-1990s economy.

How to move a tech product past early adopters into a fast-growing mass market.

Small firms fail when technicians run them; build systems that run the business.

How Britain, Germany, Japan and the US each built their own form of capitalism.

Cost-cutting can't produce growth; a company must stand out to win.

How $27 lent to 42 villagers grew into Grameen Bank and microcredit.

How two fired executives built Home Depot into a national chain.

Jim Clark, founder of Silicon Graphics and Netscape, starts a third company in 1999.

A manifesto to rebuild firms for an age of automated white-collar work and design.

The empirical work that established how venture returns and cycles behave.

Fourteen companies, such as Anchor Brewing and Zingerman's, that chose to stay small.

Georges Doriot, who showed that investing in small, risky firms could pay.

How Salesforce was built, set out as 111 plays on marketing, sales and growth.

Why most government efforts to build venture capital sectors fail.

Why Israel produces so many tech start-ups, from military service to immigration.

Lessons on fearlessness drawn from the life of the rapper 50 Cent.

From LinkExchange to Zappos, and the case for building a company on its culture.

Steve Jobs's life and Apple's products, from forty interviews with him and many more.

Innovation as a game played by the state, capital markets and competition.

Netflix from its 1997 founding to Qwikster in 2011, and its war with Blockbuster.

How 3D printing and other tools let anyone start a manufacturing business.

Amazon's first two decades, from an online bookshop to selling nearly everything.

The wildcatters, from George Mitchell to Harold Hamm, who started the shale boom.

Musk's life from South Africa and PayPal to running SpaceX and Tesla at once.

How people champion new ideas, and how leaders can encourage originality.

From student apartments in Ann Arbor to selling Equity Office to Blackstone in 2007.

How to search for, buy and run a small business as its owner-manager.

Airbnb from three air mattresses in 2007 to a global lodging business.

How Uber and Airbnb built businesses in regulated markets by acting first.

When and how to put speed before efficiency to capture a market before rivals.

Building Creative Artists Agency into Hollywood's top agency, then failing at Disney.

How to position software so it clearly wins for a chosen market.

How venture capital works, from fund economics to term sheets, for founders.

How Dollar Shave Club, Warby Parker and other online brands took on incumbents.

The rise of WeWork and Adam Neumann and its failed public offering.

Amazon's shareholder letters from 1997 to 2019, with speeches and interviews.

How to launch a network product that is worthless until enough people use it.

WeWork's rise under Adam Neumann, the failed 2019 IPO and SoftBank's rescue.

PayPal from Confinity and X.com through the merger to the 2002 sale to eBay.

Two years shadowing Musk, across SpaceX, Tesla, Neuralink and the buying of Twitter.

Four companies, from Planet Labs to Rocket Lab, racing to build cheap satellites.

Masayoshi Son's rise from Kyushu to SoftBank, Yahoo Japan and the Vision Fund.

Insider account of a New York developer's own deals.

Value pricing for solo and boutique consultancies.

Supply-side case for entrepreneurs as the actual source of growth

The only dedicated English biography; stops before the handover.

The one dedicated book: Huizenga's roll-up and the sale to Viacom.

Insider account: Schultz on building the company to 1997.

Insider account of build-to-order, negative working capital and cutting the channel.

Oral history interviews with the first generation of VCs.

Two years embedded inside Benchmark Capital.

Subtitled 'Big Ideas from the Computer Age'; collects early essays

Insider account by an early PayPal marketing hire; partisan but first-hand.

Venture capital as finance: valuing startups, reading terms and expected returns.

Business-model innovation as a discipline, with a profit-formula framework.

How to build a deliberately small, niche software business that pays.

Owner-operator economics: labour efficiency and the four keys.

How venture funds work: LP terms, fund mechanics and how returns reach investors.

Inside Y Combinator in the years before Altman ran it.

3G Capital's meritocracy-and-zero-based-budgeting playbook, from AmBev to Heinz.

How Chinese private champions including Alibaba actually built scale.

How an ordinary business can add subscriptions for steady recurring revenue.

How Kenya's tech startups and M-Pesa grew, with interviews with their founders.

How to turn an existing business into a franchise system.

The SaaS growth playbook: niche, funnel, hiring cadence.

The Ansari X Prize and the start of commercial human spaceflight.

Bain's account of what founder-led companies lose as they scale.

A worker's guide to the gig economy and how platforms price labour.

An angel investor's rules for picking, backing and helping early-stage startups.

What older consumers want and buy, against the stereotypes firms design for.

Reported from inside Uber just before the 2017 crisis broke.

Why buying a small business beats starting one, and how to find, fund and buy it.

Operating manual for scaling a company from fifty to thousands

The commercial-space policy fight that let SpaceX in.

SpaceX against Blue Origin and the legacy contractors.

Four women venture capitalists and the deals the industry forgot

How to design a free tier that turns users into paying customers.

Insider account: Netflix co-founder, including the Blockbuster pitch.

How startup brands such as Casper and Allbirds built loyal customers.

Authorised, translated from Japanese; admiring in tone.

On direct listings and the alternatives to the traditional IPO, SPACs included.

Data on 30,000 startups testing what predicts a billion-dollar outcome.

Bootstrapped SaaS economics: pricing, churn, plateau.

Media executive's memoir spanning Paramount, Fox and IAC

The founder scene around OpenAI, reported from inside the funding rounds.

How to use prize competitions, crowdfunding and communities to go big.

Founder's account of building Firestone; business sense from the tyre trade

Tire-shop founder's memoir on profit sharing and dealer economics

How leaders turn a founder-driven startup into a company that lasts.

How firms lead future industries by seeing tomorrow's chances and building skills.

How a basement kitchenware business grew into a billion-dollar company.

Strategy as constant reshaping of advantage in fast, unpredictable markets.

Glen Bell's rise from poverty to build Taco Bell and sell it for $130 million.

A marketing adviser's ideas for growing a business or a career.

A venture adviser on startups and the trap of the deferred life plan.

Why long-lived companies underperform the market, and how to transform them.

Disruption theory used to forecast how industries will change.

How to get a mutual fund off the ground: what to do, what it costs, how it works.

How companies can serve the world's poor profitably and reduce poverty in doing so.

Customer development: how startups find customers before building the full product.

How a college dropout with no family money made himself a fortune.

How Chuck Feeney made a fortune from Duty Free Shoppers and gave it away in secret.

Entrepreneur's memoir of building and selling successive companies

Why imitating others' innovations matters as much as innovating.

Techstars lessons for accelerating a startup

Lessons from building CD Baby from a side project to an $85 million business.

A step-by-step playbook for growing a small business, from Ramsey's own company.

Jeff Bezos and Amazon's early years, from D. E. Shaw to the founding in 1994.

Buyer's-side guide to picking and vetting a franchise.

How Method's eco-friendly cleaners took shelf space from P&G and Unilever.

Why jobs, 401(k)s and frugality are a slow lane, and business ownership a fast one.

Venture financing term by term, for founders negotiating their first rounds.

Subtitled 'Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City'

Lessons in 'unreasonable thinking' from building companies and giving away wealth.

How entrepreneurs spread four centuries of progress to the world's excluded majority.

Data on 10,000 founders: co-founders, hiring, investors, control and succession.

A step-by-step guide to finding customers, a market and product-market fit.

second edition 2022 adds Matt Blumberg

written with Amy Batchelor

How entrepreneurs and tech investors are building companies in the Middle East.

Cash discipline for small businesses; a system, not an accounting theory.

Nine principles of lateral thinking that innovators use to reach goals faster.

Rakuten's founder and his economist father debate how Japan can compete again.

How to anticipate change and create your own opportunities in business.

A brewer's business lessons, anecdotes and advice for building a career or a company.

Where politics meets startups taking on incumbents in regulated industries.

Case studies of Israeli technologies and how they were commercialised.

Why a business can stay small on purpose instead of chasing growth.

Why organisations kill breakthrough projects, and how structure can protect them.

An operating manual for founders scaling from a few people to a few hundred.

Culture is how people behave when the leader is absent, and must be designed.

Expanded edition of the 1992 book

Two decades of short reflections on entrepreneurship, creativity and philosophy.

A process for using power in negotiations to close deals and reach a chosen outcome.

One of the few attempts at a survey of the commercial sector.

Naval Ravikant's ideas on building wealth and being happy, gathered from his talks.

Book drawn from the Masters of Scale podcast

published 2023

An operating framework for growing firms: priorities, data and meeting rhythm.

A children's story of the small digger that worked to free the stuck ship Ever Given.