


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.

Originals at its core is a book about how to champion new ideas and fight groupthink. Adam Grant explores how to recognize a good idea, speak up without getting silenced, build a coalition of allies, choose the right time to act, and manage fear and doubt using studies and stories spanning business, politics, sports, and entertainment.

The New York Times bestselling author and social media expert Gary Vaynerchuk, founder of WineLibrary and Vayner Media, shells out hard-won advice on how to connect with customers and beat the competition in an increasingly noisy word. Read this book if mastering social media marketing is your goal.

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.

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.

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.