entrepreneurship

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The Four Steps to the Epiphany

The Four Steps to the Epiphany

by Steve Blank

Cited by 2 other books and connected to 0 more in entrepreneurship. If you read one book in this category first, the citation network says make it this one.

Foundational Books in entrepreneurship

Ranked by how often they are cited by other books in the collection. These are the titles later authors keep returning to — read one and you will recognise its fingerprints across the rest of the category.

  1. The Four Steps to the Epiphany1

    The Four Steps to the Epiphany

    by Steve Blank

    Cited by 2
  2. Running Lean2

    Running Lean

    by Ash Maurya

    Cited by 1

More books in entrepreneurship

Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist by Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson

Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist

by Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson

star4.7

Feld and Mendelson demystify the VC fundraising process by walking founders clause-by-clause through term sheets, covering economics (valuation, option pools, liquidation preferences) and control (board seats, protective provisions, drag-along rights). The fourth edition adds chapters on bank debt, crowdfunding, ICOs, and hiring investment bankers, arguing that informed founders negotiate better deals and build healthier investor relationships.

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The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley by Jimmy Soni

The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley

by Jimmy Soni

star4.7

Soni reconstructs the founding of PayPal from 150,000 pages of internal documents and hundreds of interviews, telling the story of how Max Levchin, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Reid Hoffman, and a handful of young engineers built the company that became the training ground for LinkedIn, YouTube, Tesla, SpaceX, Palantir, and Yelp. The book argues that the PayPal Mafia's later impact was seeded by the crucible of fraud, competition with eBay, and survival through the dot-com bust.

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Secrets of Sand Hill Road: Venture Capital and How to Get It by Scott Kupor

Secrets of Sand Hill Road: Venture Capital and How to Get It

by Scott Kupor

star4.6

Kupor, manageing partner at Andreessen Horowitz, pulls back the curtain on how venture firms actually raise, invest, and exit, explaining LPs, fund economics, and the mechanics of term sheets from the VC's own vantage point. He argues that founders who understand VC incentives (fund lifecycles, reserves, power-law returns) negotiate better deals and pick better partners, and he walks through governance, down rounds, and IPO/M&A outcomes in plain language.

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Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose by Tony Hsieh

Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose

by Tony Hsieh

star4.6

Hsieh chronicles his path from childhood worm farms through selling LinkExchange to Microsoft and building Zappos into a billion-dollar company acquired by Amazon, arguing that culture, core values, and customer happiness, not product or price, are the real moats. He lays out the ten Zappos core values and makes the case that companies optimizing for employee and customer happiness will outlast those optimizing purely for profit.

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Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days by Jessica Livingston

Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days

by Jessica Livingston

star4.5

Livingston, a founding partner of Y Combinator, interviews 32 founders of iconic tech companies (Apple, PayPal, Hotmail, Flickr, Lotus, Adobe, TiVo, Craigslist) about the scrappy, chaotic early days before product-market fit. The book argues that startup success is less about grand strategy and more about stubborn founders pivoting through rejection, technical crises, and funding droughts until something works.

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Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World by Rand Fishkin

Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World

by Rand Fishkin

star4.5

Fishkin, founder of Moz and SparkToro, counters Silicon Valley's hero narratives with a candid account of Moz's two decades of near-bankruptcies, botched pivots, VC term-sheet pain, and a CEO demotion he imposed on himself. He argues that much conventional startup wisdom - blitzscaling, fundraising at any cost, founder mythology - is wrong for most companies, and offers a more humble playbook for building durable, minority-owned, customer-funded businesses.

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Super Founders: What Data Reveals About Billion-Dollar Startups by Ali Tamaseb

Super Founders: What Data Reveals About Billion-Dollar Startups

by Ali Tamaseb

star4.4

Tamaseb, a DCVC partner, hand-collected 30,000 data points on every US billion-dollar startup founded since 2005 and compared them to a control group of random startups to test common myths. He finds that most unicorn founders had no industry experience, solo founders do fine, first-mover advantage is largely a myth, and the single strongest predictor is a founder's prior track record of starting things - overturning much received VC wisdom.

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The Startup Owner's Manual by Steve Blank

The Startup Owner's Manual

by Steve Blank

star4.1

Blank provides a step-by-step method for building startups by testing business model hypotheses with real customers. The manual turns customer development into repeatable, actionable stages.

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