Recommended books
Strategy
Traction by Gino wickman
Traction by Gino Wickman stood out because of it's focus on practical tools and applications. Many entrepreneurship books preach many of the same principles. Gino takes it a step further and provides templates, thought processes, and course work around the book's key lessons. This book revolves around EOS or Entrepreneurial Operating System. The idea is standardizing key components of your business in a way that holds people accountable and pointed in the same direction. A more in-depth review can be found here and EOS course work here.
Product Market Fit
The Lean Startup by Eric ries
The Lean Startup introduces concepts that a entrepreneur will hear echoed through the entirety of his or her career. The book focuses on many great "how to" questions like:
How to fail fast, so that you can learn faster
How do you create a MVP (minimum viable product)
How does a early company find product market fit
If you like The Lean Startup and are interested in learning more, I would recommend Ash Maurya's book Running Lean to get more details on the day to day running of a lean business. One of the key takeaways is the one page business plan, Lean Canvas, found here.
The Hard Thing about Hard Things
The first half shares the story of Ben as he overcomes a shifting technology landscape, a IPO during the .com bust, and a eventual sale to HP. The second half goes into great detail as he shares his lessons learned. I appreciate the book for its candor and practical advice.
Being a CEO cannot be taught -but it can be learned.
Shoe Dog
I loved how this book portrays Phil Knight as a young man and entrepreneur. You can see how Nike changes and develops as the founder changes and develops.
Chaos monkeys
This book is a bit of a curve ball. It follows a founder as he transitions from Wall Street, to Y-Combinator, and lastly to Facebook right before their IPO. It shows the birth of a new form of digital ads that will soon become dominate. The author’s no bullshit tone and borderline asshole personality makes the book entertaining.
Ego is the Enemy
One of SupportNinja’s values is “Always be Humble,” and this is one one of the values I subscribe to as well. Without humility, you cannot learn and improve.
The Everything store
Follow Amazons rise and domination of the e-commerce industry. I appreciate Bezos’ use of primitives: Finally, Bezos becomes enamored with the idea of creating primitives – the building blocks of computing – and letting developers create emergently amazing things with it. They brainstorm primitives like storage, bandwidth, processing, messaging, and payments.