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Seattle Review of Books
From writers to readers, from booksellers to librarians, from new releases to antiquarian discoveries, we want to examine exactly what it means to love books and writing in Seattle in the 21st century. We believe the book review is an underrated art form, and we want to publish as much beautiful writing about books as humanly possible.

BUSINESS

9 non threatening leadership strategies for women – In this fast-paced business world, female leaders need to make sure they’re not perceived as pushy, aggressive or competent. One way to do that is to alter your leadership style to account for the (sometimes) fragile male ego. Should men accept powerful women and not feel threatened by them? Yes. Is that asking too much? IS IT? Sorry I didn’t mean to get aggressive there. Anyhoo, here are 9 non-threatening leadership strategies for women.

76 Best Business Books for Entrepreneurs to Read

79 Books Every Entrepreneur Should Read

The 100+ Best Books for Small Businesses and Entrepreneurs

100 Tricks to Appear Smart in Meetings: How to Get By Without Even Trying  – Funny because it’s true.  From the creator of the viral sensation “10 Tricks to Appear Smart in Meetings” (5+ million views and hundreds of thousands of shares) comes the must-have book you never knew you needed, 100 Tricks to Appear Smart in Meetings.  In it, you will learn how to appear smart in less than half the time it takes to actually learn anything.

 The 101 Best Business Books You’ve Ever Read: Ready?

American Indian and Alaskan Native Authored Leadership Book List  – A compiled list of leadership books written by American Indian and Alaskan Native authors. This list is meant to be a resource, not an official endorsement.

Asian American Native Hawaiian Pacific Islander (AANHPI)I Authored Leadership Book List  – A compiled list of leadership books written by AANHPI authors. This list is meant to be a resource, not an official endorsement.

Authors with Disability Leadership Book list  – A compiled list of leadership books written by authors with disabilities in the United States. This list is meant to be a resource, not an official endorsement.

Black-Authored Leadership Book List– A compiled list of leadership books written by Black authors in the United States. This list is meant to be a resource, not an official endorsement.

Business Model Generation
Features practical innovation techniques used today by leading consultants and companies worldwide, including 3M, Ericsson, Capgemini, Deloitte, and others. Designed for doers, it is for those ready to abandon outmoded thinking and embrace new models of value creation: for executives, consultants, entrepreneurs, and leaders of all organizations. If you’re ready to change the rules, you belong to “the business model generation!”

Contract Drafting and Negotiation for Entrepreneurs and Business Professionals – Author and attorney Paul Swegle has spent much of his career working closely with business colleagues in companies across several industries to negotiate and document commercial arrangements – contracts that supported the design, development, launch, distribution and marketing of countless products and services. In doing so, Paul has witnessed and celebrated countless successful commercial relationships, some lasting more than a decade. He has also learned important lessons from myriad ill-fated relationships, tripped up by poorly written agreements, under-performing commercial partners and unexpected surprises of nearly every variety. Paul’s book presents practical insights accumulated and shared with business colleagues over a 20-year period. Its purpose is to help business persons negotiate agreements that achieve their business goals without creating unexpected and unnecessary risks and liabilities. Paul’s guidance emphasizes mindfulness of the balance between protecting key interests while still getting important deals done.

Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us All
Too often, companies and individuals assume that creativity and innovation are the domain of the “creative types.” But two of the leading experts in innovation, design, and creativity on the planet show us that each and every one of us is creative. In an incredibly entertaining and inspiring narrative that draws on countless stories from their work at IDEO, the Stanford d.school, and with many of the world’s top companies, David and Tom Kelley identify the principles and strategies that will allow us to tap into our creative potential in our work lives, and in our personal lives, and allow us to innovate in terms of how we approach and solve problems. It is a book that will help each of us be more productive and successful in our lives and in our careers.

Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World – Deep work is the ability to focus without distraction on a cognitively demanding task. It’s a skill that allows you to quickly master complicated information and produce better results in less time. Deep work will make you better at what you do and provide the sense of true fulfillment that comes from craftsmanship. In short, deep work is like a super power in our increasingly competitive twenty-first century economy. And yet, most people have lost the ability to go deep-spending their days instead in a frantic blur of e-mail and social media, not even realizing there’s a better way.

Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap…And Others Don’t
Built to Last, the defining management study of the nineties, showed how great companies triumph over time and how long-term sustained performance can be engineered into the DNA of an enterprise from the very beginning. But what about the company that is not born with great DNA? How can good companies, mediocre companies, even bad companies achieve enduring greatness?

Hispanic/Latino/Latinx Authored Leadership Book list  – A compiled list of leadership books written by Hispanic/Latino/Latinx authors. This list is meant to be a resource, not an official endorsement.

How to Be Successful without Hurting Men’s Feelings: Non-threatening Leadership Strategies for Women – Ambitious women are scary. In this fast-paced business world, female leaders need to make sure they’re not perceived as pushy, aggressive, or competent. In How to Be Successful Without Hurting Men’s Feelings, Sarah Cooper, author of the bestselling 100 Tricks to Appear Smart in Meetings, illustrates how women can achieve their dreams, succeed in their careers, and become leaders, without harming the fragile male ego.

Leadership Books Authored By Women  – A compiled list of leadership books written by  authors who identify as women. This list is meant to be a resource, not an official endorsement.

LGBTQ+-Authored Leadership Book List A compiled list of leadership books written by LGBTQ+ authors in the United States. This list is meant to be a resource, not an official endorsement.

The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit (and When to Stick)
One of Seth Godin’s best books. A little book with a big idea, “The Dip” reveals that the system is stacked against the people who don’t know when to quit (and when to stick).

The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers
While many people talk about how great it is to start a business, very few are honest about how difficult it is to run one. Ben Horowitz analyzes the problems that confront leaders every day, sharing the insights he’s gained developing, managing, selling, buying, investing in, and supervising technology companies. A lifelong rap fanatic, he amplifies business lessons with lyrics from his favorite songs, telling it straight about everything from firing friends to poaching competitors, cultivating and sustaining a CEO mentality to knowing the right time to cash in.

It’s Not About You: A Little Story About What Matters Most in Business
In this inspirational parable, we meet Ben, a young manager charged with persuading five hundred employees of a struggling chair manufacturer to agree to a merger as a way out of their financial woes. Facing what seems like an impossible uphill climb, Ben seeks the advice of Claire, an old friend, who introduces him to an eccentric elderly lady known simply as Aunt Elle.

The Industries of the Future
In The Industries of the Future, Ross provides a “lucid and informed guide” (Financial Times) to the changes coming in the next ten years. He examines the fields that will most shape our economic future, including robotics and artificial intelligence, cybercrime and cybersecurity, the commercialization of genomics, the next step for big data, and the impact of digital technology on money and markets. In each of these realms, Ross addresses the toughest questions: How will we have to adapt to the changing nature of work? Is the prospect of cyberwar sparking the next arms race? How can the world’s rising nations hope to match Silicon Valley with their own innovation hotspots? And what can today’s parents do to prepare their children for tomorrow?

Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don’t
Why do only a few people get to say “I love my job”? It seems unfair that finding fulfillment at work is like winning a lottery; that only a few lucky ones get to feel valued by their organizations, to feel like they belong. Imagine a world where almost everyone wakes up inspired to go to work, feels trusted and valued during the day, then returns home feeling fulfilled. This is not a crazy, idealized notion. Today, in many successful organizations, great leaders are creating environments in which people naturally work together to do remarkable things.

Mastering the Rockefeller Habits: What You Must Do to Increase the Value of Your Fast-Growth Firm
What are the underlying handful of fundamentals that haven’t changed for over a hundred years? From Harnish’s famous Mastering a One Page Strategic Plan process that has been a best-selling article on the web to his concise outline of eight practical actions you can take to strengthen your culture, this book is a compilation of best practices adapted from some of the best-run firms on the planet. Included is an instructive chapter co-authored by Rich Russakoff, revealing winning tactics to get banks to finance your business. Lastly, there are case studies demonstrating the validity of Harnish’s practical approaches.

Techstars Entrepreneur’s Toolkit [website] – an online educational resource to help you learn the fundamentals of entrepreneurship and accelerate your success.

The ONE Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results
YOU WANT LESS. You want fewer distractions and less on your plate. The daily barrage of e-mails, texts, tweets, messages, and meetings distract you and stress you out. The simultaneous demands of work and family are taking a toll. And what’s the cost? Second-rate work, missed deadlines, smaller paychecks, fewer promotions–and lots of stress. AND YOU WANT MORE. You want more productivity from your work. More income for a better lifestyle. You want more satisfaction from life, and more time for yourself, your family, and your friends. NOW YOU CAN HAVE BOTH–LESS AND MORE. In The ONE Thing, you’ll learn to * cut through the clutter * achieve better results in less time * build momentum toward your goal * dial down the stress * overcome that overwhelmed feeling * revive your energy * stay on track * master what matters to you The ONE Thing delivers extraordinary results in every area of your life–work, personal, family, and spiritual. WHAT’S YOUR ONE THING?

ReWork
Most business books give you the same old advice: Write a business plan, study the competition, seek investors, yadda yadda. If you’re looking for a book like that, put this one back on the shelf. Rework shows you a better, faster, easier way to succeed in business. Read it and you’ll know why plans are actually harmful, why you don’t need outside investors, and why you’re better off ignoring the competition. The truth is, you need less than you think. You don’t need to be a workaholic. You don’t need to staff up. You don’t need to waste time on paperwork or meetings. You don’t even need an office. Those are all just excuses.

Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action
In 2009, Simon Sinek started a movement to help people become more inspired at work, and in turn inspire their colleagues and customers. Since then, millions have been touched by the power of his ideas, including more than 28 million who’ve watched his TED Talk based on START WITH WHY — the third most popular TED video of all time.
Sinek starts with a fundamental question: Why are some people and organizations more innovative, more influential, and more profitable than others? Why do some command greater loyalty from customers and employees alike? Even among the successful, why are so few able to repeat their success over and over?  People like Martin Luther King Jr., Steve Jobs, and the Wright Brothers had little in common, but they all started with WHY. They realized that people won’t truly buy into a product, service, movement, or idea until they understand the WHY behind it.

Strengths Based Leadership: Great Leaders, Teams, and Why People Follow
In recent years, while continuing to learn more about strengths, Gallup scientists have also been examining decades of data on the topic of leadership. They studied more than 1 million work teams, conducted more than 20,000 in-depth interviews with leaders, and even interviewed more than 10,000 followers around the world to ask exactly why they followed the most important leader in their life.

The Go-Giver: A Little Story About a Powerful Business Idea
The Go-Giver tells the story of an ambitious young man named Joe who yearns for success. Joe is a true go-getter, though sometimes he feels as if the harder and faster he works, the further away his goals seem to be. And so one day, desperate to land a key sale at the end of a bad quarter, he seeks advice from the enigmatic Pindar, a legendary consultant referred to by his many devotees simply as the Chairman.

Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business
Do you have a grip on your business, or does your business have a grip on you? All entrepreneurs and business leaders face similar frustrations—personnel conflict, profit woes, and inadequate growth. Decisions never seem to get made, or, once made, fail to be properly implemented. But there is a solution. It’s not complicated or theoretical.The Entrepreneurial Operating System® is a practical method for achieving the business success you have always envisioned. More than 2,000 companies have discovered what EOS can do.

Women Who Venture – “This book about dozens of successful women-investors is terrific! It is much needed today, to show current and aspiring investors what is possible. Renata’s book will tell the stories of venture capitalists from all different backgrounds, who had very different sets of experiences and approaches, stories about how they shaped their career and achieved their success. Page after page, this book will give confidence to other women who want to work in venture capital. And by the time they finish reading the book, I hope they will feel: ‘If they can do it, I can do it too!’” – Janet Bannister, Real Ventures, Canada

FINANCE

The Index Card: Why Personal Finance Doesn’t Have to be Complicated
 When University of Chicago professor Harold Pollack interviewed Helaine Olen, an award-winning financial journalist and the author of the bestselling Pound Foolish, he made an off­hand suggestion: everything you need to know about managing your money could fit on an index card. To prove his point, he grabbed a 4″ x 6″ card, scribbled down a list of rules, and posted a picture of the card online. The post went viral.

Now, Pollack teams up with Olen to explain why the ten simple rules of the index card outperform more complicated financial strategies. Inside is an easy-to-follow action plan that works in good times and bad, giving you the tools, knowledge, and confidence to seize control of your financial life.

The Top 10 Distinctions Between Millionaires and the Middle Class
If you’re ready to take the journey to wealth and personal fulfillment, here’s your ticket. In this life-changing little book, entrepreneur and inspirational speaker Keith Cameron Smith shows you how to think like a millionaire and reap the benefits of a millionaire mindset. The key to moving beyond the middle class and up the economic ladder is mastering ten vital principles, including:

• Millionaires think long-term. The middle class thinks short-term. Create a clear vision of the life you desire, and focus on it.
• Millionaires talk about ideas. The middle class talks about things and other people. Ask some positive “what if” questions every day, and bounce ideas off successful people who will be honest with you.
• Millionaires work for profits. The middle class works for wages. Take calculated risks and learn to take advantage of good opportunities.

Unshakeable: Your Financial Freedom Playbook
After interviewing fifty of the world’s greatest financial minds and penning the #1 New York Times bestseller Money: Master the Game, Tony Robbins returns with a step-by-step playbook, taking you on a journey to transform your financial life and accelerate your path to financial freedom. No matter your salary, your stage of life, or when you started, this book will provide the tools to help you achieve your financial goals more rapidly than you ever thought possible.

PERSONAL GROWTH

A Curious Mind: The Secret to a Bigger Life
From Academy Award–winning producer Brian Grazer, New York Times bestseller A Curious Mind offers a brilliant peek into the “curiosity conversations” that inspired him to create some of the world’s most iconic movies and television shows. He shows how curiosity has been the “secret” that fueled his rise as one of Hollywood’s leading producers and creative visionaries, and how all of us can channel its power to lead bigger and more rewarding lives.

Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones – James Clear is an author and speaker focused on habits, decision-making, and continuous improvement. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Entrepreneur, Time, and on CBS This Morning. His website receives millions of visitors each month and hundreds of thousands subscribe to his popular email newsletter at jamesclear.com. He is a regular speaker at Fortune 500 companies and his work is used by teams in the NFL, NBA, and MLB. Through his online course, The Habits Academy, Clear has taught more than 10,000 leaders, managers, coaches, and teachers. The Habits Academy is the premier training platform for individuals and organizations that are interested in building better habits in life and work. You can learn more at habitsacademy.com.

The Daily Stoic’s Email Meditations – Receive timeless wisdom from the Stoics, delivered to your inbox each morning. This daily email will help you cultivate strength, insight and wisdom necessary for living the good life. Every word is based on the two-thousand plus year old philosophy that has guided some of history’s greatest men and women. Join the 100,000+ Daily Stoic community now!

The Daily Stoic: 366 Meditations on Wisdom, Perseverance, and the Art of Living  – Offering 366 days of Stoic insights and exercises, featuring all-new translations from the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, the playwright Seneca, or slave-turned-philosopher Epictetus, as well as lesser-known luminaries like Zeno, Cleanthes, and Musonius Rufus. Every day of the year you’ll find one of their pithy, powerful quotations, as well as historical anecdotes, provocative commentary, and a helpful glossary of Greek terms. By following these teachings over the course of a year (and, indeed, for years to come) you’ll find the serenity, self-knowledge, and resilience you need to live well.

The Miracle Morning: The Not-So-Obvious Secret Guaranteed To Transform Your Life… (Before 8AM)
Based on the premise that how you start your day largely determines the quality of your day, your work, and your life, The Miracle Morning gives you the ultimate morning ritual and teaches night owls how to beat the snooze button, even if you’ve never been a morning person. What’s now being practiced by hundreds of thousands of people around the world could literally be the simplest approach to creating the life you’ve always wanted. It’s been right there in front of us, but this book has finally brought it to life.

The book draws its inspiration from stoicism, the ancient Greek philosophy of enduring pain or adversity with perseverance and resilience. Stoics focus on the things they can control, let go of everything else, and turn every new obstacle into an opportunity to get better, stronger, tougher. As Marcus Aurelius put it nearly 2000 years ago: “The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.”

The Five Minute Journal
If you always wanted to keep a daily journal, but life, excuses, and failed journaling attempts took precedence, the Five Minute Journal was made for you. With a simple, guided format, it helps you cultivate gratitude and improve your daily well being. And it takes just 5 minutes a day.

You Are a Badass
By the end of You Are a Badass, you will understand why you are how you are, how to love what you can’t change, how to change what you don’t love, and how to start living the kind of life you used to be jealous of.

PRESENTATIONS

Pitch Anything: An Innovative Method for Presenting, Persuading, and Winning the Deal
When it comes to delivering a pitch, Oren Klaff has unparalleled credentials. Over the past 13 years, he has used his one-of-a-kind method to raise more than $400 million–and now, for the first time, he describes his formula to help you deliver a winning pitch in any business situation. Whether you’re selling ideas to investors, pitching a client for new business, or even negotiating for a higher salary, Pitch Anything will transform the way you position your ideas.

Presentation Zen
Best-selling author and popular speaker Garr Reynolds is back in this newly revised edition of his classic, best-selling book, Presentation Zen, in which he showed readers there is a better way to reach the audience through simplicity and storytelling, and gave them the tools to confidently design and deliver successful presentations.

slide:ology: The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations
No matter where you are on the organizational ladder, the odds are high that you’ve delivered a high-stakes presentation to your peers, your boss, your customers, or the general public. Presentation software is one of the few tools that requires professionals to think visually on an almost daily basis. But unlike verbal skills, effective visual expression is not easy, natural, or actively taught in schools or business training programs. slide:ology fills that void.

Techstars Entrepreneur’s Toolkit [website] – an online educational resource to help you learn the fundamentals of entrepreneurship and accelerate your success.

RELATIONSHIPS

Startup Life: Surviving and Thriving in a Relationship with an Entrepreneur -Brad Feld–a Boulder, Colorado-based entrepreneur turned-venture capitalist–shares his own personal experiences with his wife Amy, offering a series of rich insights into successfully leading a balanced life as a human being who wants to play as hard as he works and who wants to be as fulfilled in life and in work. With this book, Feld distills his twenty years of experience in this field to address how the village of startup people can put aside their workaholic ways and lead rewarding lives in all respects. While there’s no “secret formula” to relationship success in the world of the entrepreneur, there are ways to making navigation of this territory easier. Startup Life is a well-rounded guide that has the insights and advice you need to succeed in both your personal and professional life.

The Man’s Guide to Women: Scientifically Proven Secrets from the “Love Lab” About What Women Really Want – This book is about personal relationships, but we (New Tech) believe every man should read this book. It will help you in your personal and business life to create more positive, productive and joyful relationships with women who are partners, peers, managers, employees, or friends.

Why Marriages Succeed or Fail: And How You Can Make Yours Last – From psychology professor (Univ. of Washington) and marriage researcher Gottman: an upbeat, easy-to-follow manual based on research into the dynamics of married couples. Gottman describes his studies as being akin to a CAT scan of a living relationship and asserts that he’s been able to predict the future of marriages with an accuracy rate of over 90 percent. In 1983 and 1986, his research team monitored more than a hundred married couples in Indiana and Illinois with electrodes, video cameras, and microphones as they attempted to work out real conflicts. Using the information derived from these sessions, Gottman concludes here that a lasting relationship results from a couple’s ability to resolve conflicts through any of the three styles of problem-solving that are found in healthy marriages- -validating, conflict-avoiding, and volatile. Interestingly, Gottman asserts that the basis of a stable marriage can be expressed mathematically: the ratio of positive to negative moments must be at least 5:1–and he offers a four-step program for breaking through negativity and allowing one’s natural communication and problem-solving abilities to flourish. Mathematics and science aside, there’s plenty of old- fashioned, helpful, and worthwhile advice here about gender differences, realistic expectations, love, and respect–advice that may appeal especially to those who enjoy taking quizzes and analyzing relationships.

SALES

Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers
The bible for bringing cutting-edge products to larger markets–now revised and updated with new insights into the realities of high-tech marketing
In Crossing the Chasm, Geoffrey A. Moore shows that in the Technology Adoption Life Cycle–which begins with innovators and moves to early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards–there is a vast chasm between the early adopters and the early majority. While early adopters are willing to sacrifice for the advantage of being first, the early majority waits until they know that the technology actually offers improvements in productivity. The challenge for innovators and marketers is to narrow this chasm and ultimately accelerate adoption across every segment.

Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It – After a stint policing the rough streets of Kansas City, Missouri, Chris Voss joined the FBI, where his career as a hostage negotiator brought him face-to-face with a range of criminals, including bank robbers and terrorists. Reaching the pinnacle of his profession, he became the FBI’s lead international kidnapping negotiator. Never Split the Difference takes you inside the world of high-stakes negotiations and into Voss’s head, revealing the skills that helped him and his colleagues succeed where it mattered most: saving lives. In this practical guide, he shares the nine effective principles—counterintuitive tactics and strategies—you too can use to become more persuasive in both your professional and personal life.

Predictable Revenue: Turn Your Business Into a Sales Machine with the $100 Million Best Practices of Salesforce.com
Discover the outbound sales process that, in just a few years, helped add $100 million in recurring revenue to Salesforce.com, almost doubling their enterprise growth… with zero cold calls. This is NOT another book about how to cold call or close deals. This is an entirely new kind of sales bible for CEOs, entrepreneurs and sales VPs to help you build a sales machine.  What does it take for your sales team to generate as many highly-qualified new leads as you want, create predictable revenue, and meet your financial goals without your constant focus and attention? SPIN Selling
Written by Neil Rackham, former president and founder of Huthwaite corporation, SPIN Selling is essential reading for anyone involved in selling or managing a sales force. Unquestionably the best-documented account of sales success ever collected and the result of the Huthwaite corporation’s massive 12-year, $1-million dollar research into effective sales performance, this groundbreaking resource details the revolutionary SPIN (Situation, Problem, Implication, Need-payoff) strategy.

Techstars Entrepreneur’s Toolkit [website] – an online educational resource to help you learn the fundamentals of entrepreneurship and accelerate your success.

SEATTLE

Sol’s Civic Minute – What’s Happening in Seattle in 60 seconds per week. This is a weekly email newsletter thatSol Villarreal sends to his subscribers every Sunday morning at 6 am. As the tagline implies, you can scan the entire thing in under a minute to catch up on what happened in Seattle the previous week. Lots of people tell him it’s the only email they get that they read in its entirety, though, so be forewarned that reading the whole thing and clicking on a bunch of the links will take you longer than a minute.  Sol’s focus is on local politics & government and other related items–the kinds of things that we all want to pay more attention to but that it’s tough to take the time to stay up to date on. He spends hours each week reading all the local news he can find so that you don’t have to!

The Evergrey – A newsletter all about Seattle, delivered fresh daily at 7 A.M. #LiveLikeYouLiveHere

STARTUPS

Do More Faster: Techstars Lessons to Accelerate Your Startup
Practical advice from some of today’s top early stage investors and entrepreneurs. TechStars is a mentorship-driven startup accelerator with operations in three U.S. cities. Once a year in each city, it funds about ten Internet startups with a small amount of capital and surrounds them with around fifty top Internet entrepreneurs and investors. Historically, about seventy-five percent of the companies that go through TechStars raise a meaningful amount of angel or venture capital.

Founder’s Checklist – Check out friend-of-New-Tech Dave Parker’s startup scoring rubric he created for the Startups Meet Angels quarterly pitch event. The rubric outlines a method for scoring the investment opportunities presented to the angels. Take some time to answer key questions in advance and you won’t be surprised when you get to the investor meeting. Compressing the time from launch to revenue is the goal. You won’t need as long of a personal runway or to raise as much capital if you’re prepared. These are the same topics they cover monthly during 6 Month Startup, a monthly meetup for founders to launch their startups.

The Four Steps to the Epiphany
The bestselling classic that launched 10,000 startups and new corporate ventures – The Four Steps to the Epiphany is one of the most influential and practical business books of all time. The Four Steps to the Epiphany launched the Lean Startup approach to new ventures. It was the first book to offer that startups are not smaller versions of large companies and that new ventures are different than existing ones. Startups search for business models while existing companies execute them.

Idea to Funding Resources from Startup Rocket – Every single day we get asked about recommended resources to help make #startuplife a tad easier. We’ve therefore put together this page with our go-to articles, books, videos, and podcasts (and we’re diligent about keeping it updated regularly).

NYSE – The Entrepreneur’s roadmap – The New York Stock Exchange has been at the center of capitalism for over two centuries. While the world has changed dramatically during that time, our core mission has remained the same: to help great entrepreneurs raise capital so they can continue to innovate, inspire and shape the future, and in doing so, help the world become a better place by improving the overall quality of life.

To help companies navigate the road to going public, The New York Stock Exchange has created The Entrepreneur’s Roadmap: From Concept to IPO. Inside, you’ll find information on a variety of topics such as:

  • The Seed Stage: Starting a Company
  • The Growth Stage: Scaling the Business
  • Late Stage: Preparing for the next chapter
  • The Exit: Strategies and Options
  • Corporate Governance and Other Considerations

The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses
The Lean Startup approach fosters companies that are both more capital efficient and that leverage human creativity more effectively.  Inspired by lessons from lean manufacturing, it relies on “validated learning,” rapid scientific experimentation, as well as a number of counter-intuitive practices that shorten product development cycles, measure actual progress without resorting to vanity metrics, and learn what customers really want. It enables a company to shift directions with agility, altering plans inch by inch, minute by minute.

Startup Boards: Getting the Most Out of Your Board of Directors
An essential guide to understanding the dynamics of a startup’s board of directors. Let’s face it, as founders and entrepreneurs, you have a lot on your plate—getting to your minimum viable product, developing customer interaction, hiring team members, and managing the accounts/books. Sooner or later, you have a board of directors, three to five (or even seven) Type A personalities who seek your attention and at times will tell you what to do. While you might be hesitant to form a board, establishing an objective outside group is essential for startups, especially to keep you on track, call you out when you flail, and in some cases, save you from yourself.

Startup Communities: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City
“Startup communities” are popping up everywhere, from cities all over the United States like Boulder, Boston, New York, Seattle, and Omaha to countries like Iceland. These entrepreneurial ecosystems are driving innovation, new business creation, and job growth. Startup Communities documents the strategy, dynamics, tactics, and long-term perspective required for building communities of entrepreneurs who can feed off of each other’s talent, creativity, and support.

Startup CEO: A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Business, + Website
A definitive book for any CEO first time or otherwise of a high-growth company While big company CEOs are usually groomed for the job for years, startup CEOs aren’t and they’re often young and relatively inexperienced in business in general. Author Matt Blumberg, a technology and marketing entrepreneur, knows this all too well. Back in 1999, he started a company called Return Path, which later became the driving force behind the creation of his blog, OnlyOnce because “you’re only a first time CEO once.” Now, more than a decade later, he’s written Startup CEO. As the fifth book in the StartUp Revolution series, this reliable resource is based on Blumberg’s experience as a startup CEO and covers a number of issues he’s faced over the dozen years he’s been a CEO.

Startup Idea Checklist – I’ve been tinkering with different startup ideas and needed a good checklist to think through them. There are great templates for this already: The YC application, Amazon’s internal press release, and Sequoia’s Writing a Business Plan. I found myself mixing and tweaking these templates because they don’t exactly match my model of the world, so I wrote up my own list. I use this list both to develop ideas and filter them. If you adopt it, be careful about using it as a filter. Remember that in the early stages, good ideas are very easy to kill.

Startup Law and Fundraising for Entrepreneurs and Startup Advisors – Entrepreneurship can be chaotic. Some chaos drives innovation. But legal chaos rocks many startups to their foundations, dashing dreams, jeopardizing jobs and investments, creating liabilities, and slowing innovation. Paul Swegle wrote Startup Law and Fundraising for Entrepreneurs and Startup Advisors to help startups avoid these pitfalls, including the pitfall of struggling to grow a poorly funded business. This is a practical book meant to help entrepreneurs and their advisors to build on a solid foundation, avoid costly legal and regulatory mistakes, and raise the money needed for stability, innovation, and operational success.

The Startup Owner’s Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company – More than 100,000 entrepreneurs rely on this book for detailed, step-by-step instructions on building successful, scalable, profitable startups.  The National Science Foundation pays hundreds of startup teams each year to follow the process outlined in the book, and it’s taught at Stanford, Berkeley, Columbia and more than 100 other leading universities worldwide.  Why? The Startup Owner’s Manual guides you, step-by-step, as you put the Customer Development process to work. This method was created by renowned Silicon Valley startup expert Steve Blank, acknowledged catalyst of the “Lean Startup” movement, and tested and refined by him for more than a decade. 

Startup Playbook
We spend a lot of time advising startups. Though one-on-one advice will always be crucial, we thought it might help us scale Y Combinator if we could distill the most generalizable parts of this advice into a sort of playbook we could give YC and YC Fellowship companies. Then we thought we should just give it to everyone. This is meant for people new to the world of startups. Most of this will not be new to people who have read a lot of what YC partners have written—the goal is to get it into one place. There may be a part II on how to scale a startup later—this mostly covers how to start one.

The Startup Playbook
Our personal how-to guide for building your startup from the ground up. In it, you’ll find a collection of the major lessons and shortcuts we’ve learned that will shift the odds in your favor. We’re sharing our tips, secrets, and advice in a frank, founder-to-founder discussion with you.

Startup Wealth: How the Best Angel Investors Make Money in Startups
Startup investors are achieving 20%, 40%, and higher rates of return. Whether you’re investing in early-stage companies, raising capital for your startup, or just interested in how angel investors really make their money, Startup Wealth will unravel the mystery surrounding startup capital.

Startup Wealth delivers engaging interviews with early- stage investors in Google, Invisalign, ZipCar, Uber, Twilio, Localytics, and other successful and not so successful companies. Find out how an amazing IPO can result in early investors getting pennies on the dollar—or a 10x+ return.

Sell More Faster: The Ultimate Sales Playbook for Startups
Most startups fail because they can’t grow revenue early or quickly enough. Startup CEOs will tell you their early missteps can be attributed to not finding their product market fit early enough, or at all. Founders overspend time and money trying to find product-market fit and make false starts, follow the wrong signals, and struggle to generate enough revenue to scale and raise funding. And all the while they never really knew who their customers were, what product they really needed, and why they needed it. But it doesn’t have to be this way, and founders don’t need to face it alone. Through expert guidance and experienced mentorship, every startup can avoid these pitfalls.

Techstars Entrepreneur’s Toolkit [website] – an online educational resource to help you learn the fundamentals of entrepreneurship and accelerate your success.

Techstars Startup Digest Prepping for an Exit – A Founder’s Perspective on M&A – Is it time to consider selling your startup? Looking for a founder’s perspective? Dave Parker is a five time founder with >10 exits. This reading list is practical advice on prepping for exit, pricing and the process. Dave Parker is a 5X Founder, Investor and Board Member. He helps startups from launch to exit – having exited nine companies. Formerly the SVP of Programs at UP Global (Startup Weekend + Startup America) that was purchased by Techstars in 2015. He currently helps founders consider their exit options.

Top Startup Book List + Top 10 Classic Business Books – Dave Parker (author of Trajectory: Startup – Ideation to Product/Market Fit)‘s list of startup business books in the categories of ideation, the lean series, head nod to the valley, marketing and sales, venture, culture, giving back, and 10 timeless business books).

Trajectory: Startup – Ideation to Product/Market Fit – People often spend years on working on startup ideas that fail—and they could have known long before, had they asked the hard questions earlier. Five-time tech founder Dave Parker has been there, and in Trajectory: Startup he offers a path to get you from ideation to launch and revenue in just six months.

Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist
How do venture capital deals come together? This is one of the most frequent questions asked by each generation of new entrepreneurs. Surprisingly, there is little reliable information on the subject. No one understands this better than Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson. The founders and driving force behind the Foundry Group—a venture capital firm focused on investing in early-stage information technology companies—Brad and Jason have been involved in hundreds of venture capital financings. Their investments range from small startups to large Series A venture financing rounds. The new edition of Venture Deals continues to show fledgling entrepreneurs the inner-workings of the VC process, from the venture capital term sheet and effective negotiating strategies to the initial seed and the later stages of development.

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