Books and Blogs

Books for Entrepreneurs, Startups, and VCs:

• Business Model Generation: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers and Challengers, by Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur
• The Startup Owner’s Manual: The Step-by-Step Guide for Building a Great Company, by Steve Blank and Bob Dorf
  (for those with access to the Cornell University Library system access the book here)
• The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses, by Eric Ries
• Entrepreneurship: Successfully Launching New Ventures, by Bruce R. Barringer and Duane Ireland
• Running Lean: Iterate from Plan A to a Plan That Works,by Ash Maurya
• Business Plans that Work, by Andrew Zacharakis, Stephen Spinelli and Jeffry A. Timmons
• The Four Steps to the Epiphany, by Steve Blank
• Essentials of Entrepreneurship and Small Business Management, by Norman M. Scarborough
• Technology Ventures, by Thomas Byers, Richard Dorf and Andrew Nelson
• The Smart Entrepreneur: How To Build For A Successful Business, by Bart Clarysse and Sabrina Kiefer
• Hello, Startup: A Programmer’s Guide to Building Products, Technologies, and Teams, by Yevgeniy Brikman
• Do More Faster: TechStars Lessons to Accelerate Your Startup, by David Cohen and Brad Feld
• Venture Deals:  Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist, by Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson
• Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion & Purpose, by Tony Hsieh
• Rework, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson
• The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World, by David Kirkpatrick
• Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation, by Steve Johnson
• Eat People: And Other Unapologetic Rules for Game-Changing Entrepreneurs, by Andy Kessler
• The Founder’s Dilemmas by Noam Wasserman
• The Innovator’s Dilemma & The Innovator’s Solution, by Clayton M. Christensen
• Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers, by Geoffrey Moore
• Inside the Tornado: Marketing Strategies from Silicon Valley’s Cutting Edge, by  Geoffrey Moore
• Dealing with Darwin: How Great Companies Innovate at Every Phase of Their Evolution, by Geoffrey Moore
• The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, by Malcolm Gladwell
• Startup Communities: Building an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem in Your City, by Brad Feld
• Startup CEO: A Field Guide to Building and Running Your Company, by Matt Blumberg
• Business Plan In A Day, by Rhonda Abrams
• Successful Business Plan: Secrets & Strategies,by Rhonda Abrams
• Enterpreneural Finance, by Philop J. Adelmman and Alan M. Marks
• Visual Thinking, by Rudolf Arnheim
• Launching a Business: The First 100 Days, by Bruce Barringer
• Preparing Effective Business Plans: An Entrepreneurial Approach, by Bruce R. Barringer
• Entrepreneurs: Talent, Temperament, Technique, by Bill Bolton and John Thompson
• Everything I Needed to Know About Business … I Learned from a Canadian, by Leonard Brody and David Raffa
• Creating Breakthrough Products: Revealing the Secrets that Drive Global Innovation, by Jonathan Cagan and Craig Vogel
• Canaan Pitch Workbook, by Canaan Partners
• The Success Principles, by Jack Canfield and Janet Switzer
• Open Innovation: The New Imperative for Creating And Profiting from Technology, by Henry William Chesbrough
• Open Innovation: Researching a New Paradigm, by Henry William Chesbrough
• The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity, by Alan Cooper
• Lean Analytics: Use Data to Build a Better Startup Faster, by Alistair Croll and Benjamin Yoskovitz
• Designerly Ways of Knowing, by Nigel Cross
• Investment Valuation: Tools and Techniques for Determining the Value of any Asset, by Aswath Damodaran
• Head, Heart and Guts: How the World’s Best Companies Develop Complete Leaders, by David L. Dotlich, Peter C. Cairo and Stephen Rhinesmith
• The Innovator’s DNA: Mastering the Five Skills of Disruptive Innovators, by Clayton M. Christensen, Jeff Dyer and Hal Gregersen
• Never Eat Alone: And Other Secrets to Success, One Relationship at a Time, by Keith Ferrazzi and Tahl Raz
• The McKinsey Engagement: A Powerful Toolkit For More Efficient and Effective Team Problem Solving, by Paul N. Friga Ph.D
• The E-Myth Revisited, by Michael E. Gerber
• Only the Paranoid Survive: How to Exploit the Crisis Points That Challenge Every Company, by Andrew S. Grove
• Entrepreneurship, by Robert Hisrich, Michael Peters and Dean Shepherd
• Visual Language: Global Communication for the 21st Century, by Robert E. Horn
• The Art of the Start: The Time-Tested, Battle-Hardened Guide for Anyone Starting Anything,by Guy Kawasaki
• The Art of Innovation: Lessons in Creativity from IDEO, America’s Leading Design FirmThomas Kelley, Jonathan Littman and Tom Peters
• So What? Who Cares? Why You? The Inventor’s Commercialization Toolkit, by Wendy Kennedy
• Blue Ocean Strategy: How To Create Uncontested Market Space And Make The Competition Irrelevant, by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne
• Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days, by Jessica Livingston
• Marketing That Works: How Entrepreneurial Marketing Can Add Sustainable Value to Any Sized Company, by Leonard M. Lodish, Howard L. Morgan and Shellye Archambeau
• The Entrepreneurial Mindset: Strategies for Continuously Creating Opportunity in an Age of Uncertainty, by Rita Gunther McGrath and Ian MacMillan
• The Minto Pyramid Principle: Logic in Writing, Thinking, & Problem Solving, by Barbara Minto
• From Hieroglyphics to Isotype: A Visual Autobiography, by Otto Neurath
• The Manager’s Bookshelf, by Jon L. Pierce and John W. Newstrom
• A Whole New Mind: Moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age, by Daniel H. Pink
• Entrepreneurship: From Opportunity to Action, by David Rae
• Start-up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle, by Dan Senor and Saul Singer
• Proactive Risk Management: Controlling Uncertainty in Product Development, by Guy M. Merritt, Roland Smith and Preston G. Smith
• Full Range Leadership Development: Pathways for People, Profit and Planet, by John J. Sosik and Dongil Jung
• New Venture Creation: Entrepreneurship for the 21st Century, by Stephen Spinelli and Rob Adams
• The Entrepreneurial Venture (Practice of Management Series), by Howard H. Stevenson, Michael J. Roberts, Amar Bhide and William A. Sahlman
• Strategies in Entrepreneurial Finance: With Accompanying Case Studies, by Gregory Stoller
• The Plan-As-You-Go Business Plan, by Tim Berry
• The Entrepreneurial Engineer, by Michael B. Timmons, Rhett L. Weiss and John R. Callister
• Product Design and Development, by Karl Ulrich and Steven Eppinger
• The Founder’s Dilemmas: Anticipating and Avoiding the Pitfalls That Can Sink a Startup (The Kauffman Foundation Series on Innovation and Entrepreneurship), by Noam Wasserman
• HOT or NOT: How to know if your Business Idea will Fly or Fail (Ryerson Entrepreneurial FieldGuides), by Sean Wise
• Effective Project Management: Traditional, Agile, Extreme, by Robert K. Wysocki
• OnlineMBA Entrepreneurship Guide OnlineMBA.com is built as a web-based resource for current and prosepective MBA Students. Their guide provides useful information on how to start entrepreneurial career.
• The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Customer Development: A cheat sheet to The Four Steps to the Epiphany, by Brant Cooper, Patrick Vlaskovits
• Profitable Growth Is Everyone’s Business: 9 Tools You Can Use Monday Morning, by Ram Charan
• Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable, by Seth Godin
• The Goal: A Process of Ongoing Improvement, by Eliyahu M. Goldratt, Jeff Cox
• It’s Not Luck, by Eliyahu M. Goldratt
• Escape Velocity: Free Your Company’s Future from the Pull of the Past, by Geoffrey A. Moore
• Climbing Mount Improbable, by Richard Dawkins
• Topgrading: The Proven Hiring and Promoting Method That Turbocharges Company Performance, by Bradford D. Smart Ph.D.
• Better Business: How the B Corp Movement is Remaking Capitalism, by Chris Marquis
• Building Backwards to Biotech: The Power of Entrepreneurship to Drive Cutting-Edge Science to Market, by Stephanie Wisner

Blogs on Startups and Venture Capital:

• Matt Blumberg’s blog
• Startup Company Lawyer
• Venture Hacks
• Chris Dixon’s blog
• Brad Feld’s blog
• Mark Suster’s blog
• Fred Wilson’s blog
• Zach Shulman’s blog
• Charlie O’Donnell’s blog
• Steve Blank’s blog
• John Gannon’s blog
• Startup blogs to make you a better entrepreneur

More Resources for Entrepreneurs and Aspiring VCs:

• Dealbook
• VentureBeat
• Innovation Daily
• TermSheet
• TechCrunch
• Startup Digest
• Startup Toolkit
• Google for Startups
• Toolbox for Startups

If you have additional books, blogs and resources that you think should be included in any section above please email zjs2@cornell.edu.