Founders and Entrepreneurs

How Sony grew from Tokyo's ruins, and how Japanese and American business differ.

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

A Jewish boy survives the war and Soviet rule in Hungary and escapes to America.

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

Authorised by the family; affectionate and incomplete.

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

A critical history of Bill Gates and the early Microsoft, from Lakeside School on.

How Nintendo conquered the American video game market.

Bill Gates from Harvard and Microsoft BASIC to the IBM deal that made Microsoft.

How a bank clerk simplified photography and built Eastman Kodak.

Academic cultural history; Disney as the century's most effective ideologist.

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

Robert Noyce, Fairchild Semiconductor and the founding of Intel.

Enlightened hospitality: put employees first, then guests, community and investors.

Walt Disney's life from Missouri to Mickey Mouse, the 1941 strike and Disneyland.

Animation historian's corrective, strongest on the studio craft.

A Microsoft co-founder's memoir of his ventures, successes and failures.

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

How the NeXT and Pixar years changed Steve Jobs into the leader who rebuilt Apple.

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

Alibaba from Jack Ma's Hangzhou apartment to its 2014 New York listing.

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

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

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

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

A biography of Bill Gates covering his reinvention after Microsoft.

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

Jensen Huang and how Nvidia came to power the move to artificial intelligence.

Sam Altman's life, including his November 2023 firing and return at OpenAI.

Alex Karp and Palantir's path from CIA funding to the surveillance state.

King Gillette, his safety razor and the disputed give-away-the-handle story.

Unauthorised; Lauder rushed out her own memoir to pre-empt it.

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

How Sam Walton built Wal-Mart and became America's richest man.

Contemporaneous account of the NeXT failure.

The FBI-informant thesis; contested on sourcing but the case for the prosecution.

Sequel to Hard Drive, on the browser wars and the road to antitrust.

Insider account: Schultz on building the company to 1997.

Unauthorised; Ellison tried to block it.

Amway's co-founder's own account; read alongside the criticism.

First major critical history by a WSJ Walmart reporter.

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

Steve Jobs's years at NeXT and Pixar and his return to Apple.

Southwest Airlines' first decade, told by its founding chief executive.

Slight management-lessons treatment; useful only for the Oracle chronology.

Hostile counterweight to Symonds's authorised Softwar, published the same year.

Authorised; Ellison's rebuttals run in footnotes throughout.

Thomas Watson Sr. and how he built IBM and its sales culture.

Steve Jobs's success at Pixar and his revival of Apple with the iMac and iPod.

Full-scale biography by a Harvard business historian.

Revisionist Japanese history of Soichiro Honda and his successors.

Management-lessons treatment of Jobs's second tenure.

Brownie Wise and the home-party sales network that made Tupperware.

Wynn, Adelson, Kerkorian and the megaresort capex race.

Insider account: Schultz's 2008 return and the store closures.

Walt Disney's Kansas City years, 1919-1928, and how his first company went bust.

The life of Sol Price, who invented the warehouse club and taught Costco.

Insider account: an early Western executive on the eBay fight.

The Krocs, the fortune, and the philanthropy it funded.

SpaceX against Blue Origin and the legacy contractors.

Insider account: later memoir on social responsibility and politics.

Authorised, translated from Japanese; admiring in tone.

Founder's account of a private-label, limited-SKU, high-turn grocery model.

Dell's founder on the buyout, the Icahn fight and VMware

Peter Thiel biography with substantial Palantir founding material.

An investigative case against the power of the Gates Foundation.

Early Western biography, written while Soichiro Honda still ran the company.

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

Family insider history of the studio's founding generation.

The brother who did the financing; useful counterpart.

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

Compiled from Investor's Business Daily profiles.

Patagonia's founder on running a business against conventional growth logic

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

Early Chinese-sourced account, admiring and lightly sourced.

A memoir of moving from international banking to founding Acumen, an impact investor.

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

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

Insider account: authorized biography of the founder.

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

Amancio Ortega and Zara's fast-fashion model of short cycles and nearby factories.

The short life of Danny Lewin and Akamai Technologies, which changed the internet.

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

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

Fifteen years of AI through Demis Hassabis and DeepMind, from AlphaGo to AlphaFold.