Reading List
I am often asked by entrepreneurs for my list of the best books to read. Over the years, I have responded via email, on Quora, and on Twitter, but now collate them in one place. Italics highlights books that are most highly recommended.
History of Silicon Valley:
Swimming Across: A Memoir by Andy Grove
Andy Grove: The Life and Times of an American by Richard S. Tedlow
Architects of the Web: 1,000 Days that Built the Future of Business by Robert H. Reid
Googled: The End of the World As We Know It by Ken Auletta
Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Disease and Transform Industries by Safi Bahcall
Return to the Little Kingdom: Steve Jobs and the Creation of Apple by Michael Moritz
Steve Jobs & The NeXT Big Thing by Randall Stross
Troublemakers: Silicon Valley’s Coming of Age by Leslie Berlin
The Intel Trinity: How Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore, and Andy Grove Built the World’s Most Important Company by Michael S. Malone
World War 3.0: Microsoft, the US Government, and the Battle for the New Economy by Ken Auletta
Revolution in The Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac Was Made by Andy Hertzfeld
The Tinkerings of Robert Noyce by Thomas Wolfe
Viral Loop: From Facebook to Twitter, How Today’s Smartest Businesses Grow Themselves by Adam L. Penenberg
The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture by John Battelle
Insanely Simple: The Obsession That Drives Apple’s Success by Ken Segall
Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart into a Visionary Leader by Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli
Advice for Entrepreneurs:
Behind the Cloud: The Untold Story of How Salesforce.com Went from Idea to Billion-Dollar Company-and Revolutionized an Industry by Marc Benioff
Cultural Strategy: Using Innovative Ideologies to Build Breakthrough Brands by Douglas Holt
Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age by Paul Graham
High Output Management by Andy Grove
How Google Works by Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg
The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right by Atul Gawande
The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers by Ben Horowitz
The Innovator’s Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth by Clayton M. Christensen, particularly chapter 2
The Method Method: Seven Obsessions That Helped Our Scrappy Start-up Turn an Industry Upside Down by Eric Ryan and Adam Lowry
The Score Takes Care of Itself by Bill Walsh and Steve Jamison
The 7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy by Hamilton Helmer
The Success Equation: Untangling Skill and Luck in Business, Sports, and Investing by Michael J. Mauboussin
Trade-Off: Why Some Things Catch On, and Others Don’t by Kevin Maney
Zero To One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future by Peter Thiel
In the Company of Giants: Candid Conversations with the Visionaries of the Digital World by Rama Dev Jager and Rafael Ortiz (Chapter 1 interview w Steve Jobs)
The 80/20 Principle: The Secret to Achieving More with Less by Richard Koch
The Pmarca Blog Archives (select posts from 2007–2009) by Marc Andreessen
Naked Statistics: Stripping the Dread from the Data by Charles Wheelan
General Greatness:
The City In History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects by Lewis Mumford
Drawing Life: Surviving the Unabomber by David Gelernter
Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business by Neil Postman
On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins and Sandra Blakeslee
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari
The Curse of the Mogul: What’s Wrong with the World’s Leading Media Companies by Jonathan A. Knee, Bruce C. Greenwald and Ava Seave
The Upside of Stress: Why Stress Is Good for You, and How to Get Good at It by Kelly McGonigal
