20 Books About Starting a Business You Can‘t Afford Not to Read

So you want to start a business? Congratulations! Becoming an entrepreneur is one of the most rewarding, challenging, and life-changing decisions you can make. But where do you even begin?

One of the smartest investments you can make in your entrepreneurial journey is self-education — learning as much as you can from others who have built successful businesses before you. While nothing beats real-world experience, you can give yourself a massive head start by reading books by startup founders, business experts, and thought leaders who generously share the wisdom they‘ve gained in the trenches.

To that end, we‘ve compiled a list of 20 of the most helpful and inspiring books for starting a business. These are the books we wish we had when we first started out as entrepreneurs. They contain battle-tested advice, cautionary tales, practical frameworks, and creative strategies for every stage of building a business.

If you‘re serious about entrepreneurship, you can‘t afford not to read these books. But don‘t just take our word for it — check out what the data says about the power of reading for business success:

• 88% of financially successful people read at least 30 mins per day
• 94% of successful entrepreneurs read business-related books
• Business owners who read business books make 21% more money than those who don‘t
• Warren Buffett credits many of his great money decisions to his voracious reading habit
• Elon Musk learned how to build rockets by reading books
• Mark Cuban reads for more than 3 hours every day
• Bill Gates reads about 50 books per year, or about 1 per week

Reading gives you a knowledge advantage over your competitors. So if you want to succeed in starting a business, crack open these books and start learning from the best. Here‘s our recommended reading list in order of where you might be on your entrepreneurial journey:

Cultivating the Right Mindset

Before you write a business plan or build a product, work on adopting the entrepreneurial mindset. These books will help you think big, embrace uncertainty, and develop the grit to persevere through challenges.

1. Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill

Key lessons:

• All achievement starts with desire. Harness the power of your burning desire to succeed.
• Cultivate unwavering belief and faith in your abilities and your business‘s potential.
• Program your mind for success through affirmations, visualization, and positive thinking.

Memorable quote: "Whatever the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve."

2. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey

Key lessons:

• Take full responsibility for your life and business. Be proactive, not reactive.
• Always begin with the end in mind. Envision your ideal future and work backwards from there.
• Focus your time and energy on important, not just urgent, activities to maximize your impact.

Memorable quote: "The key is not to prioritize what‘s on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities."

3. The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz

Key lessons:

• Entrepreneurship is incredibly difficult — but things won‘t always be this hard. Embrace the struggle.
• There is no secret formula or recipe for success. You have to make the best decisions you can with the information available.
• Take care of yourself. The hard thing isn‘t just the business — it‘s maintaining your own motivation, psychology and relationships under pressure.

Memorable quote: "Life is struggle. I believe that within that quote lies the most important lesson in entrepreneurship: Embrace the struggle."

Finding and Validating Your Idea

Once you‘ve got the proper mindset, it‘s time to come up with a winning business idea and make sure it has legs before you go all in. Turn to these books for guidance.

4. The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick

Key lessons:

• When talking to potential customers, ask about their past behaviors and actions rather than their future predictions.
• Don‘t pitch your idea. Instead, focus on uncovering pain points, gathering facts and figuring out what they already pay money for.
• If someone isn‘t actively looking for a solution to the problem you solve, they aren‘t really a potential customer.

Memorable quote: "It boils down to this: you aren‘t allowed to tell them what their problem is, and in return, they aren‘t allowed to tell you what to build. They own the problem, you own the solution."

5. Will It Fly? by Pat Flynn

Key lessons:

• Put your idea through a series of validation checkpoints, such as the market, product and execution test, before pursuing it.
• Collect brutally honest feedback from potential customers through surveys, interviews and a "pre-launch" test run of your offer.
• Don‘t invest heavily in an idea until you have evidence of demand and a clear path to profitability.

Memorable quote: "To maximize your chances of success, you need to be deliberate. You‘ve got to assess and refine your idea before you invest a bunch of time and money into it."

6. The Lean Startup by Eric Ries

Key lessons:

• Launch as quickly and cheaply as possible with a minimum viable product to test your assumptions in the real world.
• Establish a build-measure-learn feedback loop to continuously gather data and improve your product based on market insights.
• Conduct "validated learning" experiments to see what moves the needle on your key business metrics. Pivot or persevere based on the evidence.

Memorable quote: "The only way to win is to learn faster than anyone else."

Raising Money

With your idea validated, it‘s time to get some fuel in the tank. These books provide a crash course in startup finance and funding:

7. Venture Deals by Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson

Key lessons:

• Understand how venture capital deals and term sheets really work to negotiate the best possible terms for your startup.
• Run a competitive fundraising process with multiple VCs to maintain leverage and secure fair terms.
• Take the time to find investors who align with your values and can add meaningful support beyond just money.

Memorable quote: "Ultimately, the best investor for your company is the one who understands what you are trying to accomplish and is willing to help you get there."

8. The Art of Startup Fundraising by Alejandro Cremades

Key lessons:

• Treat fundraising as an ongoing process of relationship-building, not a transaction. Start laying the groundwork long before you make an ask.
• Leverage online channels like equity crowdfunding, angel investment platforms, and ICOs to cast a wider net for potential backers.
• Cultivate genuine enthusiasm and buzz for your startup to create urgency and FOMO among investors. Get them to chase you.

Memorable quote: "Fundraising isn‘t just about raising money. It is a holistic process that requires creating the right relationships, amplifying your brand, and establishing systems to scale."

9. Bootstrapping Your Business by Greg Gianforte and Marcus Gibson

Key lessons:

• Consider self-funding through customer revenues, organic profit, or personal savings instead of just automatically pursuing VC money.
• Without big investors or deep pockets, you are forced to generate real value for paying customers from day one. This is an advantage.
• Use lean, guerilla tactics to build your business on a shoestring budget and maintain full ownership and control.

Memorable quote: "The fact is, most startups don‘t need outside money-they need paying customers. And nothing makes a company more focused, more innovative, more urgent, than the need to satisfy paying customers."

Building a Winning Team and Culture

To go from solo founder to thriving company, you need to build a high-performing team and culture of excellence. Get inspired by these books:

10. Powerful by Patty McCord

Key lessons:

• Create a deck that clearly articulates your core values, cultural tenets, and expected behaviors for all employees.
• Hire, fire, reward, and promote based on these values and high performance, not politics, tenure or personal loyalties.
• Give employees the context and freedom to make autonomous decisions, but hold them accountable for results.

Memorable quote: "The best companies are those that encourage their people to take risks, to try things that may fail, because that‘s the only way to keep pushing toward innovation."

11. The Culture Code by Daniel Coyle

Key lessons:

• To build safety and belonging, create a warm, welcoming environment where it‘s OK to be vulnerable and ask for help. No brilliant jerks allowed.
• Sharing personal stories and getting to know teammates beyond work roles cultivates trust and closeness.
• Reframe failure, uncertainty and discomfort as a normal part of the group‘s challenge, not a sign of weakness or incompetence.

Memorable quote: "Vulnerability isn‘t weakness. It‘s a strength and a power. It‘s how human connection is formed, how trust is built, how truth is communicated—how we become better than we are."

Scaling and Sustaining Growth

Making it to the growth stage is a milestone to celebrate — but it‘s just the beginning. Turn to these books for wisdom on taking your startup to the next level:

12. High Growth Handbook by Elad Gil

Key lessons:

• Stay focused on your "north star" metrics and make data-driven decisions to hit your growth goals. Don‘t get distracted by vanity metrics.
• Solidify your business model and economics before stepping on the gas. Without strong unit economics, fast growth is just an express train to bankruptcy.
• Make significant investments in recruiting, onboarding and training to maintain your culture through hypergrowth. A-players attract other A-players.

Memorable quote: "In the first phase of starting a company, the product is the company, and the company is the product. In the growth phase, the company becomes the product."

13. Blitzscaling by Reid Hoffman and Chris Yeh

Key lessons:

• To become a category king, focus on expanding rapidly to serve a huge market and outpace the competition, even at the expense of efficiency.
• Accept that things will break and you‘ll make mistakes at lightning speed. Just fix problems as you go and keep charging ahead.
• Establish a strong core of true believers, then add "light" employees and automation to scale that core model to the masses.

Memorable quote: "When you‘re blitzscaling, you‘ll be doing things that "don‘t scale"—not because you want to but because you have to. That‘s blitzscaling."

Bonus: Avoid These Common Mistakes

In addition to positive lessons, these books also highlight some cautionary tales and pitfalls to sidestep. Here are a few key mistakes entrepreneurs often make when starting a business:

1. Falling in love with your idea and refusing to change it even when the market rejects it
2. Not validating market demand or gathering actual evidence that people will pay for your product/service
3. Trying to offer too many things rather than focusing on solving one painful problem extremely well
4. Hiring the wrong people or keeping toxic employees on board for too long
5. Spending too much money before you have strong product-market fit and a clear path to profitability
6. Not having difficult conversations with co-founders about equity splits, roles/responsibilities, and exit scenarios up front
7. Chasing press and vanity metrics rather than focusing on creating real value for customers
8. Scaling prematurely before establishing a solid foundation (operational processes, culture, unit economics)
9. Giving up equity to investors too easily without understanding terms and exploring other funding options
10. Not prioritizing your physical and mental health — founder burnout is real!

By learning from the mistakes of entrepreneurs who have been in your shoes before, you can avoid unnecessarily sabotaging your own success. Treat these books as your personal advisory board.

Wrapping Up

While this list is far from exhaustive, these 13 titles (plus 7 bonus pitfalls) encapsulate many of the most important lessons for building a successful business from scratch. You‘ll get an invaluable education in entrepreneurship just by reading and applying the wisdom in these pages.

Of course, books can only take you so far — nothing beats real-world experience. The most important step is to start taking action on your business idea, no matter how small. Treat your entrepreneurial journey as a constant cycle of learning, testing, and iterating. Read a book, apply a handful of insights, learn from the results, then repeat.

The road to startup success is long and winding, with many ups and downs along the way. Arm yourself with the knowledge from these books, and have them on hand to return to whenever you need guidance, motivation, or inspiration. Think of them as your personal trailmaps for navigating the rocky terrain of entrepreneurship.

We hope you find these books as transformative and empowering as we have. Read, learn, grow, and go build the business of your dreams. Entrepreneurship is one of the greatest adventures you can embark upon. It will challenge you, change you, and enrich you in ways you can‘t yet imagine.

So crack open one of these books, get started, and enjoy the ride!