Every two weeks, we ask our guests about the books that have impacted them or help them during their entrepreneurship journey. We thought it might inspire you, so we’ve compiled the ones related to our FinTech episodes!
🆙 The Lean Startup – Eric Ries
recommended by Alexandre Louisy – CEO and co-founder – Upflow
How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses
Most new businesses fail. But most of those failures are preventable. The Lean Startup is a new approach to business that’s being adopted around the world. It is changing the way companies are built and new products are launched. The Lean Startup is about learning what your customers really want. It’s about testing your vision continuously, adapting and adjusting before it’s too late. Now is the time to think Lean.
🦾 The Hard Thing About Hard Things – Ben Horowitz
recommended by Alexandre Louisy – CEO and co-founder – Upflow
Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers
Ben Horowitz, cofounder of Andreessen Horowitz and one of Silicon Valley’s most respected and experienced entrepreneurs, offers essential advice on building and running a startup—practical wisdom for managing the toughest problems business school doesn’t cover, based on his popular ben’s blog.
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, sharing the insights he’s gained developing, managing, selling, buying, investing in, and supervising technology companies. A lifelong rap fanatic, he amplifies business lessons with lyrics from his favorite songs, telling it straight about everything from firing friends to poaching competitors, 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.
⏺️ The Art of the Start – Guy Kawasaki
recommended by Alexandre Louisy – CEO and co-founder – Upflow
The Time-Tested, Battle-Hardened Guide for Anyone Starting Anything
A new product, a new service, a new company, a new division, a new organization, a new anything—where there’s a will, here’s the way.
It begins with a dream that just won’t quit, the once-in-a-lifetime thunderbolt of pure inspiration, the obsession, the world-beater, the killer app, the next big thing. Everyone who wants to make the world a better place becomes possessed by a grand idea.
But what does it take to turn your idea into action?
Whether you are an entrepreneur, intrapreneur, or not-for-profit crusader, there’s no shortage of advice available on issues such as writing a business plan, recruiting, raising capital, and branding. In fact, there are so many books, articles, and Web sites that many startups get bogged down to the point of paralysis. Or else they focus on the wrong priorities and go broke before they discover their mistakes.
From raising money to hiring the right people, from defining your positioning to creating a brand, from creating buzz to buzzing the competition, from managing a board to fostering a community, this book will guide you through an adventure that’s more art than science—the art of the start.
🖱️ Clean Architecture – Robert C. Martin Series
recommended by Lucas Bertola – Co-founder & CTO – AGICAP
A Craftsman’s Guide to Software Structure and Design: A Craftsman’s Guide to Software Structure and Design
Building upon the success of best-sellers The Clean Coder and Clean Code, legendary software craftsman Robert C. « Uncle Bob » Martin shows how to bring greater professionalism and discipline to application architecture and design.
As with his other books, Martin’s Clean Architecture doesn’t merely present multiple choices and options, and say « use your best judgment »: it tells you what choices to make, and why those choices are critical to your success. Martin offers direct, no-nonsense answers to key architecture and design questions like:
> What are the best high level structures for different kinds of applications, including web, database, thick-client, console, and embedded apps?
> What are the core principles of software architecture?
> What is the role of the architect, and what is he/she really trying to achieve?
> What are the core principles of software design?
> How do designs and architectures go wrong, and what can you do about it?
> What are the disciplines and practices of professional architects and designers?
🧩 An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management – Will Larson
recommended by Lucas Bertola – Co-founder & CTO – AGICAP
There’s a saying that people don’t leave companies, they leave managers. Management is a key part of any organization, yet the discipline is often self-taught and unstructured. Getting to the good solutions for complex management challenges can make the difference between fulfillment and frustration for teams, and, ultimately, between the success and failure of companies.
Will Larson’s An Elegant Puzzle focuses on the particular challenges of engineering management—from sizing teams to handling technical debt to performing succession planning—and provides a path to the good solutions. Drawing from his experience at Digg, Uber, and Stripe, Larson has developed a thoughtful approach to engineering management for leaders of all levels at companies of all sizes. An Elegant Puzzle balances structured principles and human-centric thinking to help any leader create more effective and rewarding organizations for engineers to thrive in.
🔮 Predictable Revenue – Aaron Ross / Marylou Tyler
recommended by Jérémy Goillot – ex-Spendesk
Turn Your Business Into a Sales Machine with the $100 Million Best Practices of Salesforce.com
Called « The Sales Bible of Silicon Valley »…discover the sales specialization system and outbound sales process that, in just a few years, helped add $100 million in recurring revenue to Salesforce.com, almost doubling their enterprise growth…with zero cold calls. This is NOT just another book about how to cold call or close deals. This is an entirely new kind of sales system for CEOs, entrepreneurs and sales VPs to help you build a sales machine. What does it take for your sales team to generate as many highly-qualified new leads as you want, create predictable revenue, and meet your financial goals without your constant focus and attention? Predictable Revenue has the answers!
☁️ Behind the Cloud – Marc Benioff / Carlye Adler
recommended by Jérémy Goillot – ex-Spendesk
The Untold Story of How Salesforce.com Went from Idea to Billion–Dollar Company–and Revolutionized an Industry
How did salesforce.com grow from a start up in a rented apartment into the world′s fastest growing software company in less than a decade? For the first time, Marc Benioff, the visionary founder, chairman and CEO of salesforce.com, tells how he and his team created and used new business, technology, and philanthropic models tailored to this time of extraordinary change. Showing how salesforce.com not only survived the dotcom implosion of 2001, but went on to define itself as the leader of the cloud computing revolution and spark a $46–billion dollar industry, Benioff′s story will help business leaders and entrepreneurs stand out, innovate better, and grow faster in any economic climate.
In Behind the Cloud, Benioff shares the strategies that have inspired employees, turned customers into evangelists, leveraged an ecosystem of partners, and allowed innovation to flourish.
💲 Trillion Dollar Coach – Eric Schmidt / Jonathan Rosenberg / Alan Eagle
recommended by Florian Fournier – CEO & co-founder – Payfit
The Leadership Playbook of Silicon Valley’s Bill Campbell
The team behind How Google Works returns with management lessons from legendary coach and business executive, Bill Campbell, whose mentoring of some of our most successful modern entrepreneurs has helped create well over a trillion dollars in market value.
Bill Campbell played an instrumental role in the growth of several prominent companies, such as Google, Apple, and Intuit, fostering deep relationships with Silicon Valley visionaries, including Steve Jobs, Larry Page, and Eric Schmidt. In addition, this business genius mentored dozens of other important leaders on both coasts, from entrepreneurs to venture capitalists to educators to football players, leaving behind a legacy of growing companies, successful people, respect, friendship, and love after his death in 2016.
Leaders at Google for over a decade, Eric Schmidt, Jonathan Rosenberg, and Alan Eagle experienced firsthand how the man fondly known as Coach Bill built trusting relationships, fostered personal growth—even in those at the pinnacle of their careers—inspired courage, and identified and resolved simmering tensions that inevitably arise in fast-moving environments. To honor their mentor and inspire and teach future generations, they have codified his wisdom in this essential guide.
Based on interviews with over eighty people who knew and loved Bill Campbell, Trillion Dollar Coach explains the Coach’s principles and illustrates them with stories from the many great people and companies with which he worked. The result is a blueprint for forward-thinking business leaders and managers that will help them create higher performing and faster moving cultures, teams, and companies.
🤴 The Little Prince – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
recommended by Aymeric Augustin – CTO – Qonto
The Little Prince is a classic tale of equal appeal to children and adults. On one level it is the story of an airman’s discovery, in the desert, of a small boy from another planet – the Little Prince of the title – and his stories of intergalactic travel, while on the other hand it is a thought-provoking allegory of the human condition. First published in 1943, the year before the author’s death in action, this translation contains Saint-Exupery’s delightful illustrations.
💨 Accelerate – Nicole Forsgren / Jez Humble / Gene Kim
recommended by Alexandre Heimburger – ex-Lydia
The Science Behind Devops: Building and Scaling High Performing Technology Organizations
Accelerate your organization to win in the marketplace. How can we apply technology to drive business value? For years, we’ve been told that the performance of software delivery teams doesn’t matter that it can’t provide a competitive advantage to our companies. Through four years of groundbreaking research, Dr. Nicole Forsgren, Jez Humble, and Gene Kim set out to find a way to measure software delivery performance and what drives it using rigorous statistical methods. This book presents both the findings and the science behind that research, making the information accessible for readers to apply in their own organizations. Readers will discover how to measure the performance of their teams, and what capabilities they should invest in to drive higher performance. This book is ideal for management at every level.