Startup Booksby Fe/male Switch

9 books in this topic

Leadership and Management Books for Startup Founders

The day you hire your first employee, your job changes from building the product to building the team that builds it. These leadership and management books cover the skills that change brings: hiring well, setting goals, running meetings, giving feedback, shaping culture and making hard decisions.

High Output Management and The Hard Thing About Hard Things suit founders who already manage people. Who and The Founder's Dilemmas are worth reading before your first hires and co-founder agreements.

The oldest book here is High Output Management (1983); the newest is The Culture Code (2018).

The Culture Code

Daniel Coyle

Daniel Coyle studied groups such as Pixar, the Navy SEALs and the San Antonio Spurs and found three skills behind strong cultures: building safety, sharing vulnerability and setting a clear purpose.

First published 2018

The Founder's Dilemmas

Noam Wasserman

Harvard researcher Noam Wasserman uses data on thousands of founders to show how early choices about co-founders, equity, roles and investors shape who keeps control and who gets rich.

First published 2012

The Hard Thing About Hard Things

Ben Horowitz

Horowitz tells how he kept Loudcloud and Opsware alive through near collapse, then turns the scars into blunt advice on firing, hiring, cash and the mental side of being CEO.

First published 2014

High Output Management

Andrew S. Grove

Intel's Andy Grove treats management like production: a manager's output is the output of the team, and every meeting, review and decision should raise it.

First published 1983

Leaders Eat Last

Simon Sinek

Sinek argues that people do their best work when their leader protects them from threats inside the group, so their energy goes into the outside challenge instead of office politics.

First published 2014

Measure What Matters

John Doerr

Venture capitalist John Doerr explains OKRs, the goal system he learned from Andy Grove at Intel and brought to Google, through stories from companies, charities and Bono's ONE campaign.

First published 2018

Principles

Ray Dalio

Bridgewater founder Ray Dalio shares the rules he wrote down over decades of running a hedge fund, from facing hard truths to designing a company like a machine that learns from mistakes.

First published 2017

Start With Why

Simon Sinek

Sinek claims that the companies people love explain their purpose before their product. His Golden Circle model asks founders to lead with why they exist, then how and what they sell.

First published 2009

Who

Geoff Smart and Randy Street

Two hiring consultants turn interviews with hundreds of CEOs into a four-step method: define the job as outcomes, source through your network, interview in a structured way and sell the role.

First published 2008

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Other startup book topics

Startup methodsLean Startup, customer development, design sprints and business model tools.Customer validationCustomer interviews, experiments and proof that people will pay.StrategyWhere to compete, how to win and how platforms and monopolies work.Disruption and technologyDisruption theory, AI-era companies, DevOps and creative confidence.Founder storiesMemoirs and histories that show what building a company feels like.Mindset and habitsHabits, decision-making, resilience and designing a working life.Money and fundingCash flow, term sheets, investors and selling your company.Marketing and salesPositioning, messaging, word of mouth and building a sales process.Product and growthProduct discovery, habit-forming products, traction channels and scaling.Women and inclusive foundersAdvice, stories and money talk for women and underrepresented founders.Business skillsHow a business works, negotiation, persuasion and startup ecosystems.

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