Books that will help you learn the art and science of building a software business
Guidance for Running a Startup
1. Startup CEO: A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Business
Being a startup CEO is a job like no other: it’s difficult, risky, stressful, lonely, and often learned through trial and error. As a startup CEO seeing things for the first time, you’re likely to make mistakes, fail, get things wrong, and feel like you don’t have any control over outcomes.
Author Matt Blumberg has been there, and in Startup CEO he shares his experience, mistakes, and lessons learned as he guided Return Path from a handful of employees and no revenues to over $100 million in revenues and 500 employees.
Startup CEO is not a memoir of Return Path’s 20-year journey but a thoughtful CEO-focused book that provides first-time CEOs with advice, tools, and approaches for the situations that startup CEOs will face.
You’ll learn:
- How to tell your story to new hires, investors, and customers for greater alignment
- How to create a values-based culture for speed and engagement
- How to create business and personal operating systems so that you can balance your life and grow your company at the same time
- How to develop, lead, and leverage your board of directors for greater impact
- How to ensure that your company is bought, not sold, when you exit
Startup CEO is the field guide every CEO needs throughout the growth of their company.
2. Hot Seat: The Startup CEO Guidebook
What avoidable problem destroys more young startups than any other?
Why is it a mistake to ask for introductions to investors?
When do you play the CEO card?
Should you sell out?
Author and four-time founder/CEO Dan Shapiro tells the stories of dozens of startups whose companies lived and died by the advice in these pages. From inception to destruction and triumph to despair, this rollercoaster read takes aspiring entrepreneurs from the highs of billion-dollar payouts and market-smashing success to the depths of impostor syndrome and bankruptcy.
Hot Seat is divided into the five phases of the startup CEO experience:
- Founding explains how to formulate your idea, allocate equity, and not argue yourself to death
- Funding provides the keys to venture capital, angels, and crowdfunding, plus clear advice on which approach to choose
- Leadership lays out a path to build a strategy and culture for your team that will survive good times and bad
- Management reveals how to manage your board, argue with your team, and play the CEO card
- Endgame explains how to finish a company’s existence with grace, wealth, and minimal litigation
3. The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done
The measure of the executive, Peter F. Drucker reminds us, is the ability to “get the right things done.” This usually involves doing what other people have overlooked as well as avoiding what is unproductive. Intelligence, imagination, and knowledge may all be wasted in an executive job without the acquired habits of mind that mold them into results.
Drucker identifies five practices essential to business effectiveness that can, and must, be learned:
- Managing time
- Choosing what to contribute to the organization
- Knowing where and how to mobilize strength for best effect
- Setting the right priorities
- Knitting all of them together with effective decision-making
Ranging widely through the annals of business and government, Peter F. Drucker demonstrates the distinctive skill of the executive and offers fresh insights into old and seemingly obvious business situations.
4. The 4 Disciplines of Execution: Achieving Your Wildly Important Goals
Do you remember the last major initiative you watched die in your organization? Did it go down with a loud crash? Or was it slowly and quietly suffocated by other competing priorities? By the time it finally disappeared, it’s likely no one even noticed. What happened?
Often, the answer is that the “whirlwind” of urgent activity required to keep things running day-to-day devoured all the time and energy you needed to invest in executing your strategy for tomorrow. The 4 Disciplines of Execution can change that forever.
The 4 Disciplines of Execution (4DX) is a simple, repeatable, and proven formula for executing your most important strategic priorities in the midst of the whirlwind. By following the 4 Disciplines—Focus on the Wildly Important; Act on Lead Measures; Keep a Compelling Scoreboard; Create a Cadence of Accountability—leaders can produce breakthrough results, even when executing the strategy requires a significant change in behavior from their teams.
4DX is not theory. It is a proven set of practices that have been tested and refined by hundreds of organizations and thousands of teams over many years. When a company or an individual adheres to these disciplines, they achieve superb results, regardless of the goal. 4DX represents a new way to think and work that is essential to thriving in today’s competitive climate. The 4 Disciplines of Execution is one book that no business leader can afford to miss.
5. The Introvert Entrepreneur: Amplify Your Strengths and Create Success on Your Own Terms
Think you have to be loud and brash to be successful in business? Think again. The strengths and traits of the typical introvert lend themselves well to entrepreneurship, as well as “intrapreneurship” and a range of business roles. In The Introvert Entrepreneur, professional coach Beth Buelow shows readers how to harness their natural gifts (including curiosity, independence, and a love of research) and counteract their challenges (such as an aversion to networking and self-promotion). She addresses a wide range of topics –from managing fears and expectations and developing a growth mindset to networking, marketing, leadership skills, and community-building–informed by interviews with introverts who have created successful businesses without compromising their core personality.
Filled with fresh insights and actionable advice, this essential guide will support anyone who’s striving to make a difference in a loud and chaotic world.
6. Enough Talk Just Do: How to turn your ideas into realities
A Beginner’s step by step guide to the journey of launching a Successful Business. Have you ever wondered how some people just manage to get stuff done and convert their ideas and dreams into realities? What is their secret, and is it really all that simple? The answer is yes if you just stop talking and start doing.
Enough Talk, Just Do is your ultimate guide to achieving your goals by becoming a ‘Doer’ (rather than a ‘Talker’) It doesn’t matter how you do it, it doesn’t matter where you start; what matters is that you do start. The power that opens doors lies in the act of doing – that is where you will uncover the magic. This book is written for people who want to take that entrepreneurial leap and are prepared to build the plane on the way down. All it takes is an idea and a little courage. So if you’re ready to get started, this book is for you. Here you will find concepts, thoughts, and practical information designed to challenge your thinking and help you to spring into action. After all, isn’t that what you’re after?
7. The 80/20 Principle: The Secret to Achieving More with Less
Be more effective with less effort by learning how to identify and leverage the 80/20 principle: that 80 percent of all our results in business and in life stem from a mere 20 percent of our efforts.
The 80/20 principle is one of the great secrets of highly effective people and organizations.
Did you know, for example, that 20 percent of customers account for 80 percent of revenues? That 20 percent of our time accounts for 80 percent of the work we accomplish? The 80/20 Principle shows how we can achieve much more with much less effort, time, and resources, simply by identifying and focusing our efforts on the 20 percent that really counts. Although the 80/20 principle has long influenced today’s business world, author Richard Koch reveals how the principle works and shows how we can use it in a systematic and practical way to vastly increase our effectiveness, and improve our careers and our companies.
The unspoken corollary to the 80/20 principle is that little of what we spend our time on actually counts. But by concentrating on those things that do, we can unlock the enormous potential of the magic 20 percent, and transform our effectiveness in our jobs, our careers, our businesses, and our lives.
8. Impact Mapping: Making a big impact with software products and projects
Software is everywhere today, but countless software products and projects die a slow death without ever making any impact. The result is a tremendous amount of time and money wasted due to wrong assumptions, lack of focus, poor communication of objectives, lack of understanding and misalignment with overall goals. There has to be a better way to deliver!
This handbook is a practical guide to impact mapping, a simple yet incredibly effective method for collaborative strategic planning that helps organisations make an impact with software. Impact mapping helps to create better plans and roadmaps that ensure alignment of business and delivery, and are easily adaptable to change. Impact mapping fits nicely into several current trends in software product management and release planning, including goal-oriented requirements engineering, frequent iterative delivery, agile and lean software methods, lean startup product development cycles, and design thinking.
Who is this book for?
The primary audience of this book are senior people involved in building software products or delivering software projects, from both business and delivery sides. This includes business sponsors and those whose responsibilities include product ownership, project oversight or portfolio management, architecture, business analysis, quality improvement and assurance and delivery.
- Business people assigned to software projects will learn how to communicate their ideas better.
- Senior product or project sponsors will learn how to communicate their assumptions more effectively to delivery teams, how to engage delivery teams to make better strategic decisions, and how to manage their project portfolio more effectively.
- Delivery teams that are already working under the umbrella of agile or lean delivery methods, and more recently lean startup ideas, will learn how to better focus deliverables and engage business sponsors and users.
- Delivery teams moving to agile or lean delivery methods will get ideas on how to address some common issues with scaling these practices, such as creating a big picture view, splitting work into small chunks that still have business value and reporting progress more meaningfully.
9. Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers
Business Model Generation is a handbook for visionaries, game changers, and challengers striving to defy outmoded business models and design tomorrow’s enterprises. If your organization needs to adapt to harsh new realities, but you don’t yet have a strategy that will get you out in front of your competitors, you need Business Model Generation.
Co-created by 470 “Business Model Canvas” practitioners from 45 countries, the book features a beautiful, highly visual, 4-color design that takes powerful strategic ideas and tools, and makes them easy to implement in your organization. It explains the most common Business Model patterns, based on concepts from leading business thinkers, and helps you reinterpret them for your own context. You will learn how to systematically understand, design, and implement a game-changing business model–or analyze and renovate an old one. Along the way, you’ll understand at a much deeper level your customers, distribution channels, partners, revenue streams, costs, and your core value proposition.
Business Model Generation features practical innovation techniques used today by leading consultants and companies worldwide, including 3M, Ericsson, Capgemini, Deloitte, and others. Designed for doers, it is for those ready to abandon outmoded thinking and embrace new models of value creation: for executives, consultants, entrepreneurs, and leaders of all organizations. If you’re ready to change the rules, you belong to “the business model generation!”
10. Value Proposition Design: How to Create Products and Services Customers Want
Value Proposition Design helps you tackle the core challenge of every business — creating compelling products and services customers want to buy. This highly practical book, paired with its online companion, will teach you the processes and tools you need to create products that sell.
Using the same stunning visual format as the authors’ global bestseller, Business Model Generation, this sequel explains how to use the “Value Proposition Canvas” to design, test, create, and manage products and services customers actually want.
Value Proposition Design is for anyone who has been frustrated by new product meetings based on hunches and intuitions; it’s for anyone who has watched an expensive new product launch fail in the market. The book will help you understand the patterns of great value propositions, get closer to customers, and avoid wasting time with ideas that won’t work. You’ll learn the simple process of designing and testing value propositions, that perfectly match customers’ needs and desires.
In addition the book gives you exclusive access to an online companion on Strategyzer.com. You will be able to assess your work, learn from peers, and download pdfs, checklists, and more.
Value Proposition Design is an essential companion to the ”Business Model Canvas” from Business Model Generation, a tool embraced globally by startups and large corporations such as MasterCard, 3M, Coca Cola, GE, Fujitsu, LEGO, Colgate-Palmolive, and many more.
Value Proposition Design gives you a proven methodology for success, with value propositions that sell, embedded in profitable business models.”
11. Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist
Get the inside scoop on what venture capitalists want to see in your startup as you hit the fundraising trail.
This is the highly anticipated third edition of the best-selling book which has become the definitive resource for understanding venture capital fundraising. Whether you are an entrepreneur, lawyer, student or just have an interest in the venture capital ecosystem, Venture Deals is for you. The book dives deeply into how deals are constructed, why certain terms matter (and others don’t), and more importantly, what motivates venture capitalists to propose certain outcomes. You’ll see the process of negotiating from the eyes of two seasoned venture capitalists who have over 40 years of investing experience as VCs, LPs, angels, and founders. They will teach you how to develop a fundraising strategy that will be a win for all parties involved.
This book is designed to bring transparency to the venture capital funding process and includes such topics as:
- How to raise money;
- What terms matter and which ones don’t;
- How to negotiate a fair deal for everyone;
- What makes venture capitalists tick, including how they are compensated and motivated;
- How companies are valued by venture capitalists;
- How all current structures of funding work, including convertible debt, crowdfunding, pre-sales and other non-traditional methods;
- How these particular issues change through different stages of financing (seed, early, mid and late); and
- How to avoid business and legal pitfalls that many entrepreneurs make.
And as in the previous editions, this book isn’t just a one-sided opinion from venture capitalists, but also has helpful commentary throughout from a veteran CEO who has raised many rounds of financing from many different investors.
If you are ready to learn all the secrets and ins and outs of fundraising, Venture Deals is an essential read.