A list of our favorite and most impactful books, covering both best business practices and methodologies, as well as Silicon Valley history and culture. Modern and classic titles.

1. Good Reads
Walter Isacason. Based on more than forty interviews with
Jobs conducted over two years—as well as interviews with
more than a hundred family members, friends, adversaries,
competitors, and colleagues—Walter Isaacson has written a
riveting story of the roller-coaster life and searingly intense
personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for
perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries:
personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet
computing, and digital publishing.
It's been called "the bible for startups" and "the
best $40 investment a startup can make" (on sale
at Amazon.com for far less)! A startup without
customers is like a day without oxygen, and The
Startup Owner's Manual helps founders get it
right--and shows you how to "get, keep, and
grow" customers, literally every step of the way.
This new step-by-step "owner's manual" walks
entrepreneurs through the proven, world-
renowned Customer Development process for
getting startups right the first time. The Owner's
Manual is adding value, structure and success to
thousands of great young companies.
Steven Blank. The essential book for anyone bringing a product
to market, writing a business plan, marketing plan or sales
plan. Step-by-step strategy of how to successfully organize
sales, marketing and business development for a new product
or company. The book offers insight into what makes some
startups successful and leaves others selling off their furniture.
Packed with concrete examples, the book will leave you with
new skills to organize sales, marketing and your business for
success.

2. Alexander Osterwalder, Yves PigneurBusiness Model
Generation is a handbook for visionaries, game changers, and
challengers striving to defy outmoded business models and
design tomorrow's enterprises. If your organization needs to
adapt to harsh new realities, but you don't yet have a strategy
that will get you out in front of your competitors, you
need Business Model Generation.
William Draper III. Entrepreneurs drive the future, and the
last several decades have been a thrilling ride of astounding,
far-reaching innovation. Behind this transformative progress
are also the venture capitalists—who are at once the
investors, coaches and allies of the entrepreneurs. William H.
Draper III knows this story first-hand, because as a venture
capitalist, he helped write it. For more than 40 years, Bill
Draper has worked with top entrepreneurs in fabled Silicon
Valley, where today’s vision is made into tomorrow’s reality.
The Startup Game is the first up-close look at how the
relationship between venture capitalists and entrepreneurs is
critical to enhancing the success of any economy.
Eric Ries. 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, it relies on “validated learning,” rapid scientific
experimentation, as well as a number of counter-intuitive
practices that shorten product development cycles, measure
actual progress without resorting to vanity metrics, and learn
what customers really want. It enables a company to shift
directions with agility, altering plans inch by inch, minute by
minute.
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.
Brant Cooper, Patrick Vlaskovits Customer Development is a
four-step framework for helping startups discover and validate
their customers, product, and go-to-market strategy,
developed by Steve Blank and an integral part of Eric
Ries' Lean Startup methodology. Focused on the Customer
Discovery step, The Entrepreneur's Guide to Customer
Development is an easy to follow guide for finding early
adopters, building a Minimum Viable Product, finding
Product-Market fit, and establishing a sales and
marketing roadmap.

3. Peter Sims. What do Apple CEO Steve Jobs, comedian Chris
Rock, prize-winning architect Frank Gehry, the story
developers at Pixar films, and the Army Chief of Strategic
Plans all have in common? Bestselling author Peter Sims
found that all of them have achieved breakthrough results by
methodically taking small, experimental steps in order to
discover and develop new ideas. Rather than believing they
have to start with a big idea or plan a whole project out in
advance, trying to foresee the final outcome, they make a
series of little bets about what might be a good direction,
learning from lots of little failures and from small but highly
significant wins that allow them to happen upon unexpected
avenues and arrive at extraordinary outcomes.
Geoffrey Moore. Here is the bestselling guide that created a
new game plan for marketing in high-tech industries. Crossing
the Chasm has become the bible for bringing cutting-edge
products to progressively larger markets. This edition
provides new insights into the realities of high-tech
marketing, with special emphasis on the Internet. It's
essential reading for anyone with a stake in the world's most
exciting marketplace.
Andrew Grove. In Only the Paranoid Survive, Grove
reveals his strategy of focusing on a new way of measuring
the nightmare moment every leader dreads--when massive
change occurs and a company must, virtually overnight, adapt
or fall by the wayside.
Grove calls such a moment a Strategic Inflection Point, which
can be set off by almost anything: mega-competition, a
change in regulations, or a seemingly modest change in
technology. When a Strategic Inflection Point hits, the
ordinary rules of business go out the window. Yet, managed
right, a Strategic Inflection Point can be an opportunity to win
in the marketplace and emerge stronger than ever.
Po Bronson. In his national bestseller The Nudist on the
Late Shift he tells the true story of the mostly under-thirty
entrepreneurs and tech wizards, immigrants and investors,
dreamers and visionaries, who see the Valley as their Mecca.
Taking us inside the world of these newcomers, brainiacs,
salespeople, headhunters, utopians, plutocrats, and
innovators as they transform our culture, The Nudist on the
Late Shift is a defining portrait of a new generation in the
whirl of an information revolution and an international gold
rush.

4. Michael Lewis. As American capitalism undergoes a seismic
shift, Michael Lewis, author of the bestselling Liar's Poker,
sets out on a Silicon Valley safari to find the true
representative of the coming economic age. All roads lead
to Jim Clark, the man who rewrote the rules of American
capitalism as the founder of (so far) three multi-billion dollar
companies--Silicon Graphics, Netscape, and Healtheon.
Lewis's shrewd, often brilliantly funny, narrative provides
ahead-of-the-curve observations about the Internet explosion
and how the success of Silicon Valley companies is forcing a
reassessment of traditional Wall-Street business models.
Robert Cringely. Computer manufacturing is--after cars,
energy production and illegal drugs--the largest industry in
the world, and it's one of the last great success stories in
American business. Accidental Empires is the trenchant,
vastly readable history of that industry, focusing as much on
the astoundingly odd personalities at its core--Steve Jobs, Bill
Gates, Mitch Kapor, etc. and the hacker culture they spawned
as it does on the remarkable technology they created.
Cringely reveals the manias and foibles of these men (they
are always men) with deadpan hilarity and cogently
demonstrates how their neuroses have shaped the computer
business. But Cringely gives us much more than high-tech
voyeurism and insider gossip. From the birth of the transistor
to the mid-life crisis of the computer industry, he spins a
sweeping, uniquely American saga of creativity and ego that
is at once uproarious, shocking and inspiring.