Best Books Every Startup Founder Should Read

“Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all.”

-Henry David Thoreau

According to a recent founding, a lot of successful people around the world share the same habit: reading. Take Bill Gates, for example. His target is to read one new book every week. Mark Zuckerberg does a similar thing, although his target is monthly. Considering the same idea those successful people share, reading good books seems like a very sensible thing to do to make success more attainable, especially for those striving to start up their very first business.

Books can be found everywhere, but finding the right ones to read can take a lot of time. For the sake of time efficiency, the list of books startup businessmen needs to read is presented below.

• Creativity is known to be one of keys to success. There is this book called The $100 StartUp that shows how a lot of people make a living from doing what they love doing. Such a fact was researched by the writer before the publication of the book. This book is easy to read and can inspire people to get more creative with their passion. Chris Guillebeau, the writer, presents 50 individuals (out of thousands) who have managed to find the intersection where their passion or skill meets with what others want to pay for and have managed to earn $50.000 or more from the initial capital of $100 and even less. These creative folk have less conventional employment, yet a more meaningful job, and surely, reading their business stories is a good first step into the startup business.        
• As creativity is needed along the way, maintaining a creative mind and team is essential. One of the global companies that have proven its creativity over the years is Pixar Animation Studios with countless box office movies. In the book entitled Creativity, Inc., the insight of the company’s creative nature is revealed. In 340 pages, the writer, Ed Catmull, who is the President of Pixar, explains what creativity in business really is and the techniques to create and nurture a creative company culture.
• In addition to creative flair, positive mental emotions should be the driving force of the business. To find out more about how emotions manage behaviour and affect business, the book called Hooked is a must-read. Nir Eyal explains in this book how to design for habit formation in layman’s terms and at the back of each chapter he actually coaches you on immediately applying what you learned to your own specific project.
  
• Once thinking outside the box and negative emotions are no longer a barrier, implementing brand new ideas into reality is the next step. The book called The Lean Startup by Eric Ries will help conduct experiments to invent the future of the business without using too many resources.
• Trying to make things happen requires commitment, a real plan and measured effort. Checklist Manifesto is the one book that will guide and help get the most of checklists to significantly achieve better performance as they work as the reminder of necessary, practical steps and as a simple disciplinary measurement. Although the writer, Atul Gawande, works in a medical field, the ideas of checklists presented in the book can be applied in other business sectors.
• Regardless the effort and commitment, there is always the possibility of things getting in the way. Should there be some kind of obstacles, reading The Hard Thing About Hard Things can be the trigger to realize that perception should be separated from facts and that solving a problem comes with knowledge. Andreessen Horowitz, who owns at least $1.8B from a sale of Loudcloud to HP and is the writer of the book, shares his trials throughout his journey, such as having talented yet bad employees, situations when the loyal ones should be demoted or even fired, etc. Learning from his experiences which are narrated with humor and anecdotes, hard times may not seem as hard.
• In today’s rushed world of business, time is money, innovation, quality, and productivity. The authors of the book Competing Against Time describe exactly how reducing elapsed time can make the critical difference between success and failure. Time-based companies are offering greater varieties of products and services, at lower costs, and with quicker delivery times than their more pedestrian competitors. A great book for those who are starting out their own brand and having to deal with various vendors in supply chain.
• The book Built To Last written by Jim Collins was aimed at analyzing what makes an average company become successful, and why some companies will never manage to attain greatness; a must-read for starting entrepreneurs who don’t want their start-ups to remain average.

All in all, reading is a mere first step, implementing the useful ideas into real actions is what will get you to reap out all the benefits.  Do you have any books to recommend to others? Let us know in the comments.