The Best Entrepreneur Books: 15 Reads Founders Actually Come Back To
Every entrepreneur ends up with a private syllabus — the few books that genuinely shaped how they think and work. Ask around long enough and the same titles keep coming up. These are the best entrepreneur books on our shelf: books worth reading before you begin, while in the trenches, and after being humbled once or twice. Each of the books below has a full summary available.
Start here
Creating something completely new? Zero to One should be the very first book to read. Peter Thiel’s whole point is that the biggest returns come from creating a category versus competing for pieces of an existing market – and he makes it in less than 200 pages.
Josh Kaufman’s The Personal MBA will help you fill in the gaps if the basics still seem unclear. He took the good parts of a business degree and condensed them down into one readable volume. No six-figure tuition necessary.
Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson wrote Rework as a short and direct guide for founders who are overwhelmed by advice. Most of it gives a founder permission to do things “their way” and not follow traditional ways of building companies.
When the problem is customers
Most early-stage businesses die because of too few customers. Alex Hormozi’s $100M Leads is a less flashy, yet incredibly useful tool for solving this issue – a tactical playbook you can begin using immediately.
In Oversubscribed, Daniel Priestley reverses the search for potential customers. Instead of finding buyers, create enough demand so there is a waitlist to get into your product or service. Combine this with his Key Person of Influence, which teaches you how to become the go-to person in your niche so the right people look for you.
Learn from the ones who did it
Looking for a master class in long-term thinking? Brad Stone’s The Everything Store details Jeff Bezos’ transformation of an online bookstore into Amazon, obsession by obsession. Ashlee Vance’s Elon Musk biography provides an example of raw ambition on another level — a case study in refusing to believe that anything is impossible. And the Bill Gates biography documents how one college drop-out changed an entire industry.
Not all founder stories are highlight reels. Antonio García Martínez’s Chaos Monkeys is an unflattering, humorous view of what Silicon Valley really looks like from the inside. Lastly, Business Adventures is a collection of stories that Bill Gates and Warren Buffett each describe as their favorite. These stories show that some of the greatest lessons have been learned over the course of many years and are largely about people.
The mindset underneath it all
Having a strategy means nothing if you do not have the mind to carry it out. Think and Grow Rich has been called the grandfather of its class – Napoleon Hill on desire and persistence; dated in places, but foundational. In The Magic of Thinking Big, David Schwartz argues that your results typically grow to match the size of your thinking. Then there is The 48 Laws of Power, a cynical counterpoint: a clear-eyed, often brutal description of how real influence works.
Now that you have ambition, how do you focus your effort well? Cal Newport’s Deep Work is about getting focused and spending your time well.
Where to go next
If you are starting a business, don’t stop here. We’ve covered more ground in our roundup of the best business books, the best books to build wealth, and the best books on discipline. Choose one to start with; don’t tackle the whole stack at once.
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