Startups
An annotated collection of 5 books & articles on startups, spanning 2005 to 2014. Featuring works by Steve Blank, Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hansson, Vinod Khosla (interview by TechCrunch) and 2 more — each with editorial commentary oriented to digital product practice.
The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Products that Win
The book that coined the discipline of customer development and seeded everything "lean startup" later systematised. Blank's claim is that startups fail not because of bad products but because they sell to the wrong cust…
Rework
Fried and DHH compressed 37signals' operating philosophy into short, aphoristic chapters — the book's format is a deliberate rejection of the business-book norm. The arguments are contrarian in a calculated way: no meeti…
Vinod Khosla: 70-80% Of VCs Add Negative Value To Startups
Khosla's notorious TechCrunch interview in which he argued, from the perspective of someone who had run a successful venture firm for decades, that most VCs actively subtract value from the startups they invest in — thro…
The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers
Horowitz wrote the book for CEOs going through the specific kinds of pain that are not covered in business school — firing executives, laying off staff, competing while nearly insolvent, managing your own psychology unde…
Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
Thiel's argument is simple and polarising: genuinely new companies create monopolies by doing something no one else is doing, and "competition" in the conventional sense is a sign that everyone is copying each other. The…