The great majority of people shouldn't read these — not because they're not good books or don't increase one's chances of startup success (they may or may not — I have no clue), but because the great majority of people will think they're doing startup stuff by reading them. It's confusing activity for accomplishment. If you do read these, keep in mind the entire time you're reading these you're not working on your startup. In other words, be very cognizant of the fact that you may very well be procrastinating.
Startup books are like books about screenwriting: the common wisdom is you learn the most by actually doing it. Reading about it without doing it is like reading about the piano or programming without actually doing it.<p>Now, once you've started the most useful book or resource has to do with the problem you face. If you have customers but need to raise money, its one kind of advice. If you have a customers but the product isn't working, its another sort of advice.<p>If you don't have customers, well, that's the hard part.
This is stupid and the startup community should mature beyond inspirational sources. Making your own company is really hard and I am not talking about creating a company like Facebook or Google, I am talking about creating something that gives you a 10x over a salary without being your own slave. If that is really hard you can't imagine how difficult (removing luck) is to achieve hypergrowth in an ethical way.
Thank you. Pretty good list of dev blogs to put on my RSS feed.<p>For the inspirational books / articles, I usually get too excited and loose my reality check when I read them.
A real entrepreneur wouldn't bother reading these books. They'd be too busy working on their idea and learning firsthand.<p>I've read two titles from this list (The Lean Startup and Trust Me, I’m Lying) and halfway through both realised I knew it already.<p>No book has all the answers. It's better to attack a business idea intelligently in your own unique way.
Euclid<p>Baby Rudin<p>Collected speeches of De Gaulle and many biographies<p>The Bible<p>The Bhagavad-Gita<p>The Iliad<p>Thucydides<p>Xenophon<p>Chaos and Pain training manual