Reading startup books is probably one of the most important tasks to do as an entrepreneur, outside of your normal operations. Only with the right knowledge, you will learn how to successfully build a company.
Why I believe startup books are a key to success
Having built my company without knowing practically anything about startups and how successfully building a company you practically have four options how to learn:
- Trial and error
- Talking to experienced people
- Reading or viewing content on the internet
- Reading books (or listening to them)
While trial and error are a path to take, you should do your best to keep this one as small as possible, since many mistakes have already been made and even the smartest most experienced entrepreneurs still try out new things all the time.
Learning from veteran entrepreneurs who can say: “Been there, done that”, is probably vital to any aspiring founder, especially if you are stuck in complex situations and don’t know where to go (e.g. “I have these two VCs offering me a term sheet, one has a better reputation but the other one better terms, what shall I do”).
Reading or viewing content on the internet is also a great source of knowledge. Typically, this type of content answers specific questions of sheds light on a specific topic. You can find great articles on medium or view videos on YouTube. What they typically don’t do, is to lay what I call “a Foundation of Knowledge”. This is where startup books come into play.
Startup books are an extremely valuable source of knowledge since they condense the essence of some of the best and most experienced entrepreneurs into several 100 pages. If you compare this to the typically decades of experiences these founders (like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Ben Horowitz, etc.) and experts have already built you immediately understand that you can learn a ton from reading and absorbing this essence. Therefore, I truly believe that every founder and entrepreneur should read startup books and other relevant literature on a regular basis.
What to learn from startup books
This is where it becomes tricky and easy: You can learn what you want. There are many startup books out there and they offer amounts on practically any topic that can be of importance to a founder. The challenge is to know what book to read and when on what topic. This is the reason why I was inspired to build startup-books.com since I want to enable quick and easy navigation and guide through the valuable resources of founder-related books that are out there.
Whether your want to learn about startup fundraising, marketing and growth hacking, sales and business development, startup culture, innovation, or how to build a kick-ass team that will help you build the most successful company on this planet most if not all the knowledge is already out there. You just have to read it and then apply it.
How to find the RIGHT (and best) startup books
If you agree with me up to now, you must be thrilled to find more about all the great startup books out there. This is obviously where startup-books.com comes into play. The goal of startup-books.com is to become the “Go-To” site when you are thinking about startup books, startup knowledge and insight.
In our books section, you can find a comprehensive list of titles that show you the categories and tags of the best and most relevant startup books out there. In our review section we will discuss specific books in more detail and give a pro and con list showing you easily why it might be worth reading the book to become a better entrepreneur and helping you in your endeavor. We will also start publishing a Newsletter soon, where we update you about the newest book out there, so you also catch up with the most current developments.