Advice to Founders and CEOs

- Dear Founder (Maynard Webb)
- The Hard Things About Hard Things (Ben Horowitz)
- Straight Talk for Startups (Randy Komisar and Jantoon Reigersman)
- The Founders’ Dilemmas (Noam Wasserman)
- The Entrepreneur’s Daily Nietzsche (Brad Feld and Dave Jilk)
- Build (Tony Fadell)
- Zero to IPO (Frederic Kerrest)
- The Great CEO Within (Matt Mochary)

Finance

- Wharton's Introduction to Financial Accounting course: [https://www.coursera.org/learn/wharton-accounting](https://w...
- How Finance Works: The HBR Guide to Thinking Smart About the Numbers (Mihir Desai)
- Financial Intelligence for Entrepreneurs: What You Really Need to Know About the Numbers (Karen Berman and Joe Knight)

Open-Book Company (Employee Ownership, Financial Literacy, Goal-setting)

- The Great Game of Business (Jack Stack and Bo Burlingham)

Legal

- Acceleration (Ryan Roberts)
- The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Law and Strategy (Constance Bagley and Craig Dauchy)

Company Strategy and Direction (post-product/market fit)

- Crossing the Chasm (Geoff Moore)
- Zone to Win (Geoff Moore)
- Only the Paranoid Survive (Andy Grove)
- Blitzscaling (Reid Hoffman and Chris Yeh)
- The Innovator's Dilemma (Clayton Christensen)
- Good to Great (Jim Collins)
- Playing to Win (A.G. Lafley and Roger Martin)
- Tape Sucks (Frank Slootman)
- Strategy vol. 1&2 (Harvard Business Review)

Pricing

- Monetizing Innovation (Georg Tacke and Madhavan Ramanujan)
- Confessions of the Pricing Man (Hermann Simon)

Startup Phase

- The Lean Startup (Eric Ries)
- The Four Steps to the Epiphany (Steve Blank)
- Zero to One (Peter Thiel)

Management/Leadership

- The Effective Executive (Peter Drucker)
- Managing Humans (Michael Lopp)
- The Art of Leadership (Michael Lopp)
- High Output Management (Andy Grove)
- Managing Oneself (Peter Drucker)
- Essentials: Management (First Round Capital)
- The Making of a Manager (Julie Zhuo)
- The Powell Principles (Oren Harari)
- Radical Candor (Kim Scott)
- Leading Matters (John L. Hennessy) (fantastic book list in the coda)
- Turn the Ship Around (L. David Marquet) (this is THE book on delegation)
- Principles (Ray Dalio)

COO/Succession Planning

- Riding Shotgun (Nathan Bennett and Stephen A. Miles)

People Performance/HR/Culture

- Powerful (Patty McCord)
- No Rules Rules (Reed Hastings and Erin Meyer)
- Netflix culture deck
- The Five Dysfunctions of a Team (Patrick Lencioni)
- Work Rules! (Laszlo Bock)
- It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work (DHH and Jason Fried)
- The Culture Map (Erin Meyer)
- The Talent War (Mike Sarraille and George Randle)
- Great People Decisions (Claudio Fernández-Aráoz)
- The Holloway Guide to Technical Recruiting and Hiring (Ozzie Osman)
- Punished by Rewards (Alfie Kohn)

Purpose, Passion, and Self

- Start with Why (Simon Sinek)
- What You Do is Who You Are (Ben Horowitz)
- Drive (Daniel Pink)
- Mindset (Carol Dweck)
- Grit (Angela Duckworth)
- The Almanack of Naval Ravikant (Eric Jorgenson)

Fundraising/VC

- Secrets of Sand Hill Road (Scott Kupor)
- Venture Deals (Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson)
- Raising Venture Capital (Andy Sparks)
- The Business of Venture Capital (Mahendra Ramsinghani)
- Done Deals (Udayan Gupta)
- The Power Law (Sebastian Mallaby)
- VC (Tom Nicholas)

Board

- Boardroom Excellence (Paul Brountas)
- Startups Boards (Brad Feld and Mahendra Ramsinghani)

M&A

- Winning (Jack Welch) - M&A chapter
- Connecting the Dots (John Chambers) - M&A chapter

Marketing

- Data-Driven Marketing (Mark Jeffery)
- Positioning (Al Ries and Jack Trout)
- Scientific Advertising (Claude Hopkins)
- Traction (Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares)
- Behind the Cloud (Marc Benioff and Carlye Adler)
- Ogilvy on Advertising (David Ogilvy)
- Marketing High Technology (William Davidow)

Psychology

- Influence (Robert Cialdini)

Negotiation

First, read Influence (under Psychology), then, in order

- Thinking in Bets (Annie Duke)
- Getting to Yes (Roger Fisher and William Ury)
- Never Split the Difference (Chris Voss)
- The Bald Truth (David Falk)

Self

- The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (Stephen Covey)

Design and UX

- Creative Confidence (Tom Kelley and David Kelley)

AI (Machine Learning, Deep Learning/Neural Networks)

- Andrew Ng's AI for Everyone course: [https://www.coursera.org/learn/ai-for-everyone](https://www....

Growth (Data Science, etc.)

- Hacking Growth (Sean Ellis and Morgan Brown)

Graph Theory

Product

- Inspired (Marty Cagan)
- Joel on Software (Joel Spolsky)

Customer Loyalty/Customer Success

- Delivering Happiness (Tony Hsieh)
- Setting the Table (Danny Meyer)

Finding a Startup Job

- Entering StartupLand (Jeffrey Bussgang)

CIO as ICP

- The CIO Paradox (Martha Heller)
- Be the Business (Martha Heller)

Stories

- Made in America (Sam Walton)
- Shoe Dog (Phil Knight)
- The Everything Store (Brad Stone)
- Built from Scratch (Bernie Marcus and Arthur Blank)
- Hard Drive (James Wallace)
- Steve Jobs (Walter Isaacson)
- Elon Musk (Ashlee Vance)
- Creativity, Inc. (Ed Catmull)
- The Ride of a Lifetime (Bob Iger)
- Valley of Genius (Adam Fisher)
- The Idea Factory (Jon Gertner)
- Dealers of Lightning (Michael Hertzik)
- Idea Man (Paul Allen)
- Pour Your Heart Into It (Howard Schultz)