Books, Articles and Podcasts for Founders and Startup Team Members

Thinking about the concept: Immersing yourself in technology, trends, pains, and what it takes to start a company

Some reasons to read books in this section include building a loose mental model of what it take to build a company, it won’t be very practical at the moment but will come in handy in the future once you are doing it and can identify what elements you need to learn more about. It is also useful to immerse yourself in emerging technologies and how they could solve (potential customer) pains you are exposed to.

• Subscribed: To learn more about the rise of the subscription business model

• Intercom on startup up: This covers the general startup journey in high level but would give you a sense of different topics to keep in mind

• Jobs to be done mental frameworks:

  • Article:

    • Know your customers’ Jobs to Be Done

    • What is JTBD

  • Podcast: The Disruptive Voice

Starting
Idea and Very Early Validation Stages:
You are working on understanding the customer better to “Make things people want”

• Makebook: The Bootstrapper’s Handbook by Peter Levels: https://makebook.io/

• Paul Graham Essays:

  • How to Get Startup Ideas

  • Do things that don’t scale

  • Founder Traits

• Other perspectives on Co-founders: 50/50 , Co-founder relationship Fred Wilson. Mark suster’s Perspective.

• Book: Disciplined Entrepreneurship: Bill Aulet

• Book: The Startup Owner’s Manual - Steve Blank

• Free Class: Steve Blank's: How to Build a Startup The Lean LaunchPad (Udacity)
  

Building the Early Product/Prototype

If you are a non technical founder building a tech company you need at least some basic understanding of how tech products/software work

• Book: Starting a Tech Business: A Practical Guide for Anyone Creating or Designing Applications or Software

• Podcast on Product Management

• Class on product

• Validation

Early Stage (usually 1-15 people):
At this stage product is taking, market fit is becoming more visible, form and scaling started to become more important

• Customer iteration:

• Pricing:

• Bootstrapping route:

• Fundraising route:

• To preview what’s coming next:
  Podcast: Starting Greatness with Mike Maples Jr

15-50 People

• The Manager’s Handbook

• Chief of Staff onboarding

• If you are hiring PMs and you are non technical
  
  BOOKS

• The Great CEO Within

• High Output Management

• Crossing the Chasm

• Predictable Revenue

• The Sales Acceleration Formula

• Re/work

• It doesn’t have to be crazy at work

• The hard thing about hard things

• What you do is who you are

50+ People

• The essential Drucker

• Competitive Strategy

• The 7 Powers

• The Toyota way

• The Goal