Learn the path Tony Hsieh took at Zappos, which he joined and became CEO after selling LinkExchange to Microsoft, to grow the company to over $1 billion in gross merchandise sales in less than ten years. A great book on creating the a strong and customer-oriented company culture.
Learn the framework that successful companies have implemented to gain traction for their product and scale successfully. Identify the marketing channels that make sense for your company, given its unique properties, in this book by Gabriel Weinberg (Founder, DuckDuckGo) and Justin Mares (Founder, Kettle & Fire).
Rob Fitzpatrick has written the most essential book on validating your business ideas correctly and in a way that is practical and will save you time, money, and heartbreak. It's a short book that basically says that you shouldn't ask anyone if your business is a good idea, because it's a bad question and everyone is bound to lie in varying degrees. It's not their responsibility to tell you the truth, but yours to extract it correctly. And this book can teach you how.
Ben Horowitz knows how hard it is to run a business, and he is brutally honest about it. The cofounder of Andreessen Horowitz draws on his experiences in founding, running, selling, and investing in companies. The book offers essential advice and practical wisdom for navigating the toughest problems in running your venture that business schools don't cover.
How many likes? How many purchases? How many email subscribers? It's easy to get lost in the numbers. As entrepreneurs, we have to remember that there are people behind all that data. People who are looking for someone they trust, someone who has their best interests in mind. Pat Flynn shows a path to becoming that trustworthy person and creating a tribe of superfans around the world.
Running a business is all about solving problems, but business leaders often don't know what's their biggest problem. Instead of going in endless circles putting out urgent fires or prioritizing the wrong things, Mike Michalowicz provides a framework for identifying the most important problems based on a business' heirarchy of needs, and prioritizing to fix them first.
