Steve is an old friend and keeps this great bibliography of great books for startups. It grows over time.  He uses it in his classes at Berkeley and Columbia on entrepreneurship.  He graciously provided them to me in unlocked format to share with you.  Please share your own list of favorites and we'll build an even better list!

If you have not heard of Steve, he has had an interesting career in Silicon Valley. I met him first when he was VP of Marketing for SuperMac and focused maniacally on getting great product reviews. Then he and Peter Barrett co-founded Rocket Science Games -- which rose to astouding heights and got sold in pieces to Sony, etc. Some really creative people came out of that company, including Peter and Bruce Leak, who started WebTV. Peter joined that company before it was sold to Microsoft and is still  here heading technology in the IP TV business.  Steve then went on to fo-found e.piphany.com -- made some money -- and started teaching and investing.  I know he is on the boards of IMVU and CafePress (a .NET company.) Steve gives an interesting talk on the true history of Silicon Valley. He is also on the National Audubon Society board, California Audubon and the California Coastal Commission -- an interesting combination, startups and conservation.

So, Steve's list of the best books for startups -- with his annotations. Let me know if you have others we should include.  I have a few I'll add in another post. Several on his list are old favorites. If you have read Regis McKenna's books, you know that he understood "influencer marketing" long (long) before the term was invented and used today. And so many of the smart folks he hired have gone on to found more really smart PR firms or write great books, like Geoffrey Moore.

Must Read Books

These four books changed my outlook on new product introductions, early stage sales and business in general.  Crossing the Chasm made me understand that there are repeatable patterns in early stage companies. It started my search for the repeatable set of patterns that preceded the chasm.  The Innovator’s Dilemma and Innovator’s Solution helped me refine the notion of the Four types of Startup Markets.  I read these books as the handbook for startups trying to disrupt an established company. The Tipping Point has made me realize that marketing communications strategies for companies in New Markets often follow the Tipping Point.

• The Innovator's Dilemma & The Innovator's Solution by Clayton M. Christensen
• Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers  
• Inside the Tornado: Marketing Strategies from Silicon Valley's Cutting Edge
• Dealing with Darwin : How Great Companies Innovate at Every Phase of Their Evolution
  all three by Geoffrey A. Moore
• The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell

Strategy Books for Startups

The Entrepreneurial Mindset articulates the critically important idea that there are different types of startup opportunities.  The notion of three Market Types springs from here.  The book provides a framework for the early marketing/sales strategies essential in a startup.  Delivering Profitable Value talks more about value propositions and value delivery systems than you ever want to hear again.  However, this is one of the books you struggle through and then realize you learned something valuable. Finally, while New Venture Creation is a textbook used in business schools to teach entrepreneurship, there is way too much great stuff in it to ignore.  At first read it is simply overwhelming but tackle it a bit a time and use it to test your business plan for completeness.

• The Entrepreneurial Mindset: Strategies for Continuously Creating Opportunity in an Age of Uncertainty by Rita Gunther McGrath and Ian MacMillan
• Delivering Profitable Value by Michael J. Lanning.
• New Venture Creation with New Business Mentor 2002 by Jeffry A. Timmons

New Product Introduction Methodologies

Eric Von Hippel and the notion of “Lead Users” offer many parallels with Customer Discovery.  Von Hippel’s four steps of 1) goal generation and team formation, 2) trend research, 3) lead user pyramid networking and 4) Lead User workshop and idea improvement is a more rigorous and disciplined approach then suggested in our book.

• Breakthrough Products with Lead User Research by Eric Von Hippel and Mary Sonnack
• he Sources of Innovation by Eric Von Hippel

“Marketing as Strategy” Books

Offering more than some handy tactical tidbits, these books offer a chance to change your entire strategy. Peppers and Rogers opened my eyes to concepts of lifetime value, most profitable customers and the entire customer lifecycle of “get, keep and grow.” Bill Davidow introduced me to the concept of “whole product” and the unique needs of mainstream customers.

• The One to One Future: Building Relationships One Customer at a TimeH  by Don Peppers, Martha Rogers
• Marketing High Technology: An Insider's View and
• Total Customer Service: The Ultimate Weapon by William H. Davidow

“War as Strategy” Books

The metaphor that business is war is both a cliché and points to a deeper truth.  Many basic business concepts; competition, leadership, strategy versus tactics, logistics, etc. have their roots in military affairs. The difference is that in business no one dies.  At some time in your business life you need to study war or become a casualty.  Sun Tzu covered all the basics of strategy in The Art of War until the advent of technology temporarily superseded him. Also, in the same vein try The Book of Five Rings by Miyamoto Musashi.  These two books have unfortunately turned into business clichés but they are still timeless reading.  Carl Von Clausewitz’s On War is a 19PthP century western attempt to understand war.  The “Boyd” book is a biography and may seem out of place here, but it’s hard to understand the importance of John Boyd’s OODA loop to business strategy without the context.  And Boyd’s OODA loop is the core concept reinvented for the Customer Development Process.  Read it and then look at all the web sites for Boyd papers, particularly Patterns of Conflict.  The New Lanchester Strategy is so offbeat that it tends to be ignored.  Its ratios of what you require to attack or defend a market keep coming up so often in real life, that I’ve found it hard to ignore.

• The Art of War by Sun Tzu, translated by Thomas Cleary, or the one by Griffith
• The Book of Five Rings by Miyamoto Musashi
• On War by Carl Von Clausewitz’s  Everyman's Library Series
• Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War by Robert Coram
• Lanchester Strategy: An Introduction by Taoka  and/or
• New Lanchester Strategy: Sales and Marketing Strategy for the Weak (New Lanchester Strategy)
  by Shinichi Yano, Kenichi SatoT, Connie Prener

Marketing Communications Books

Ries and Trout positioning books can be read in a plane ride, yet after all these years they are still a smack on the side of the head.  Regis McKenna has always been a favorite of mine. However, as you read Relationship Marketing separate out the examples Regis uses into either startups or large sustainable businesses.  What worked in one, won’t necessarily work in another.  Read these books first before you dive into the 21PstP century stuff like Seth Godin. 

Seth Godin “gets deeply” the profound changes the internet is having in the way we think about customers and communicating with them.  Godin’s Permission Marketing book crystallized a direct marketing technique (permission marketing), which was simply impossible to achieve pre-internet.  His follow-on book, Ideavirus is worth it after you’ve read Permission Marketing.  His follow-on books are all worth having in your library.  Lakoff’s book, while written for a political audience has some valuable insights on framing communications.

• Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind The 20th Anniversary Edition and
• The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing: Violate Them at Your Own Risk by Al Ries, Jack Trout
• Relationship Marketing: Successful Strategies for the Age of the Customer by Regis McKenna
• Permission Marketing: Turning Strangers Into Friends, and Friends into Customers and
• Unleashing the IdeavirusH  by Seth Godin
• Don’t Think of an Elephant! by George Lakoff
   
   

Sales

Many of the ideas of Customer Validation are based on the principles articulated by Bosworth, Heiman and Rackham. Bostworth’s Solution Selling is a must read for any executive launching a new product.  Its articulation of the hierarchy of buyers needs as well its description of how to get customers to articulate their needs, makes this a “must read”, particularly those selling to businesses. Heiman’s books are a bit more tactical and are part of a comprehensive sales training program from his company Miller-Heiman.  If you are in sales or have a sales background you can skip these.  But if you aren’t they are all worth reading for the basic “blocking and tackling” advice.  The only bad news is that Heiman writes like a loud salesman – but the advice is sound. Rackham’s Spin Selling is another series of books about major account, large ticket item sales, with again the emphasis on selling the solution, not features.Lets Get Real is of the Sandler School of selling (another school of business to business sales methodology.)

•  Solution Selling: Creating Buyers in Difficult Selling MarketsH  By Michael T. Bosworth
• The New Conceptual Selling: The Most Effective and Proven Method for Face-To-Face Sales Planning and The New Strategic Selling: The Unique Sales System Proven Successful by the World's Best Companies by Stephen E. Heiman, et al
• Spin Selling Hand the HSpin Selling Fieldbook  HBy Neil Rackham
• Lets Get Real or Lets Not Play  by Mahan Khalsa
• Sandler Selling System  Hwww.sandler.com
• Miller Heiman Sales Process Consulting & Training  Hwww.millerheiman.com

Startup Nuts & Bolts

Jeff Timmons Business Plans that Work summarizes the relevant part of hsi New Venture Creation book.  However, both are worth having on the shelf as his model of how to look at startup opportunities provides a rigor and framework that I only wish I had used.  Nesheim’s book High Tech Startup is the gold standard of the nuts and bolts of all the financing stages from venture capital to IPO’s. If you promise to ignore the marketing advice he gives you, Baird’s book, Engineering Your Startup is the cliff notes version in explaining the basics of financing, valuation, stock options, etc. Term Sheets and Valuations is a great read if you’re faced with a term sheet and staring at words like “liquidation preferences and conversion rights” and don’t have a clue what they mean.  Read this and you can act like you almost understand what you are giving away. Gordon Bells’ book High-Tech Ventures is incomprehensible on the first, second or third read.  Yet it is simply the best “operating manual” for startups that has been written.  (The only glaring flaw is Bell’s assumption that a market exists for the product and that marketing’s job is data sheets and trade shows.)  Read it in doses for insight and revelation and make notes, (think of reading the bible) rather than reading it straight through.

• Business Plans That Work and New Venture Creation with New Business Mentor 2002 by Jeffry A. Timmons
• High Tech Start Up: The Complete Handbook for Creating Successful New High Tech Companies 
  By John L. Nesheim
• Engineering Your Start-Up: A Guide for the High-Tech Entrepreneur By Michael L. Bair
• Term Sheets & Valuations - An Inside Look at the Intricacies of Venture Capital by Alex Wilmerding Aspatore Books Staff, Aspatore.com
• High-Tech Ventures: The Guide for Entrepreneurial Success by Gordon Bell

Manufacturing

I've yet to meet a manufacturing person that does not reference The Goal when talking about lean manufacturing principles first. It's a book inside a novel - so it humanizes the manufacturing experience.  Lean Thinking is the best over all summary of the lean manufacturing genre. Toyota Production System is the father of all lean manufacturing - it's simple tone is refreshing.

• The Goal by Eliyahu Goldratt
• Lean ThinkingH by James Womack

Toyota Production System: Beyond Large-Scale Production by Taiicho Ohno.
 
 

Product Design

Cooper’s book, The Inmates are Running the Asylum, had the same impact on me as Moore’s Crossing the Chasm – “why of course, that’s what’s wrong.”  It’s important and articulate. 

• The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How To Restore The Sanity by Alan Cooper
   
   

Culture/Human Resources

If you are in a large company and wondering why your company isn’t going anywhere your answers might be found in Good to Great.  Written by Jim Collins, the same author who wrote Built to Last, both are books that “you should be so lucky” to read.  What differentiates good companies versus great?  How do you institutionalize core values into a company that enable it to create value when the current management is long gone?  When I first read these, I thought they were only for companies that were lucky enough to get big.  Upon reflection, these books were the inspiration for the “Mission-Oriented Culture.”  Read these two books together.
Ironically, the best HR stuff for anyone in a startup to read is not a book.  It is the work James Baron at Stanford has done.    Download his slides on the Stanford Project on Emerging Companies.  Baron’s book, Strategic Human Resources – is a classic HR textbook. Finally, if you are working at a startup and wondering why the founder is nuts, The Founder Factor helps explain a few things.

• Good To Great and Built to Last by James C. Collins, Jerry I. Porras
• The Human Equation: Building Profits by Putting People First By Jeffrey Pfeffer
• Strategic Human Resources: Frameworks for General Managers by James N. Baron, David Kreps
• The Founder Factor by Nancy Truitt Pierce

Venture Capital

Unlike the “how to” books above, these are personal stories.  If you have never experienced a startup first hand, Jerry Kaplan and Michael Wolff’s books are good reads of a founder’s adventure with the venture capitalists.  Eboys is the story of Benchmark Capital during the Internet Bubble.  Ferguson’s book is a great read for the first time entrepreneur.  His personality and views of the venture capitalists and “suits” are a Rorschach ink blot test for the reader.

• Burn Rate: How I Survived the Gold Rush Years on the InternetH  by Michael Wolff
• Startup: A Silicon Valley Adventure by Jerry Kaplan
• Eboys: The First Inside Account of Venture Capitalists at Work by Randall E. Stross
• High Stakes, No Prisoners: A Winner's Tale of Greed and Glory in the Internet Wars
  by Charles H. Ferguson

History

The best history of Silicon Valley you won’t read anywhere is actually a YouTube presentation: The Secret History of Silicon Valley.  If you want the best-written summary of why Silicon Valley happened, (and why the east coast blew it) here it is.  Though she misses the military-industrial complex contribution to the formation of Silicon Valley, Annalee Saxenian’ Regional Advantage nails most of the rest.  The Nudist on the Late Shift is a book you send to someone who lives outside of Silicon Valley who wants to know what life is like in a startup. Alfred Sloan’s My Years with General Motors is a great read, but not for the traditional reasons.  Read it from the point of view of an entrepreneur (Durant) who’s built a great company by gut and instinct, got it to $200M and is replaced by the board.  Then watches as a world-class bureaucrat grows into one of the largest and best run companies in the world.   Make sure you read it in conjunction with Sloan Rules and A Ghost’s Memoir.

• The Secret History of Silicon Valley
• Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128H
  by Annalee Saxenian
• The Nudist on the Late Shift by Po Bronson
• My Years with General Motors by Alfred Sloan
• Sloan Rules: Alfred P. Sloan and the Triumph of General Motors by David R. Farber
• A Ghost's Memoir: The Making of Alfred P. Sloan's My Years with General Motors
  by John McDonal