Books for Startups

For Books on Silicon Valley History see here

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Entrepreneurial Management Stack Over the last few years we’ve discovered that startups are not smaller versions of large companies. The skills founders need are not covered by traditional books for MBA’s and large company managers. There are now a few books that specifically address founders needs. Alexander Osterwalder’s Business Model Generation is the first book that allows you to answer “What’s your business model?” intelligently and with precision. Make sure this one is on your shelf.

Osterwalders follow-on book Value Proposition Design describes how to get product/market fit right. It’s another “must have” for your bookshelf.

Eric Ries was the best student I ever had. He took the Customer Development process, combined it with Agile Engineering, and actually did the first implementation in a startup. His insights about the combined Customer Development/Agile process and its implications past startups into large corporations is a sea change in thinking. His book, The Lean Startup is a “must have” for your shelf.

It’s impossible to implement any of this if you don’t understand Agile Development.Extreme Programming Explained by one of the pioneers of Agile, Kent Beck, is a great tutorial. If you don’t understand Values, Principles and Practices in XP it makes Customer Development almost impossible.

If you’re in a large company, The Other Side of Innovation makes sense of how to actually insert innovation into an execution organization. If you’re starting a medical device company Biodesign:The Process of Innovating Medical Technologies is a must have. It has a great customer discovery process.

Talking to Humans is a great simple primer on Customer Discovery.

[img=134,180]http://steveblank.files.wordpress.com/2009/02/four-steps-hardcover-cover.jpg?w=134&h=180[/img] Order Here

And my newest book, The Startup Owners Manual

The Founders Workbook – The Checklist Companion to the Startup Owners Manual

Must Read Books The other side of innovation is the closest recipe I’ve read for getting entrepreneurship right in large companies. Innovator’s Dilemma and Innovator’s Solution helped me refine the notion of the Four types of Startup Markets. I read these books as the handbook for startups trying to disrupt an established company. The Innovators DNA rings true about the skills founders need to have. Crossing the Chasm made me understand that there are repeatable patterns in early stage companies. It started my search for the repeatable set of patterns that preceded the chasm. The Tipping Point has made me realize that marketing communications strategies for companies in New Markets often follow the Tipping Point. Blue Ocean Strategy is a great way to look at what I’ve called “market type.”

The Marketing Playbook gives marketers five strategy options, teaches you gap analysis and offer tactical marketing campaign advice. Do More Fasteridentifies issues that first-time entrepreneurs encounter and offer useful advice. Getting Real is web-focussed. Wasserman’s Founders Dilemma is essential reading to building a great startup team.

These books are classics but timeless. The Entrepreneurial Mindset articulates the critically important idea that there are different types of startup opportunities. The notion of three Market Types springs from here and Christensen’s work. The book provides a framework for the early marketing/sales strategies essential in a startup. Delivering Profitable Value talks more about value propositions and value delivery systems than you ever want to hear again. However, this is one of the books you struggle through and then realize you learned something valuable. Schumpeter’s book Theory of Economic Development is famous for his phrase “creative destruction” and its relevance to entrepreneurship. Peter Drucker’s Concept of the Corporationwas the first insiders view of how a decentralized company (GM) works. His Practice of Management defined “management by objective” and Innovation and Entrepreneurship is a classic. While written for a corporate audience, read it for the sources of innovation. If you write software you already know about Fred Brooks classic text the Mythical Man Month. If you manage a software company you need to read it so you don’t act like Dilbert’s pointy-haired boss. Peppers and Rogers, The One to One Future opened my eyes to concepts of lifetime value, most profitable customers and the entire customer lifecycle of “get, keep and grow.” Bill Davidow’s Marketing High Technology introduced me to the concept of “whole product” and the unique needs of mainstream customers. Michael Porter is the father of competitive strategy. His books Competitive Strategy, Competitive Advantage, and On Competition are still the standards.

Seth Godin “gets deeply” the profound changes the internet is having in the way we think about customers and communicating with them. Godin’s All Marketers are Liarstalks about the power of storytelling in marketing. His Permission Marketing book crystallized a direct marketing technique (permission marketing), which was simply impossible to achieve pre-internet. Read his Ideavirus after you’ve read Permission Marketing. Made to Stick gives you the tools to make your messages “sticky.” I putSway here because great marketers know how to find these irrational behaviors Lakoff’s book, Don’t Think of an Elephant! while written for a political audience has some valuable insights on framing communications.

If you don’t pay attention to the law from the day you start your company it can kill you. But most books (and lawyers) speak in their own arcane language. David Weekly’s An Introduction to Stock and Options should be your first read (unfortunately its Kindle only.) The Entrepreneurs Guide to Business Law is the one book you ought to have on your shelf. While not written explicitly for Silicon Valley startups it demystifies the most common areas you need to know. Term Sheets and Valuations is a great read if you’re faced with a term sheet and staring at words like “liquidation preferences and conversion rights” and don’t have a clue what they mean. Read this and you can act like you almost understand what you are giving away.

Brad Feld’s Startup Communities posits a big idea: startup communities are driven by entrepreneurs who are the leaders and everyone else is a feeder. Essential reading if you’re trying to build your own cluster. Anna Lee Saxenian’s Regional Advantage is the definitive text of why Silicon Valley beat Boston as the hub of U.S. entrepreneurship. Startup Nation is the story of how the Israeli government engineered the country into becoming the hottest cluster outside the U.S. for startups. In contrast, Josh Lerner’s Boulevard of Broken Dreams describes the multiple ways governments can screw up a cluster. Jessica Livingston’s Founders At Work are the best case studies/vignettes without a PR rewrite of how founders really start companies. The Startup Playbook also does a good job of offering founders advice. An Engineer’s Guide to Silicon Valley Startups is one of those quirky books that perfectly match Silicon Valley culture. If you’re an engineer in the valley or coming out, this is a useful read. It describes what types of startups are there, how to get a job at one, negotiating your salary, stock options, etc. Geek Silicon Valley is part history and part travel guide. Also useful.

If you buy one book to understand how VC’s and fund raising works, Venture Deals is the one. Wish I had it when I did startups. Same for Mastering the VC Game. If you read two books about how to deal with VC’s start here. The rest of the books are personal stories. Bill Draper’s book is both history and advice from a VC pioneer. If you have never experienced a startup first hand, Jerry Kaplan’s bookStartup and Michael Wolff’s book Burn Rate are good reads of a founder’s adventure with the venture capitalists. Eboys is the story of Benchmark Capital during the Internet Bubble. Ferguson’s book is a great read for the first time entrepreneur. His personality and views of the venture capitalists and “suits” are a Rorschach ink blot test for the reader.

These books tell the story of the formation of the Venture Capital Industry.

If you take an entrepreneurship class in a Business School or University you’ll probably encounter one of these textbooks.The reason you don’t see them on the desks of working entrepreneurs is that at $100-$150+ they’re all priced for a captive student audience. (Some do have paperback versions for $50-$85.) The other uncomfortable fact is that most startups in Silicon Valley ignore these textbooks once they leave school. In the real-world startups are now built using the business model/customer development/agile engineering stack. Not one of these textbooks teach that.

Of all the texts, Technology Ventures is “the gold standard” of entrepreneurship textbooks. Jeff Timmons’ New Venture Creation has too much great stuff in it to ignore. At first read it is simply overwhelming but tackle it a bit a time and use it to test your business plan for completeness. Business Plans that Work summarizes the relevant part of Timmons’ New Venture Creation book and teaches how to write a document (the business plan) that no one ever reads. However, both books are worth having if you’re in a large company thinking about introducing follow-on products.

What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20 and InGenious are the books I give all young entrepreneurs.If you are in a large company and wondering why your company isn’t going anywhere your answers might be found in Good to Great. Written by Jim Collins, the same author who wrote Built to Last, both are books that “you should be so lucky” to read. What differentiates good companies versus great? How do you institutionalize core values into a company that enable it to create value when the current management is long gone? When I first read these, I thought they were only for companies that were lucky enough to get big. Upon reflection, these books were the inspiration for the “Mission-Oriented Culture.” Read these two books together.

Ironically, the best HR stuff for anyone in a startup to read is not a book. It is the work James Baron at Stanford has done. Download his slides on the Stanford Project on Emerging Companies. Baron’s book, Strategic Human Resources – is a classic HR textbook. Finally, if you are working at a startup and wondering why the founder is nuts, The Founder Factor helps explain a few things.

I’m not sure how to characterize The Checklist Manifesto so I stuck it here. It’s a quick read with some insights that match why Business Model strategy need to be translated into Customer Development checklists.

My friend, Stephen Spinelli President of Philadelphia University offered this great reading list on the activity of the university in tech transfer/collaborations with business, community and government. The list also covers the activity/behavior/leadership of the university president.

All of the following four chapters are in the: Journal of the Programme on Institutional Management in Higher Education, Higher Education Management. Vol. 13, No. 2, 2001. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

Also see Tom Eisenmann’s Reading list from his Harvard Lean Startup class.