Book Recommendations
Last updated: 25rd Nov 2025
Talk to your fellow founders. Ideally one-step ahead in the journey (could be funding, adoption, company size, etc). Those are your best resources for sanity and cutting-edge playbooks.
In the meantime, here are the books most impactful in my journey as an early-stage tech founder.
Getting the right Founder Mindset
- The One Thing: Long Term to Short Term Goal Setting Framework that's actionable
- Working Backwards: Highly recommend reading the chapters on Input Metrics for making your chaotic journey more structured.
- What Customers Want: Understand the broad concept of Jobs To Be done (Macro Concept, good to be aware of in the background)
- The Mom's Test: How to actually validate your assumptions (whether in the problem or product)
- Continuous Dicovery Habits Mental model for how to plan and execute tests in a lean manner and innovate continuously
- Lean UX Supplementary to Continous Discovery Habits and The Mom's Test. Practical guide to executing your early experiments.
- Traction A good primer on understanding different channels of user aquisition and growth.
- Who Not How: Get in the mindset of delegating and how to do it effectively.
- Fundraising: THis process changes a lot imo depending on the stage, industry and geography for early-stage companies. This is a good primer for getting in the mindset for growth stage fundraising.
Networking & Sales
- Founding Sales: A long, yet solid primer on how to prepare for enterprise sales calls, the materials needed and planning the actual execution.
- It's Not All About Me: The Top Ten Techniques for Building Quick Rapport with Anyone
- To Sell is Human: The Surprising Truth About Movin Others
- Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation
Productivity
- Predictably Irrational - Dan Ariely
- Eat that frog: 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating Innovation to Create Breakthrough Products and Services
- Deep Work: Rules of Focused Success in a Distracted World