Knowledge is power, 30 books every young entrepreneur should read | Hacker News Reader

Knowledge is power, 30 books every young entrepreneur should read

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29 pointssharpshoot25 comments

You can find summaries of some of these on my site: http://www.squeezedbooks.com

Some of them lend themselves very well to being compressed, like 'crossing the chasm'. Others, like 'founders at work' are really impossible to summarize.

I find it sort of interesting that he lists both 'The Black Swan', as well as the stories/autobiographies. One of the points of the former is that a lot of the big successes are just luck - being in the right place at the right time and having enough skills to capitalize on the opportunity. But beyond that, there is often nothing in particular that can be copied to 'achieve success'. It's an interesting book, and I'm still wrestling with it.

I haven't read The Black Swan, but I read Fooled by Randomness. He has a secondary point that because most successes are just luck and yet people don't want to admit it, there are large profit opportunities to be made by betting on improbable events. That's really entrepreneurship in a nutshell - usually, if you look at the businesses that actually net billion dollar payouts while they're younger, you'll say "There's no possible way that can succeed." And that's why the founders make so much money when they do.

(Of course, 99% of the businesses where there's no possible way it can succeed don't actually succeed, and you get back to Taleb's argument again.)

read The Black Swan - it's fantastic. It's been 3 weeks and I'm still thinking about all the implications. Also, read "Accidental Empires".

If you have to read 30 more books before starting your business, you aren't an entrepreneur, you're an academic.

That's not really true - most CEOs are voracious readers with personal libraries of thousands of volumes. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/21/business/21libraries.html. Bill Gates in particular is known as an avid bookworm - every other year, he spends a week doing nothing but reading, often for 18 hours a day. http://scout.wisc.edu/Reports/ScoutReport/2005/scout-050401-...

30 books also shouldn't take you too long. If you devote yourself to reading full-time, it should be between 10 days and 2 weeks. If you read them at a more leisurely pace (subway time, before bed, waiting for dinner to cook, other downtime), it might take you 3 months or so. Either way, the benefits - particularly with this set of books - far outweighs the costs.

(If anyone cares, I've read 12 out of the 30 on this list, and am hoping to get more out when I visit the library this afternoon.)

Hrm... yes, on the other hand, there is definitely a trait that I recognize in other people because I see it in myself, which is that of the "knowledgeable person". We take pride in knowing, in being informed, in reading a lot, but at times are less 'doers'.... Waterhouses and Shaftoes, so to speak.

To some degree, I think this trait deals with a desire to have all possible knowledge prior to taking a decision. However, at times, that sort of 'maximizing' behavior is counterproductive when compared with someone who gathers 'enough' information, and plunges ahead.

I also tend to lean too far to the "Waterhouse" side of the spectrum.

I think a lot of the problem is that people are mentally adding "before you start your startup" to the title, when nobody's actually said so. There's no such thing as "prepared enough" to start a company; you learn what you can and prepare as best you can, then just do it and clean up your messes along the way. The books above will probably help, and some may change how you position your initial idea, but it's not gonna kill you to read them after getting started.

"Bill Gates in particular is known as an avid bookworm - every other year, he spends a week doing nothing but reading, often for 18 hours a day."

how many weeks do you think he took off to read while microsoft was still a startup?

I think PG mentions this in one of his articles, but if you read 'How to Win Friends and Influence People', get the original edition from the 1930s. It only costs 3 bucks or so on Amazon, and it's better than the newer ones. I highly recommend this book - it can be a true revelation for us technical types.

In what way is the older version better?

The newer versions have been modified by committee, probably to remove politically incorrect elements and 'contemporize' the book. It's understandable, I guess - the original was published during the Jim Crow era, and not very long after women's suffrage, so it has some eye-opening passages by our standards. The ideas expressed in the book also contradict much modern psychology and moral fashion.

Unfortunately the editors of new versions removed or changed valuable stuff along with the 'anachronistic' elements. A smart reader should be able to deal with the original version without getting offended.

I think the biggest reason to read the original, though, is that most of us are too young to have ever known someone from Dale Carnegie's generation in person. For instance, the oldest people I've ever been able to talk to were born circa 1900 or so - Carnegie is a full generation older. Mark Twain was still writing when Carnegie was a young man, think about that. Edison and Westinghouse were still duking it out over AC/DC.

Carnegie is old, but not nearly as old as Plato or Galileo or Augustine or someone you might read in college. Reading stuff written by people from his era is eye-opening because if you 'look around the edges' you get a glimpse of what things were like 100 years ago. The world has changed so much since their time, yet so little. Just the austerity of ordinary peoples' lives before the US became a superpower is amazing by our blinged-out standards.

It's useful for entrepreneurs, especially in tech, to have an expansive view of recent history. Also, it's just plain interesting. Is Carnegie's original book an anachronism? I don't think it is. I hope this makes some sense.

I'm tired of all these books and articles. A lot of them are fun to read, but it seems like nowadays you spend more time reading than doing. Is it really a prerequisite for any entrepreneur to read so much?

You aren't going to work productively on your startup for every waking hour of every day anyway. So why not use some of the unproductive time to be productive in a different way, by reading and expanding your mind?

No. But it helps.

Listing 30 "must read" books is great, but nowhere in the article does he state his credentials. Is he part of a successful start-up? If so why doesn't he say so? If not why would I read the same books that have not helped him?

I'd read a subset of the list (say 5-8), and try building a startup. After all, you learn the lessons so much better if you learn it from doing.The 5-8 books give you an idea of what lies ahead.

Seems like a pretty good list, but do we really need to hear the google story (again) or give a damn about who backed Webvan?

If you've read those books sure, but i think its really important to understand the history behind some of these great companies.

Really depends on your perspective - i got a lot of comfort out of immersing myself into those books during depressing times.

eBoys gives you an interesting perspective on the venture capital industry from an outsiders perspective, so i think a vanilla statement like 'give a damn about who backed webvan' may not apply to people who genuinely don't know about it or haven't read the book.

What books do u like aswanson?

Sharp,

Meant no disrespect to the post, like I said before about 94 percent seem to be good. I am just suffering from a case of google fatigue and am tired of hearing/reading about that company.

You are right, as an outsider it probably would be good to read about eboys. I just think that the VCs during that era don't deserve much veneration or ink because they just seemed to pump money into almost any half-baked idea.

I have been sort of schizophrenic in my reading habits lately, trying to make it through "The Road To Reality" (Penrose), Foundation (Rand), and Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (Cassirer). I also intend to read most of the books on the list you posted.

You don't have time to read 30 books when you're starting a company. I hardly even have time to write this comment.

so many books. such little time.

Nice list. I've read about 1/2 of them. But IMO, the best one to start with would be "How to Get Rich" by Felix Dennis.

Reading is good. Correction. Reading is GR8. The only issue is that you have a few hours in a day to focus on your startup and you tend to translate any minutes and hours into features and debugging, thus sparing 20 hours for a book can be an issue. Also one issue is that 95% of books in any given category are mostly copy and paste books. What I suggest is to ask 3 people you consider as role models WHAT BOOK WOULD YOU RECOMMEND? You will end up with 5 or 6 titles, but they will be way more helpful. If you admired me I would suggest "THE MYTHICAL MAN MONTH" "WORLD IS FLAT" , and I have not read the following one but every one here talks about it "FOUNDERS AT WORK"

"The only issue is that you have a few hours in a day to focus on your startup and you tend to translate any minutes and hours into features and debugging"

I've found that they don't directly compete. I usually read books when I'm a.) mentally spent and unable to work on much of anything intellectually or b.) in a place where I don't have a computer, eg. the subway. If I weren't reading I'd probably be watching TV or posting on news.YC or something like that.

Also - I'd highly recommend against reading only 5-6 titles on a subject. You want that 95% overlap, because the point of reading books isn't to gather information (there's Google for that...), it's to train your gut instinct with other people's mistakes. All books are highly contextual - after all, other people's advice is only relevant when their situation is similar to yours - so you need to triangulate between them and figure out what's relevant in which situations. You're trying to develop the intuition that says "No, this is a bad idea" when you're about to do something stupid, and the way to do that is to read enough about stupid things other people have done that your mode of thinking shifts you away from that.

You know you've succeeded when you forget your sources.

I agree partially, I am not saying that you shouldn't read the most you can. I used to read one book a week. I found that when you read different subject, then that is good, but when you read the same subject over and over again, you usually end up with the same data or you end up with so much information that you can hardly act up on it. Reading to learn about entrepreneurship is good, but DOING is much better and I still believe that reading 40 books about "lisp" is not going to make you better than reading 5 great ones and using the rest of your time practicing. Although the point of reading is not solely to gather information, it automatically comes with it. The server between our ears stores it all. No delete. Rarely. At the end if you want to read 30 books that are truly valuable to you, then read HISTORY before and after the major World War and Market crashes. Read about Ricardo competitive advantage theory.

Success alone is word we shall use with care. Successful at is better. And you are successful when your grandkids' kids read about you (of course in a positive manner) in their class. Most likely you won't be here to know that you have succeeded.

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