Books & sources

Everything we reference, with a one-paragraph summary of each.

The Lean Startup

Eric Ries

Treat your startup like a series of experiments. Build a small version, measure how real people react, learn, and adjust fast instead of guessing for months.

Zero to One

Peter Thiel with Blake Masters

Great companies create something new rather than copying. Aim to own a small market completely, then grow out from there.

The Mom Test

Rob Fitzpatrick

How to talk to customers without getting fooled by polite lies. Ask about their real past behaviour, not their opinion of your idea.

The Four Steps to the Epiphany

Steve Blank

The origin of 'customer development': discover, validate, create demand, then build the company — in that order.

The Hard Thing About Hard Things

Ben Horowitz

An honest look at the painful parts of running a company: layoffs, firing friends, near-death moments, and keeping going.

High Output Management

Andrew S. Grove

Intel's former CEO explains management as a production system: focus on the activities that multiply your team's output.

Crossing the Chasm

Geoffrey A. Moore

Early fans are not the same as the mainstream market. There's a gap ('the chasm') between them, and you cross it by dominating one niche first.

Traction

Gabriel Weinberg & Justin Mares

Lists 19 ways to get customers and gives a simple method (Bullseye) to test them and focus on the one that works.

Business Model Generation

Alexander Osterwalder & Yves Pigneur

Introduces the Business Model Canvas: one page with nine boxes that shows how a business makes, delivers and earns from value.

Running Lean

Ash Maurya

A step-by-step playbook for applying lean ideas, including the Lean Canvas, a one-page startup plan.

Competing Against Luck

Clayton M. Christensen et al.

Explains 'Jobs to Be Done': people don't buy products, they hire them to make progress in their lives.

The Innovator's Dilemma

Clayton M. Christensen

Why great, well-run companies get beaten by small newcomers with 'worse' but cheaper, simpler products.

Rework

Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hansson

Short, punchy essays arguing you can build a business with less: less planning, less funding, less busywork.

Venture Deals

Brad Feld & Jason Mendelson

Plain explanations of term sheets, valuation and how venture capital deals actually work.

Good to Great

Jim Collins

Research on companies that made the leap from average to outstanding, including 'first who, then what'.

The E-Myth Revisited

Michael E. Gerber

Most small businesses fail because the owner is stuck doing the work. Build systems so the business can run without you.

Lean Analytics

Alistair Croll & Benjamin Yoskovitz

Which numbers to watch at each stage of a startup, and the idea of focusing on One Metric That Matters.

Do Things That Don't Scale

Paul Graham

Early on, recruit users by hand and over-serve them. Scalable systems come later.

The Only Thing That Matters

Marc Andreessen

The essay that popularised 'product/market fit' and argued it's the one thing that decides a startup's fate.

$100M Offers

Alex Hormozi

How to make an offer so good people feel stupid saying no, using a simple 'value equation'.

Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion

Robert B. Cialdini

The classic research on why people say yes: reciprocity, commitment, social proof, authority, liking and scarcity.

Hooked

Nir Eyal

The Hook Model: how products build habits through triggers, actions, variable rewards and investment.

Start with Why

Simon Sinek

Inspiring companies communicate from the inside out: why they exist, then how, then what.

Blue Ocean Strategy

W. Chan Kim & Renée Mauborgne

Stop fighting rivals in crowded 'red oceans'. Create new demand in uncontested 'blue oceans'.

Obviously Awesome

April Dunford

A practical method for positioning: making it obvious why your product is the best choice for a specific customer.

Measure What Matters

John Doerr

How Intel, Google and others use OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) to focus and align teams.

Never Split the Difference

Chris Voss with Tahl Raz

A former FBI hostage negotiator's techniques: tactical empathy, mirroring, labelling and calibrated questions.

SPIN Selling

Neil Rackham

Research on 35,000 sales calls showing big deals are won by asking Situation, Problem, Implication and Need-payoff questions.

The Cold Start Problem

Andrew Chen

How products with network effects get started, grow and defend themselves — starting with one small 'atomic network'.

Thinking in Bets

Annie Duke

A former poker champion on making smart decisions when you can't know everything — and not judging decisions only by results.

Thinking, Fast and Slow

Daniel Kahneman

Our minds run on a fast, intuitive System 1 and a slow, careful System 2 — and the fast one makes predictable mistakes.

Sprint

Jake Knapp, John Zeratsky & Braden Kowitz

Google Ventures' five-day process for answering big questions by prototyping and testing with real customers.

Radical Candor

Kim Scott

Be a great boss by caring personally while challenging directly.

Company of One

Paul Jarvis

Why staying small, profitable and independent can be a smarter goal than growing at all costs.

The Personal MBA

Josh Kaufman

A plain-English crash course in business fundamentals, from value creation to finance.

Inspired

Marty Cagan

How the best tech companies discover and build products customers love, by tackling the biggest risks early.

Only the Paranoid Survive

Andrew S. Grove

How to spot and survive 'strategic inflection points' — moments when the rules of your industry suddenly change.

Blitzscaling

Reid Hoffman & Chris Yeh

When and how to grow extremely fast, prioritising speed over efficiency in a race to win a big market — and the risks of doing so.

Deep Work

Cal Newport

The ability to focus without distraction on hard tasks is rare and valuable — and you can train it.

$100M Leads

Alex Hormozi

Lead generation broken into four core channels (warm outreach, content, cold outreach, paid ads) and the 'Rule of 100'.

Building a StoryBrand

Donald Miller

Clarify your message by making the customer the hero of the story and your brand the guide.