Top Startup books recommended by experts

At MentorCruise, we are all about making the most out of the experience of others. As part of that, we've connected and asked dozens of experts and professionals about their favourite Startup books – and here are the answers.

Table of Contents

Fundamentals of Startup

Understanding the concepts of Startup starts with understanding the fundamentals. On your way to mastery, it's crucial for you to understand how certain concepts were derived, and why things work like they do. Starting with these resources is the best way to do so.

High Growth Handbook

High Growth Handbook

Every high-growth company eventually needs to tackle thet same set of challenges around organizational structure, late-stage funding and secondary stock sales, culture, internationalization, hiring executive for roles the founders don’t understand, buying other companies, and more. This is the handbook for navigating those challenges.

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Zero to One

Zero to One

Doing what someone else already knows how to do takes the world from 1 to n, adding more of something familiar. But when you do something new, you go from 0 to 1. The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. Tomorrow’s champions will not win by competing ruthlessly in today’s marketplace. They will escape competition alt…

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The Lean Startup

The Lean Startup

Rather than wasting time creating elaborate business plans, The Lean Startup offers entrepreneurs—in companies of all sizes—a way to test their vision continuously, to adapt and adjust before it’s too late. Ries provides a scientific approach to creating and managing successful startups in a age when companies need to innovate more than ever.

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Zero to Sold

Zero to Sold

It's easy to build software products. The hard part is turning them into viable businesses that stand the test of time. If you want to build a business that survives, you have to know what challenges you will encounter. Zero to Sold tells the story of a sustainable, bootstrapped software business that grew to thousands of customers before it was acquired.

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The $100 Startup

The $100 Startup

Chris identified 1,500 individuals who have built businesses earning $50,000 or more from a modest investment (in many cases, $100 or less), and focused on the 50 most intriguing case studies. In nearly all cases, people with no special skills discovered aspects of their personal passions that could be monetized, and were able to restructure their lives in ways that gave them greater freedom a…

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Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days

Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days

Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days is a collection of interviews with founders of famous technology companies about what happened in the very earliest days. These people are celebrities now. What was it like when they were just a couple friends with an idea?

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Additional Startup Reading

These books are not required for you to learn Startup, but they are highly recommended for you to deepen your knowledge.

The Mom Test: How to Talk to Customers and Learn If Your Business is a Good Idea when Everyone is Lying to You

The Mom Test: How to Talk to Customers and Learn If Your Business is a Good Idea when Everyone is Lying to You

The Mom Test' by Rob Fitzpatrick is a guide for entrepreneurs on how to ask questions that actually validate their business ideas without bias or false assumptions. It emphasizes on asking good questions that provide genuine data and prevent the loss of valuable resources.

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The Hard Thing About Hard Things

The Hard Thing About Hard Things

"The Hard Thing About Hard Things" by Ben Horowitz is a guide for entrepreneurs and leaders that offers practical advice on managing difficult situations in business, including laying off employees, handling investor relationships, and making tough decisions.

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Running Lean

Running Lean

Running Lean is about testing a vision by measuring how customers behave. Running Lean is about engaging customers throughout the product development cycle. Running Lean tackles both product and market validation in parallel using short iterations. Running Lean is a disciplined and rigorous process.

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The 4-Hour Workweek

The 4-Hour Workweek

The 4-Hour Work Week is all about how to change the way readers look at how they live and work and why they should challenge old assumptions. The author writes from a unique vantage point. He created a life and a career he chose out of consistently questioning the traditional assumptions about life and work.

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Thrive: The Third Metric to Redefining Success and Creating a Life of Well-Being, Wisdom, and Wonder

Thrive: The Third Metric to Redefining Success and Creating a Life of Well-Being, Wisdom, and Wonder

That third metric, she writes in Thrive, includes our well-being, our ability to draw on our intuition and inner wisdom, our sense of wonder, and our capacity for compassion and giving. As Arianna points out, our eulogies celebrate our lives very differently from the way society defines success.

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What Customers Want: Using Outcome-Driven Innovation to Create Breakthrough Products and Services

What Customers Want: Using Outcome-Driven Innovation to Create Breakthrough Products and Services

In a book that challenges everything you have learned about being customer driven, internationally acclaimed innovation leader Anthony Ulwick reveals the secret weapon behind some of the most successful companies of recent years. Known as "outcome-driven" innovation, this revolutionary approach to new product and service creation transforms innovation from a nebulous art into a rigorous scienc…

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Specializations and Deeper Startup Knowledge

You've got your basics in order – time to move on to some advanced and specialized concepts. Startup is evolving every day, these books can help you master it.

Mastering the VC Game

Mastering the VC Game

Jeffrey Bussgang is one of a very few people who have played on both sides of this high-stakes game. Now he draws on his unique perspective to offer high-level insights, colorful stories, and practical advice gathered from his own experience as well as from interviews with dozens of the most successful entrepreneurs and VCs. He reveals how to get noticed, perfect a pitch, and negotiate a partn…

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Mastering the VC Game: A Venture Capital Insider Reveals How to Get from Start-up to IPO on Your Terms

Mastering the VC Game: A Venture Capital Insider Reveals How to Get from Start-up to IPO on Your Terms

Jeffrey Bussgang is one of a very few people who have played on both sides of this high-stakes game. Now he draws on his unique perspective to offer high-level insights, colorful stories, and practical advice gathered from his own experience as well as from interviews with dozens of the most successful entrepreneurs and VCs. He reveals how to get noticed, perfect a pitch, and negotiate a partn…

Recommended by the experts and mentors at MentorCruise

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