The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses
Eric ries defines a startup as an organization dedicated to creating something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty. Ries provides a scientific approach to creating and managing successful startups in a age when companies need to innovate more than ever. This is just as true for one person in a garage or a group of seasoned professionals in a Fortune 500 boardroom.
Crown Business. What they have in common is a mission to penetrate that fog of uncertainty to discover a successful path to a sustainable business. 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, ” rapid scientific experimentation, as well as a number of counter-intuitive practices that shorten product development cycles, it relies on “validated learning, measure actual progress without resorting to vanity metrics, and learn what customers really want.
Most startups fail. But many of those failures are preventable.
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, selling, investing in, buying, managing, sharing the insights he’s gained developing, and supervising technology companies.
HarperBusiness. A lifelong rap fanatic, telling it straight about everything from firing friends to poaching competitors, he amplifies business lessons with lyrics from his favorite songs, cultivating and sustaining a CEO mentality to knowing the right time to cash in. Filled with his trademark humor and straight talk, The Hard Thing About Hard Things is invaluable for veteran entrepreneurs as well as those aspiring to their own new ventures, drawing from Horowitz's personal and often humbling experiences.
.
Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies
A new york times bestsellersuperintelligence asks the questions: What happens when machines surpass humans in general intelligence? Will artificial agents save or destroy us? Nick Bostrom lays the foundation for understanding the future of humanity and intelligent life. It is to these distinctive capabilities that our species owes its dominant position.
Will it be possible to construct a seed artificial Intelligence, to engineer initial conditions so as to make an intelligence explosion survivable? How could one achieve a controlled detonation?This profoundly ambitious and original book breaks down a vast track of difficult intellectual terrain. The human brain has some capabilities that the brains of other animals lack.
If machine brains surpassed human brains in general intelligence, then this new superintelligence could become extremely powerful - possibly beyond our control.
Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies
The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail Management of Innovation and Change
Christensen explains why most companies miss out on new waves of innovation. From steve jobs to jeff bezos, Clay Christensen’s work continues to underpin today’s most innovative leaders and organizations. The bestselling classic on disruptive innovation, by renowned author Clayton M. An innovation classic.
Crown Business. Named by fast company as one of the most influential leadership books in its Leadership Hall of Fame. Oxford University Press. Named one of 100 leadership & success Books to Read in a Lifetime by Amazon EditorsA Wall Street Journal and Businessweek bestseller. No matter the industry, he says, a successful company with established products will get pushed aside unless managers know how and when to abandon traditional business practices.
Offering both successes and failures from leading companies as a guide, The Innovator’s Dilemma gives you a set of rules for capitalizing on the phenomenon of disruptive innovation. Sharp, cogent, leader, and provocativeand consistently noted as one of the most valuable business ideas of all timeThe Innovator’s Dilemma is the book no manager, or entrepreneur should be without.
Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist
This is the highly anticipated third edition of the best-selling book which has become the definitive resource for understanding venture capital fundraising. And as in the previous editions, this book isn’t just a one-sided opinion from venture capitalists, but also has helpful commentary throughout from a veteran CEO who has raised many rounds of financing from many different investors.
You’ll see the process of negotiating from the eyes of two seasoned venture capitalists who have over 40 years of investing experience as VCs, angels, LPs, and founders. Oxford University Press. Harvard Business School Publis. Wiley. This book is designed to bring transparency to the venture capital funding process and includes such topics as: how to raise money; What terms matter and which ones don’t; How to negotiate a fair deal for everyone; What makes venture capitalists tick, crowdfunding, early, including how they are compensated and motivated; How companies are valued by venture capitalists; How all current structures of funding work, including convertible debt, pre-sales and other non-traditional methods; How these particular issues change through different stages of financing seed, mid and late; and How to avoid business and legal pitfalls that many entrepreneurs make.
. If you are ready to learn all the secrets and ins and outs of fundraising, Venture Deals is an essential read.
Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike
Bill gates named shoe dog one of his five favorite books of 2016 and called it “an amazing tale, a refreshingly honest reminder of what the path to business success really looks like. In shoe dog, he tells his story at last. Today, nike’s annual sales top $30 billion. Together, harnessing the electrifying power of a bold vision and a shared belief in the transformative power of sports, they created a brand—and a culture—that changed everything.
At twenty-four, knight decides that rather than work for a big corporation, he will create something all his own, new, dynamic, different. HarperBusiness. It’s a messy, perilous, riddled with mistakes, and chaotic journey, endless struggles, and sacrifice. Above all, the irascible and charismatic bill bowerman, he recalls the relationships that formed the heart and soul of Nike, and with his first employees, with his former track coach, a ragtag group of misfits and savants who quickly became a band of swoosh-crazed brothers.
Phil knight opens up in ways few CEOs are willing to do.
Principles: Life and Work
Forty years later, bridgewater has made more money for its clients than any other hedge fund in history and grown into the fifth most important private company in the United States, according to Fortune magazine. Along the way, dalio discovered a set of unique principles that have led to Bridgewater’s exceptionally effective culture, which he describes as “an idea meritocracy that strives to achieve meaningful work and meaningful relationships through radical transparency.
It is these principles, and not anything special about Dalio—who grew up an ordinary kid in a middle-class Long Island neighborhood—that he believes are the reason behind his success. Crown Business. He also describes the innovative tools the firm uses to bring an idea meritocracy to life, such as creating “baseball cards” for all employees that distill their strengths and weaknesses, and employing computerized decision-making systems to make believability-weighted decisions.
In principles, dalio shares what he’s learned over the course of his remarkable career. 1 new york times Bestseller “Significant.