The Best Startup Books You've Never Heard Of
The hidden gems that provide great advice as well as anecdotes that backup their guidance.
When working in the startup world, reading anecdotes and advice from winners in the field helps solidify and absorb experiences you’re going through.
Books and podcasts on business and startup development are dominating the internet. The Lean Startup and 4-hour Work Week are reads that are considered classics for giving insights into internet businesses. As great as these are, some books I’ve found to be the most helpful and entertaining for me, have been those I’ve not heard many people talk about at all.
As well as these hidden gems providing fantastic advice, I have found them to be fun reads for anyone building, working in or having a general interest in startups.
The Agile Startup by Jeff Sheinrock and Matt Richter-Sand
I was given this book back in 2016 by my uncle. The only downside to this book is having a name similar to “The Lean Startup” (another great read, but too well-known for this article), as it deserves to be more recognised.
The book gives short-form, easy-to-absorb advice that goes into enough detail to provide the reader with strong knowledge on key areas of business. It does so in a style unrecognisable to the style one would associate with business literature, including cartoon images on each point it makes.
It’s a comprehensive guide that includes clear instructions on everything from marketing, team-building, how to pitch and more.
Key lessons I took from the book include:
Asking people’s thoughts about an idea you have is better done in “stealth”, where the individual you’re asking has no idea it’s your idea.
This removes any excitement a friend or family may be blinded by when offering their opinion on something you’re working on.
The theory and break-down of how an advisory board can be assembled, how they would contribute to the company, and how you would allocate a share package for them.
How raising money, although very exciting, is a milestone founders should celebrate with caution - it’s the beginning of a journey and the work is just beginning at that point.
At the time of reading this book, I was wireframing a group-project-management app, similar to Slack, that is aimed at University students. Every university colleague of mine that I mentioned loved the sound of it and said they would absolutely download an app like that to organise projects and hold accountability of every group member of projects moving forward.
The first time I carried out Key Lesson 1 mentioned, and reframed my question to something like this:
“Hey I heard there’s this up and coming app that’s aimed at project management, but for University group projects”
The responses changed drastically. Suddenly, without the adrenaline of this being a friend’s idea, they would respond with the valuable insight of “well there’s enough work to be doing at university, downloading and learning a new tool isn’t worth it even for the pain-points it’s solving”. This advice, although sobering, was really something that I needed to hear moving forward.
The Agile Startup is a comprehensive guide I’ve brought up in conversations several times, and I revisit regularly.
That Will Never Work by Marc Randolph
During lockdown I was watching a podcast with Gary Vee and the co-founder and first CEO of Netflix, Marc Randolph, where the latter was promoting his book “That Will Never Work”.
Anecdotes and stories about the early days of big companies have always felt the most valuable to me so at the time it was worth the read.
The book is less of 101 of startups when compared to Agile Startup, but more of a written documentary of a company that so many people use today, from a co-founder’s perspective. Randolph is honest and at times extremely humble, taking the reader through the entire journey, from brainstorming ideas with his co-founder Reed Hastings, right through to Netflix’s IPO.
I found that the book was not as easy to flow and digest as others, but the content and stories made up for it in my opinion.
Randolph is extremely honest in what he struggled with throughout the process, but also provides strong insights into building businesses.
Key Insights I got from the book included:
The influence of the time the company was founded, in 1997 during the dot-com-boom. The co-founders knew they wanted to create an internet business, and seeing so many others fail around them, while they also went through periods of generous funding made for their own challenges as well as advantages.
Although we’re several years on from here, we can see parallels in different “booms” since, e.g. social media, NFTs, AI.
The importance of breaking down ideas into first principles and testing them quickly and cheaply.
One of the first questions they had was whether or not DVD’s could be posted in the mail without being damaged (also a very interesting reminder of how Netflix started out before streaming), so they went about testing it as simply as they could - posting a DVD in the post.
Although it may seem trivial, the book expands on telling the readers the importance of testing ideas in a way that’s affordable.
How their idea for a subscription model arrived way after they launched! The way they arrived there, and the challenges to get it working profitably were very interesting.
At the time of reading, I was buying and selling football cards on eBay, and Key Insight 2 inspired me to see what part of the buying and selling process I can test affordably and do better in the long-run. Examples include putting emphasis on card quality in the images, having product descriptions written concisely and testing delivery pricing.
For anyone who enjoys podcasts or books of founder stories, this is one for you.
Build by Tony Fadell
I have saved my favourite until last with this one, as it is the best startup book I’ve read in my opinion, as a hardware engineer, working with physical products. While I was working as an Electronics Engineer at Stix Mindfulness, co-founder and CEO of the company Liam sent me a podcast where Tony Fadell is a guest on (more on this later) and later he and I both became evangelists of his book Build.
Tony Fadell is an engineer, product designer and entrepreneur who created the iPod, co-created the iPhone and founded Nest. He also spent some of the early days of his career working at the iconic General Magic.
Fadell has said how when writing Build, he wanted it to act as a mentor for people in their careers, and in my opinion he couldn’t have achieved his goal any better.
The book is a blend of advice with supported anecdotes - a recipe in my opinion for a strong learning resource.
The lessons (backed up with Fadell’s own experiences) span several key areas, from where to work at the beginning of your career, what to expect with different types of product releases, how to handle working with “assholes” and how to correctly carry out commission-based sales.
The key insights from this book were:
The value of working at a company, not for perks or salary, but for what you’ll learn and who you’ll learn with. It must be noted that this message can be misinterpreted, but the obvious prerequisite is that the advice is for people who can afford to do so.
How the first release of a hardware product is really for technology enthusiasts. People who are happy to test a product out they know is not refined.
The second product release (or a version 2) should take into account the various changes that should be made to the product that became obvious after its release. Fadell says that the third version of the product is where the company should look to make a profit from the technology.
The reason for it taking three iterations are down to product iterations, unit economics and supplying at larger quantities.
Fadell talks about how commission typically works by a salesperson receiving commission as soon as a sale is made.
He says how in his eyes commission should be vested, and therefore optimised for customer retention and satisfaction.
Fadell also appeared on Lex Fridmann’s Podcast which I have linked here.
The podcast he appears on, is truly one of the best podcasts I’ve listened to. If you do not have as much time to read this book, but feel the lessons could be quite valuable, I recommend giving the podcast a listen. It talks about what you would expect he would discuss on a podcast, like what it was like working with Steve Jobs, as well as Fadell’s experience working at General Magic, which if you have not heard of, is an incredible case study of technology development.
As mentioned earlier, I was working at Stix Mindfulness at the time of reading Build, and it came at a time a few months before the hard-launch of our product.
Too many things in the book resonate with me, but the most important lesson I remember feeling at the time was how important it is to work somewhere with a good team, launching a product everyone is passionate about to learn and develop as much as possible.