Knowledge is power, 30 books every young entrepreneur should read

You can find summaries of some of these on my site: <a href="http://www.squeezedbooks.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.squeezedbooks.com</a><p>Some of them lend themselves very well to being compressed, like 'crossing the chasm'. Others, like 'founders at work' are really impossible to summarize.<p>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.

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

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.

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 <i>really</i> a prerequisite for any entrepreneur to read so much?

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?

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"