So You Want To Be a Start-Up Founder?
Starting your own business or launching a start-up (yes, there’s a difference between the two) isn’t for the faint of heart, but if you’ve got something you enjoy doing or an idea you think will challenge current norms and disrupt the market, perhaps you’re considering being your own boss.
Though it may not come as news to you that running a start-up is brutal business—90% of start-ups fail—every founder hopes to be the one who overcomes the odds. Besides furiously studying market trends and absorbing insights shared by successful entrepreneurs, you’ll want to include these five books to your reading list before taking the plunge.
1. Who by Geoff Smart and Randy Street
As a start-up founder, finding the right talent and making hiring decisions will be one of the most strategic activities you’ll undertake. According to research done by the authors of Who, making a hiring mistake will cost you 15 times the employee’s base salary in direct expenses and productivity loss.
In this book, authors Smart and Street share their “A” Method For Hiring, a human resource framework to help you identify “A” Players among potential candidates and weed out “B” and “C” Players. “A” Players are defined as having at least a 90 percent chance of achieving a set of outcomes that only the top 10 percent of candidates are able to achieve.
A key component of this method is their Scorecard, in which you must define:
- the mission of the job that you’re hiring for
- specific outcomes that you need the successful candidate to hit
- competencies that they must have in order to meet your expectations.
The book also tells you which bad hiring practices to avoid, recommends a series of structured interview questions to help you gather relevant information about a candidate, and how to close the candidates you want to hire instead of losing them to competitors.
Get the book here: Physical Copy, eBook
2. Zero to One by Peter Thiel
PayPal co-founder and venture capitalist Peter Thiel believes that creating something new is the only way for humanity to progress and for companies to profit. In Zero to One, he suggests multiple ways to nurture small start-ups developing revolutionary technologies.
Instead of “horizontal progress”, where a variation of something that already exists is produced, Thiel advocates for “vertical progress”, where one creates a new product, a new system or a new way of doing things. Aiming to be a monopoly? You’re on the right track, according to Thiel, because competition eats into profits and distracts from product improvement. And while there’s no running from competition eventually, competitors that arrive should push the start-up to innovate further.
To wrap it up, Thiel also provides a five-point checklist that’ll boost your start-up’s chances of success.
Get the book here: Physical Copy, Audiobook
3. The Lean Startup by Eric Ries
In The Lean Startup, Ries offers a blueprint for start-up founders to learn what their customers are willing to pay for, as quickly and cheaply as possible. He proposes a Build-Measure-Learn model with the following steps:
- Set your hypothesis. What belief do you have about your customers that you are seeking to validate?
- Build the minimal product necessary to test the hypothesis.
- Run the experiment — introduce the product to users and collect data on their behaviour.
- Analyse the data and reflect. How accurate was your hypothesis? Should you change directions?
Then you set a new hypothesis, and loop through the model again. The faster you complete multiple loops, the faster you’ll learn about the feasibility of your idea. You’ll also end up with a prototype that has gone through multiple iterations, rather than one fancy, yet-to-be-tested prototype.
In each chapter, Ries discusses each step in further detail. What we found particularly useful was the section on whether your start-up should pivot or persevere. Many times, start-ups don’t suffer from a complete failure but zombie along a path of stagnancy. For teams that experience the latter, Ries reveals the two signs that you need to pivot.
Get the book here: Physical Copy, eBook, Audiobook
4. Tools of Titans by Tim Ferriss
If you’re looking to stay on top of your self-mastery by sharpening your personal habits and beliefs, Tools of Titans is a comprehensive read by Ferriss, who has interviewed 101 high-performing people—including entrepreneurs—on the habits that have helped them to achieve success. His premise? If you copy the habits and adopt the beliefs of people who have already achieved the success that you’re looking for, you too can be successful.
Here are three of our favourite nuggets of wisdom:
- “Don’t be afraid to do something that you’re not qualified to do.” Every successful person once had to face formidable obstacles. Dan Carlin, an American podcaster, urges us to be courageous to overcome the challenges thrown at us.
- “If it’s not a ‘hell, yes!’, it’s a no.” If author Derek Sivers doesn’t feel excited about an opportunity, he rejects it. Our time is limited, so stay ultra-focused on your goals.
- “What matters isn’t what you know—it’s what you do, consistently.” Motivational speaker Tony Robbins reminds us that success doesn’t come from knowledge, but action. So don’t just read about the tactics in this book—follow through with practice!
Get the book here: Physical Copy, eBook
5. The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers by Ben Horowitz
Ben Horowitz is no stranger to start-ups. He began his career at the web browser company Netscape, before co-founding Loudcloud, a cloud computing company at the height of the tech bubble in 1999. After the bubble burst, the company faced an endless stream of crises. Horowitz eventually turned the company around and sold it to HP for a cool US$1.6 billion in 2007.
In this book, Horowitz speaks from his own experiences and offers essential advice on building and running a start-up. There are no theoretical models, only stories of having to fire friends and poach competitors; insights on common problems faced by founders; and advice on how to sustain a CEO mentality and knowing the right time to exit your start-up.
The Hard Thing About Hard Things could be a good read if you’re struggling in your start-up. Every entrepreneur—even legendary ones—have struggled at one point in time, Horowitz assures. In fact, he says that if CEOs were graded on a test, the mean score would be 22 out of 100. Had you not known this, you’d think that you were the only entrepreneur who was severely underperforming, when struggling is, in fact, normal.
Get the book here: Physical Copy, eBook, Audiobook
