The books.

Y Combinator's co-founder interviews founders about their first days, before anyone knew how the story ended.

What separated the companies that made the leap: humble leaders, the right people first, and the flywheel.

People don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it. The TED talk, at book length.

Is this idea worth quitting your job for? Answer that before you quit.

The authorised biography, written with Jobs's cooperation and without his editing. Both editions on the shelf.

Six skills shared by the founders of fast-growing companies, from two hundred interviews.

Where customer development began. Dense, and still the book the lean-startup shelf is built on.

The part the other books leave out: laying off friends, running out of money, being CEO when nothing works. Two Russian translations on the shelf.

Why well-run companies lose to worse products. The question every corporate venture arm exists to answer.

Build, measure, learn. The book that gave everyone the words 'MVP' and 'pivot', for better and worse.

Customer development as a step-by-step manual: the checklist version of The Four Steps.

Y Combinator's short playbook: a great idea, a great team, a great product and great execution, in that order.

Competition is for losers: find the secret nobody else believes and build a monopoly on something small and new.

Aim for ten times, not twice. The bigger goal forces you to drop most of what you do and keep the part only you can do.

A Valley investor's field manual for the whole arc, idea to exit, written for founders who weren't born in the Valley.

Not a business book at all: a tour of the world's oddest corners. Good for the imagination between spreadsheets.

Stop fighting over the same customers. Make the competition irrelevant by opening a market nobody's in yet.

The iPod and Nest man on making things, hiring, firing and staying sane, in short chapters you can read in any order.

Two fired managers build Home Depot, mostly by being obsessive about the customer standing in the aisle.

The Business Model Canvas: nine boxes that make you say what the business actually is. Half the decks we see skipped it.

People who've sat through thousands of pitches on the mistakes that sink most of them. Worth an evening before the deck, not after.

IDEO's founders on the idea that everyone is creative, and the exercises that get it back when a job has worn it off.

Pixar's co-founder on protecting ideas while they're still ugly. The best book on running creative teams we know.

161 artists and thinkers, and what they actually did all day. Reassuring: a good many of them napped.

IDEO's CEO on design thinking as a way to run a company, not just a studio.

MIT's 24 steps from idea to scalable company, in order. The nearest thing to a syllabus for a first startup.

The exercises that go with the 24 steps. Do them in a team, with a whiteboard and no laptops.

The 24 steps worked through real companies, so you can see where each one went right or sideways.

A small Do Book on finding your way and making a living from the things you'd make anyway.

A short, practical Do Book on leading: share the vision, then get out of the way.

The talk you've always wanted to give, in a book you'll finish on one train ride.

A road map for growing a company without it growing out of your control.

Unapologetic rules for disruption from an ex-hedge-fund man: productivity wins, and most of the rest is noise.

The biography, rockets and all. Read it for the method; argue about the man afterwards.

The industrial job is ending; start thinking like an entrepreneur before you quit yours.

On handing wealth and values to the next generation without spoiling either.

The Dartmouth founders' network guide: the practical steps from an idea to a funded company.

A scientist and a twenty-eight-year-old venture capitalist invent the biotech industry in a few messy years.

An operating system for a business that has outgrown its founder's memory.

Givers finish last, and first, and generosity done with your eyes open turns out to be a strategy.

A survey of the world's best-known portfolio strategies, and the awkward finding that they end up much the same.

Most 'strategy' is a list of goals. Rumelt shows the real thing: a diagnosis, a guiding policy, and actions that fit together.

Why some companies thrive in chaos: discipline, creativity checked against evidence, and a healthy dose of paranoia.

Graham's essays from before Y Combinator: on makers, wealth, and why nerds weren't popular.

Short essays on deciding what's worth doing. If it isn't a hell yeah, it's a no.

Intel's CEO on management as production: meetings, one-on-ones, leverage. The book founders hand their first managers.

The five stages of decline, starting with the hubris that success breeds. Best read while things are going well.

Honest, practical advice for people with jobs on making the working day less miserable, whoever the boss is.

The six principles of persuasion, from the psychologist who went undercover in sales jobs to find them.

Intercom's founders on the first years: what to build, whom to hire, and when to say no.

The 80/20 principle applied to a life rather than a spreadsheet.

A memoir of losing a father and finding a wife in the same stretch of years. Not about business; about everything else.

A new role, handled properly: a playbook for each kind of move, from promotion to turnaround to a new company.

Personal branding from before it was a cliché: four steps to building a name for yourself.

The history of hedge funds, and a fair case that they were less the villains of the crash than people assume.

Networking as generosity: build the relationships long before you need them. Founders Coffee in book form.

Babson's classic textbook on starting a venture: the opportunity, the team and the money, in that order.

Netflix's founder and the author of The Culture Map on freedom and responsibility: pay top of market, then take the rules away.

Grove on strategic inflection points, the moments when the ground moves and yesterday's plan quietly stops working.

More buyers than you can serve, on purpose. A waiting list, it turns out, sells better than a discount.

A seed investor on why the startups that change the future look wrong at first, and how to spot the inflection they're riding.

Take the profit first and run the business on what's left. Simple, slightly annoying, and it works.

Companies run on self-management, wholeness and purpose, and the real ones already doing it.

The Basecamp founders against meetings, growth for its own sake and most business advice. Short chapters, sharp elbows.

Tight cultures and loose ones, and how the difference explains nations, companies and your co-founder. Culture Codes' cousin.

Two founders with a team across the world on running a company where nobody shares a room.

An accountant's four keys to a profitable small business, starting with paying yourself a proper salary.

Apple's former evangelist on starting anything: make meaning, then make money. Russian edition on the shelf.

The Boulder thesis: a startup community has to be led by founders and in it for the long haul. The book behind half of ours.

Studios that build several startups at once: how they're set up, funded and run.

The exercises that go with Maxwell's 21 laws, for anyone who'd rather practise leading than read about it.

A therapist and a conductor on giving everyone an A in advance, and other small shifts that change a room.

Fifty models for thinking through a decision, each on a page with a drawing. Keep it by the desk.

Thirty-three laws of business and life from the podcast's host and the guests he's argued with.

Why most small businesses don't work: the founder is a technician doing a manager's job. Work on the business, not in it.

Drucker's short classic: effectiveness can be learned, and it starts with knowing where your time actually goes.

A small parable about giving more value than you take. An hour to read, and remembered for longer.

A novel about a failing factory that teaches the theory of constraints: find the bottleneck, and everything else waits on it.

The index fund's inventor makes his case: own the whole market, keep costs low, and stop trying to be clever.

An argument against getting rich slowly: build something that scales instead of saving for forty years.

On self-sabotage, and the uncomfortable idea that the obstacle is usually the person climbing.

A consultant who left the well-paid track on building a working life that isn't a ladder.

The core ideas of a business degree in one book, for the price of one book.

Startup Communities, eight years on: why ecosystems are complex systems, and why nobody gets to run one.

The Lean Startup author on bringing the method inside big companies, with GE as the case study.

A student talks his way into meeting Bill Gates, Lady Gaga and others to ask how they started. Cheek as a career strategy.

A lawyer's short guide to using legal thinking in business without becoming the person nobody wants in the meeting.

A monograph on the flywheel from Good to Great: find your loop, then push it the same way for a very long time.

A serial founder on using passion and perseverance to build a company from what you already know.

A restaurant becomes the world's best by giving guests more than was sensible. Service lessons for any business.

Nine patterns behind outsized success, drawn from the lives of the people who had it.

The Fastlane author's follow-up: stop living by the script of job, mortgage, retirement.

User research and design for teams with no designer and no time. Test the idea before you polish the pixels.

Short takes on entrepreneurship in a connected world, from a group of founders and investors including Brad Feld.

What really motivates people: autonomy, mastery and purpose, and why bonuses often make things worse. Russian edition on the shelf.

The story of the Valley's first startup, told in Russian. There's no English edition, so this one's for the Russian shelf.

A graduate textbook for when you need to know whether the pattern in the data is really there.

Four women who made it in Silicon Valley venture capital when almost nobody else did.

An early Uber investor on angel investing: how to get into deals, what to look for, and why most will go to zero.

Things that gain from disorder, and how to be one of them. Taleb at his most useful and most combative.

Bitcoin and Ethereum as the frontier of entrepreneurship, from the years when that frontier was new.

Getting into venture capital, and thinking like an investor before anyone hires you as one.

Dubai, built out of the desert, and the dream of capitalism behind it. Useful before any trip to the Gulf.

A practical manual on car control and staying safe on the road, from Motorbooks' workshop series.

The first inside account of a venture firm, Benchmark, in the dot-com years. Partners' meetings, as they really went.

Look at the effects of a policy on everyone, over the long run. The one lesson, and a slim book.

How much of success is luck we mistake for skill. Humbling, especially after a good year.

What an early-stage company is actually worth, and why, in a guide short enough to read before the term sheet arrives.

The founding of Twitter as it happened: money, power, friendship and betrayal. A cautionary tale about co-founders.

Scaling from ten people to ten thousand, from an investor who's watched it at Twitter, Airbnb and Stripe.

The trigger, action, reward, investment loop behind habit-forming products. Use it with a conscience.

The exercises that go with Hooked, for mapping the habit loop in your own product.

Adam Smith's other book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, read as a guide to living well. The economist's softer side.

Harvard's guide to thinking about finance: cash, returns and value, for people who'd rather not be lost in the CFO's meeting.

A publishing tycoon's blunt, funny and slightly alarming account of how he made his money, and what it cost.

A serial company builder on the playbook behind seven billion-dollar companies, roll-ups included.

Personal finance on autopilot: spend lavishly on what you love, cut mercilessly what you don't.

Fooled by Randomness, The Black Swan, The Bed of Procrustes and Antifragile in one volume.

What really happened after US universities were allowed to own and license their patents. Essential for anyone working with university labs.

The Chicago Fed's own workbook on how banks create money through reserves and lending.

Design the product around the price, not the other way round. Why most launches fail on willingness to pay.

A plain guide to financial literacy: budgeting, saving and investing, from the beginning.

A poor baseball team beats rich ones by trusting data over scouts' instincts. The best book about finding mispriced talent.

The academic origin of the idea that nations innovate as systems of firms, universities and policy. The theory under every ecosystem strategy.

A graduate-level manual on building equity portfolios with models rather than hunches.

Having too little, of money or time, narrows the mind. Explains a lot about founders in their third month of runway.

Venture capital from the fund's side: LPs, fund economics, term sheets, boards.

On the money habits and beliefs people pick up early, and how they quietly run the rest of their finances.

Never trust anyone who doesn't bear the cost of being wrong. The rule behind founder equity and GP commitments.

A dynamic model for splitting equity fairly between co-founders who put in different things at different times.

Build a board that helps rather than hovers, then learn to run the meeting.

An accountant on using tax law the way it was written to encourage business. US-centric; the principles travel.

Every technological revolution brings a bubble, a crash and then a golden age. The best map we know of where AI is heading.

Snow days, bakery air, finding money in your old coat: a list of small good things. For the week the metrics are down.

The whole lifecycle of a venture fund, from raising it to returning it, with practitioners' views at each step.

A critical, often polemical history of the Federal Reserve. Read it as an argument, not a textbook.

Find high-quality businesses and hold them for a long time. The whole method, patiently explained.

A season inside Y Combinator, following one batch from arrival to Demo Day.

A real estate founder's models for leads, budget and team. Useful well beyond property.

A former consultant's account of development loans used as leverage over countries. Contested, and worth reading critically.

Letters to his daughter that became a book: spend less than you earn, invest the rest in index funds, avoid debt.

A step-by-step guide to how venture capital works, for people starting out on either side of the table.

The 1937 original on desire, persistence and the mastermind group. Dated, and still quoted everywhere.

An academic look at how venture capital funds innovation, and where the model works less well.

Every clause in a term sheet, what it does and which few matter. Read it before you sign, from either side of the table.

The Science of Getting Rich and its two companions, from 1910. Early self-help, much borrowed from since.

The key measures of a property investment, from cap rate to IRR, worked through with numbers.

A medtech founder on going from underrated to unbeatable, and selling her company along the way.

Money as life energy: count the hours each purchase costs you and the numbers start to look different.

Getting strangers to want to buy your stuff: the four ways to find leads, and more of each.

Make an offer so good people feel stupid saying no. Pricing and packaging, loudly explained.

Sales funnels and value ladders for online businesses, from the man who sells funnel software.

Turning what you know into a following and a business. The second of Brunson's three.

Finding where your customers already gather online and getting in front of them. The third of Brunson's three.

The textbook on marketing things customers don't understand yet, from chasm-crossing to pricing a platform.

The adman's own manual. The consumer isn't a moron; she's your wife. Forty years on, still right about most things.

A simple formula for getting a small business found online, for people starting from nothing.

Networked markets explained, and why platforms beat pipelines. The reference on marketplaces.

A founder on turning a hobby into an empire by starting before she felt ready.

Use a short quiz to find your best leads before you ever talk to them. A four-step playbook.

A personal and practical guide to finding your story and building a brand on it.

Small businesses started for almost nothing, and what the people who started them did right.

A whole marketing plan on one page, nine boxes long. Good for anyone who's been meaning to write one.

How to talk to customers so that even your mother can't lie to you: ask about their life, never about your idea.

Predictable revenue for fast-growing software companies, from the authors of Predictable Revenue and SaaStr.

Nineteen channels for getting customers, and the bullseye method for picking the three worth testing first.

The Entrepreneurial Operating System: vision, people, data, issues, process, traction. Not the same book as the one above.

A B2B marketing playbook for selling to buyers who don't know they have the problem yet.

The Getting to Yes team on using emotions in a negotiation instead of pretending there aren't any.

A practical guide to reading what people's posture and gestures say before they do.

A film-school storyteller on telling your own story so people actually listen. Another small Do Book.

Harvard's principled negotiation: separate people from the problem, argue interests not positions. Still the standard.

Smart tactics for the colleague, client or co-founder who makes everything harder than it needs to be.

Straight-talking advice on being heard, in meetings, on stage and across a table.

The Moth's storytellers on turning something that happened to you into five minutes a room remembers.

Still the manual on being someone people want to work with. Remember their name; let them do the talking.

An essential guide to skilful communication: listening, asking and saying the hard thing kindly.

The organiser's handbook for changing things from the outside. Uncomfortable, practical, and much quoted by founders.

A summary of the FBI hostage negotiator's book on tactical empathy. Read it, then read the real thing.

Most meetings, dinners and conferences are dull; here's how to give each one a purpose. Required reading for anyone hosting at the door.

A marketer on the unconscious codes that make Americans, French and Germans buy so differently. Not ours, but a close cousin.

A proven formula for presenting: be organised, be engaging, and stop hiding behind the slides.

Building real applications on foundation models: evaluation, prompts, retrieval, fine-tuning, and what breaks in production.

An end-to-end build of an LLM product, from data pipeline to deployment, for engineers who learn by doing.

How computers work, built up from flashlights and telegraphs. The one book that makes the whole stack make sense.

Algorithms explained with drawings, for people who were scared off by the textbooks.

Legal basics for startups, in a Do Book you can read before the first contract instead of after the first dispute.

The mathematician who beat blackjack, then Wall Street. Probability as a way of life.

The golden age of Egyptology and the adventurers who dug it up. History, rivalry and a great deal of sand.

How financial models don't just describe markets, they change them. The sociology of Black-Scholes.

Four centuries of how we power the world, from wood to nuclear. The long view for anyone in climate or deep tech.

A science writer on why the old picture of genes as a blueprint is wrong, and what biology looks like now.

The MP3's inventors, a factory worker who leaked the albums, and the executive who lost the industry. A disruption story.

Stripe's former COO on management and company building: the operating documents, the frameworks, the hard talks.

Olympiad-style mathematical problem solving, and the habits of mind that carry over to everything else.

Inclusive institutions make countries rich; extractive ones keep them poor. Nobel-winning, and a lens for every market you enter.