Reading List

There’s a lot of wisdom packaged up in dead trees and digits,  much of it available for free or at your local library or for download. However, until cognitive implant technology reaches maturity, there is no substitute for spending the time to read, watch and listen.

The good news is that a lot of the wisdom out there is presented with wit, style and sagacity. We recommend setting aside a couple of weeks on your own to do this, simultaneously becoming good friends with a beach and the world’s finest coffee beans.

 

Here is our pick of the crop

Essentials:

• The Art of the Start by Guy Kawasaki
• The Lean Startup by Eric Ries
• The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development – Brant Cooper and Patrick Vlaskovits
• Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey A. Moore
• Rocket Surgery Made Easy: The Do-It-Yourself Guide to Finding and Fixing usability Problems by Steve Krug
• Running Lean: Iterate from Plan A to a Plan That Works by Ash Maurya
• Venture Hacks: The Option Pool Shuffle

If you have the time:

• Anything You Want – Derek Sivers
• Startups Open Sourced – Jared Tame
• Business Model Generation – Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Peignoir
• Paul Graham’s essays
• Hackers and Painters – Paul Graham
• The Innovator’s Solution by Clayton M. Christensen
• The E-Myth Revisited – Michael E. Gerber
• The E-Myth Enterprise – Michael E. Gerber
• Tools and Blogs for Entrepreneurs – Steve Blank
• Founders at Work – Jessica Livingston
• Free: the future of a radical price – Chris Anderson
• The Cluetrain Manifesto – Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls and David Weinberger
• The Monk and the Riddle: The Education of a Silicon Valley Entrepreneur by Randy Komisar and Kent L. Lineback
• Don’t Make Me Think: A Common-Sense Approach to Web Usability – Steve Krug
• The Founder’s Dilemmas by Noam Wasserman

Articles:

• Venture Deals by Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson
• An Introduction to Stock Options for the Tech Entrepreneur of Startup Employee by David Weekly
• Diffusion of Innovations by Everett M. Rogers
• The Startup Owner’s Manual
• Startups Open Sourced
• Free Agent Nation

If you are a developer:

• Agile Development.
• How the Frogs Invented Vesting
• Startup Genome Report and a blog post calling for Domain Experts
  

If you are a business person:

• Harvard Business Review – 10 Must-Read Essentials
• Saras Sarasvathy
• Cynefin Framework

Procrastination Fodder:
Would you rather read about startups than actually work on your own? Being procrastinators ourselves, we have so much sympathy for this demographic that that we offer a third set of readings.

• Founders at Work
• The Education of a Millionaire
• Forbes: Why ‘Shared Value’ Can’t Fix Capitalism
• Forbes: The Rise of Developernomics
• Both Sides of the Table: Understanding How The Innovator’s Dilemma Affects You
• Both Sides of the Table: The Amazong Power of Deflationary Economics for Startups
• Wired Magazine: Why Black Market Entrepreneurs Matter to the World Economy
• Oh My God What Happened and What Should I Do? – Leif Abraham & Christian Behrendt
• So you’d like to… Start a Silicon Valley Dot-Com
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_as_Debt

Presentations:

• TechStars – Being Sure

How do I get my hands on these books?

Most are available on Kindle. You can check them out of the JFDI library or the National Library. Or you can just buy them. Yes, you might have to spend your own money. How can you expect to raise $500,000 from strangers for a company that you’re not willing to put $500 into?

 

This page is part of JFDI.Asia’s archive of Frequently Asked Questions on innovation and entrepreneurship. For more, Read The Frogging Manual. If you’re here because someone at JFDI gave you a link, please don’t be offended. We get a lot of questions from people, and these pages are the best way we have found to offer a comprehensive, helpful response. If your question remains unanswered, please post it to our OpenFrog Community and we will compile the best of the answers here.