Huge congratulations to JKB, Frode, Kim, and the rest of the Vespa team! We are infinitely grateful for all of your help and advice. We are lucky enough to have Vespa as the foundation for our developer-focused enterprise search product.
Having worked with both Solr and Elastic in past search companies, it’s incredible to be able to deploy into Fortune 50 enterprises without any doubts about stability and with all the benefits of a cutting-edge hybrid engine.
Can’t wait to watch you on the next leg of your journey!
- Dear Founder (Maynard Webb)
- The Hard Things About Hard Things (Ben Horowitz)
- Straight Talk for Startups (Randy Komisar and Jantoon Reigersman)
- The Founders’ Dilemmas (Noam Wasserman)
- The Entrepreneur’s Daily Nietzsche (Brad Feld and Dave Jilk)
- Build (Tony Fadell)
- Zero to IPO (Frederic Kerrest)
- The Great CEO Within (Matt Mochary)
Finance
- Wharton's Introduction to Financial Accounting course: [https://www.coursera.org/learn/wharton-accounting](https://w...
- How Finance Works: The HBR Guide to Thinking Smart About the Numbers (Mihir Desai)
- Financial Intelligence for Entrepreneurs: What You Really Need to Know About the Numbers (Karen Berman and Joe Knight)
Open-Book Company (Employee Ownership, Financial Literacy, Goal-setting)
- The Great Game of Business (Jack Stack and Bo Burlingham)
Legal
- Acceleration (Ryan Roberts)
- The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Law and Strategy (Constance Bagley and Craig Dauchy)
Company Strategy and Direction (post-product/market fit)
- Crossing the Chasm (Geoff Moore)
- Zone to Win (Geoff Moore)
- Only the Paranoid Survive (Andy Grove)
- Blitzscaling (Reid Hoffman and Chris Yeh)
- The Innovator's Dilemma (Clayton Christensen)
- Good to Great (Jim Collins)
- Playing to Win (A.G. Lafley and Roger Martin)
- Tape Sucks (Frank Slootman)
- Strategy vol. 1&2 (Harvard Business Review)
Pricing
- Monetizing Innovation (Georg Tacke and Madhavan Ramanujan)
- Confessions of the Pricing Man (Hermann Simon)
Startup Phase
- The Lean Startup (Eric Ries)
- The Four Steps to the Epiphany (Steve Blank)
- Zero to One (Peter Thiel)
Management/Leadership
- The Effective Executive (Peter Drucker)
- Managing Humans (Michael Lopp)
- The Art of Leadership (Michael Lopp)
- High Output Management (Andy Grove)
- Managing Oneself (Peter Drucker)
- Essentials: Management (First Round Capital)
- The Making of a Manager (Julie Zhuo)
- The Powell Principles (Oren Harari)
- Radical Candor (Kim Scott)
- Leading Matters (John L. Hennessy) (fantastic book list in the coda)
- Turn the Ship Around (L. David Marquet) (this is THE book on delegation)
- Principles (Ray Dalio)
COO/Succession Planning
- Riding Shotgun (Nathan Bennett and Stephen A. Miles)
People Performance/HR/Culture
- Powerful (Patty McCord)
- No Rules Rules (Reed Hastings and Erin Meyer)
- Netflix culture deck
- The Five Dysfunctions of a Team (Patrick Lencioni)
- Work Rules! (Laszlo Bock)
- It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work (DHH and Jason Fried)
- The Culture Map (Erin Meyer)
- The Talent War (Mike Sarraille and George Randle)
- Great People Decisions (Claudio Fernández-Aráoz)
- The Holloway Guide to Technical Recruiting and Hiring (Ozzie Osman)
- Punished by Rewards (Alfie Kohn)
Purpose, Passion, and Self
- Start with Why (Simon Sinek)
- What You Do is Who You Are (Ben Horowitz)
- Drive (Daniel Pink)
- Mindset (Carol Dweck)
- Grit (Angela Duckworth)
- The Almanack of Naval Ravikant (Eric Jorgenson)
Fundraising/VC
- Secrets of Sand Hill Road (Scott Kupor)
- Venture Deals (Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson)
- Raising Venture Capital (Andy Sparks)
- The Business of Venture Capital (Mahendra Ramsinghani)
- Done Deals (Udayan Gupta)
- The Power Law (Sebastian Mallaby)
- VC (Tom Nicholas)
- Data-Driven Marketing (Mark Jeffery)
- Positioning (Al Ries and Jack Trout)
- Scientific Advertising (Claude Hopkins)
- Traction (Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares)
- Behind the Cloud (Marc Benioff and Carlye Adler)
- Ogilvy on Advertising (David Ogilvy)
- Marketing High Technology (William Davidow)
Psychology
- Influence (Robert Cialdini)
Negotiation
First, read Influence (under Psychology), then, in order
- Thinking in Bets (Annie Duke)
- Getting to Yes (Roger Fisher and William Ury)
- Never Split the Difference (Chris Voss)
- The Bald Truth (David Falk)
Self
- The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (Stephen Covey)
Design and UX
- Creative Confidence (Tom Kelley and David Kelley)
AI (Machine Learning, Deep Learning/Neural Networks)
- The CIO Paradox (Martha Heller)
- Be the Business (Martha Heller)
Stories
- Made in America (Sam Walton)
- Shoe Dog (Phil Knight)
- The Everything Store (Brad Stone)
- Built from Scratch (Bernie Marcus and Arthur Blank)
- Hard Drive (James Wallace)
- Steve Jobs (Walter Isaacson)
- Elon Musk (Ashlee Vance)
- Creativity, Inc. (Ed Catmull)
- The Ride of a Lifetime (Bob Iger)
- Valley of Genius (Adam Fisher)
- The Idea Factory (Jon Gertner)
- Dealers of Lightning (Michael Hertzik)
- Idea Man (Paul Allen)
- Pour Your Heart Into It (Howard Schultz)