Entrepreneurship and Scaling

Inspired: How to Create Tech Products Customers Love (Cagan)

Reminds founders to fall in love with the problem, not the solution. How do you ensure value, feasibility, usability, and viability while designing products collaboratively with customers and across functional areas.
One of our favorite quotes: “Customers rarely leave for competitors, they leave because we stop taking care of them.”

Hearts, Smarts, Guts, and Luck: What It Takes to Be an Entrepreneur and Build a Great Business (Tjan, Harrington, and Hsieh)

Entrepreneurs come in all shapes and sizes. Understanding your dominant traits (e.g. guts-dominant like Richard Branson or smarts-dominant like Warren Buffett) helps you maximize your abilities while giving awareness to traits you need to dial up or down depending on the situation.

Prediction Machines (Agrawal, Gans, and Goldfarb)

At its core, AI is a prediction. It helps us make a decision with imperfect information at scale. Without any formulas and through lens of economics, this book helps founders think about how to re-engineer workflows to derive max benefits of AI, what the tradeoffs around AI are, and offers a highly practical AI canvas to guide you in product development.

Getting to Yes (Fisher, Ury, Patton), Getting Past No (Ury), and Difficult Conversations (Stone, Patton, Heen)

These three books form a strong foundation around negotiations and the art of effective communication. Whether you are trying to convert a customer, discussing compensation, working with cofounders, navigating competition, or building a potential partnership – these deeply researched and battle tested concepts will prove exceedingly useful in your professional, and personal, life.

Crossing the Chasm (Moore)

Many startups fall into the trap of not being able to “cross the chasm” between the handful of early visionary customers and the later adopters who represent the majority of the addressable market. This majority has different needs, product expectations, and purchasing habits that a founder must learn to anticipate and harness to reach scale. This seminal book has guided countless founders through this transition.

Secrets of Sand Hill Road (Kupor)

Sand Hill Road is the famed location of the world’s most successful venture capital firms. This book breaks down how VCs make decisions, what their motivations and internal operations are, and how founders can pitch more effectively and build an enduring partnership with their investors. This is a must read for any founder raising venture capital.

Zero to One (Thiel, Masters), One to Ten (Gupta), and The Growth Handbook (Gil)

Every startup is on a path. You start by understanding a problem space better than anyone else and bringing a new product or service into the market (zero to one). As you quickly iterate and test against market needs, you begin to grow and bring more customers, employees, and partners on your journey (one to ten). As you find your stride, you are able to supercharge that growth to reach your maximum potential (ten to ten thousand). These books, in their respective order, are invaluable guides and references on this path.

Trillion Dollar Coach (Schmidt, Rosenberg, Eagle)

Learn about the legendary coach who mentored Steve Jobs, Larry Page, and Eric Schmidt and was instrumental in the growth of Google, Apple, and Intuit. This book examines essential principles and offers a blueprint for teams that help them increase performance and move faster.

Setting the Table: The Transforming Power of Hospitality in Business (Danny Meyer)

Both memoir and playbook, showing how a restaurateur built enduring businesses by treating hospitality as a competitive advantage, not a soft skill. Founders will take away practical ideas on culture, leadership, and “enlightened hospitality” – putting employees first so they can consistently create standout experiences for customers and partners.

Disability + Accessibility

Fashion, Disability, and Co-design: A Human-Centered Design Approach (Jun)

Blending theory, history, and case studies, the author outlines a practical framework for adaptive fashion that treats customization, fit, and function as engines of creativity rather than constraints. The book offers a transferable blueprint for any startup founder, for how to turn inclusion into a core innovation strategy.

Mismatch: How Inclusion Shapes Design (Holmes)

Reframes disability as a “mismatch” between people and their environments, then demonstrates how design choices either create or remove those barriers. The book offers practical language, principles, and prompts that product teams and founders can use to embed inclusion in their design processes and business strategy.

Mindset & Perseverance

Endurance: Shackleton’s Incredible Voyage (Alfred Lansing)

A riveting account of a failed Antarctic expedition that became a masterclass in resilience, resourcefulness, and calm leadership under unimaginable pressure. Founders will recognize how relentless optimism, clear decision-making, and shared purpose can keep a team aligned even when the original plan falls apart.

Man’s Search for Meaning (Viktor Frankl)

Through vivid accounts of survival and loss, the author shares his experiences in concentration camps and argues that humans can endure almost any “how” if they have a clear “why”. Many Presidents, CEOs, and founders have highlighted this book as a cornerstone for perspective, resilience, and purpose in leadership. One of our favorite quotes is “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response.”

Meditations (Marcus Aurelius, Gregory Hays translation)

A timeless collection of private notes from a Roman emperor, this classic book distills Stoic practices for focusing on what you can control and letting go of the rest. Startup founders will find concise, repeatable mental habits for staying grounded when growth, ego, or external noise threaten to knock them off course.

The Things They Carried (Tim O’Brien)

A powerful examination of what people carry into high-stakes environments – from talismans and letters to trauma and hope – and how those burdens shape their choices. For startup leaders, it offers a nuanced lens on team psychology, camaraderie, and how the stories we tell ourselves often blur the line between fact and memory – and ultimately shape our reality.

Wherever You Go, There You Are (Jon Zabat-Zinn)

Centered on the idea that your mind always travels with you, the book reframes mindfulness as a way of inhabiting daily life rather than an escape from it. Founders will find a sustainable approach to managing stress, staying present with their teams, and making decisions from clarity instead of chronic urgency.