ENTREPRENEURSHIP
3 All-Time Best Books for Entrepreneurs
Learn to transform your life. No one is wise by birth.
Did you always want to read books that would widen your perspective, help you become a better entrepreneur, and help you make smarter decisions?
Now is the time. Not tomorrow or next month. By starting, even if you proceed small, you are far more likely to achieve your goals.
Entrepreneurship is just like any other topic. The more you study, the better you get at it. You should know more about what went wrong as well as what works so that you make your decisions accordingly.
1. The Lean Startup by Eric Ries
“Every so often a business book comes along that changes how we think about innovation and entrepreneurship… The Lean Startup has the chops to join this exalted company.”
- Financial Times
Ries defines a startup as an organization dedicated to creating something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty. Let it be your mother’s garage or your tiny room, you have no resources. Scaling up through that is something challenging and so most startups fail. However, he shows us the preventable failures to keep us going.
Lean is an approach, a movement, where vastly better, faster business calls are placed at the center of decision-making. Inspired by lessons from lean manufacturing, it took the best of Toyota’s efficiency-seeking production combined with just in time approach. It prioritizes listening to the customers and learning what they really want, not what you think they want. Let’s admit it, there is a huge difference between the two. That eliminates building something they are not willing to pay for. Then there is efficient production. Through testing with customers, iterating accordingly, and repeating the process continuously, Ries shows how your service/product can adapt to become the perfect fit for the market.
I understood the customer validation and its importance through this book. His systematic analysis helps those who apply the method to build a desirable product or service. He talks about creating a minimum viable product, which meets the basic requirements to test it on the customer without further work to see if they like it. Then comes pivoting if what they see is not what they like. That refers to changing your product to meet the market demand. Of course, then there is testing again, it is always present in the cycle to help this work. It resembles a game, if you don’t see demand, you pivot and test again until you don’t need to.
Eric Ries (1978-) is an American entrepreneur, blogger of Lessons Learned, and author of New York Times bestseller The Lean Startup, which has sold over one million copies. His innovative Long-Term Stock Exchange launched in 2019, disrupting US stock exchanges with a new public market experience for modern companies and investors.
“It’s the perfect philosophy for an era of limited resources, when the noun optimism is necessarily preceded by the adjective cautious.”
- Wired
2. Zero to One by Peter Thiel and Blake Masters
“Peter Thiel has built multiple breakthrough companies, and Zero to One shows how.”
- Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla
Thiel thinks every moment in business happens once. So copying is not a good strategy that should be followed. The next Zuckerberg will not create a social platform. Nor will the next Gates, Jobs, Musk, Page… So why should we look at what they did rather than focus on what nobody hasn’t touched on yet?
“It’s easier to copy a model than to make something new: doing what we already know how to do takes the world from 1 to n, adding more of something familiar. But every time we create something new, we go from 0 to 1.”
Zero to One is a condensed version of a highly popular set of online notes taken by Masters for the CS183 class on startups, as taught by Thiel at Stanford University in 2012 which is sold more than 2.5 million copies. It explains how companies can create new things and revolutionize the world. According to Thiel, successful people find value in unexpected places, and they do this by thinking about principles instead of formulas. This could be regarded as a suggestion to enter into the blue ocean, coined in 2004 by two INSEAD professors.
Red oceans are bloody and full of sharks, in other words competitors. Red oceans are all the industries in existence today where industry boundaries are defined and accepted, and the competitive rules of the game are known. Blue oceans, in contrast, denote all the industries not in existence today, untainted by competition where demand is created, not fought over. Thiel talks about the creation of new things so those things should open up new markets.
This book helped me broaden my understanding of competition and changed how I viewed the first-mover advantage. I thought it was a good thing and resulted in having the reputation of innovative and revolutionary perhaps. But you can actually become better by learning from mistakes. Besides, people look at who is delivering the most superior product/service, not who is the first to do it. There are many lessons to be learned in this book and these are just a few of them.
Peter Andreas Thiel (1967-) is a German-American entrepreneur and venture capitalist. He is mostly known for co-founding PayPal and Palantir Technologies. He also made the first outside investment in Facebook where he serves as a director and was an early investor in companies like SpaceX, LinkedIn, and Yelp. He is a partner at Founders Fund, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm that has funded companies like SpaceX and Airbnb. He is the author of Zero to One.
Blake Masters is the co-author of Zero to One and COO at Thiel Capital and President of The Thiel Foundation. He co-founded Judicata and Spar, formerly Box and Founders Fund, studied at Stanford and Stanford Law School.
“This book delivers completely new and refreshing ideas on how to create value in the world.”
- Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook
3. How To Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie
“In my office, you will not see the degree I have from the University of Nebraska, or the master’s degree I have from Columbia University, but you’ll see the certificate I got from the Dale Carnegie course.”
Warren Buffett
This book is not exactly a self-help book as the title might make you think, for people who want to make friends. It is a book that reiterates the basic tenants of leadership and guides you through the underlying principles to become the best leader you never had. Dale Carnegie’s advice has remained applicable across the years, since the book was first published in 1936, and has been sold thirty million times since. A Library of Congress survey even ranked Carnegie’s piece as the seventh most influential book in American history.
His simple yet so effective advice combined with the many examples in the book helped me, deep-dive into the concepts, and made me think about how I can apply them to my life. It is not a mind-reading kind of book but more of the combination of results of years of observations from his courses pooled into a booklet which was to be handed out in his class at first and then, later on, became this book as we know it. You should read it just to get more understanding as to what people want in general and how you can help them get there. There are lessons on how to be a problem-solver, be agreeable, and show true leadership. Those can be applied to your team, your business, your partners and to your investors because they all have one thing in common. People. So having better relationships would help with whatever you are doing.
Dale Carnegie (1888-1955) was an American writer and lecturer, and the developer of courses in self-improvement, salesmanship, public speaking, and interpersonal skills. Even though Carnegie describes himself as a “simple country boy” his ideas have reached millions of people. He has taught courses over the world in-person about leadership, sales, people skills. Now, they are continued to be taught by skilled trainers worldwide or through live online courses. You can find more information here.
“The advice is timeless, well stated and able to be understood by your average Joe and Jane and the top executives of major corporations.”
- New York Times
This is a glimpse of the books we can all learn a lot from. I provided just 3, knowing that there are thousands because it would not be helpful to realize there is so much to do and we are nowhere near the end. So instead, by going one by one, we get to actually do something. Let me know if there are any books you want to include in the next batch.
