Business books

See also: Reading list, for the computer science shelf.

Zero to One (Peter Thiel)

Zero to One, by Paypal cofounder Peter Thiel, grew out of his 2012 Stanford CS183 course. A must-read on pure creation: going from 1 to n is a growth problem, going from 0 to 1 is building something that did not exist before.

The Four Steps to the Epiphany (Steve Blank)

The Four Steps to the Epiphany is the book Steve Blank wrote as the course text for his first entrepreneurship class, and where the customer development vocabulary comes from. It reads like a process, not an essay: customer discovery, customer validation, customer creation, company building. The value is in the order, and in what each step has to prove before the next one starts.

Short version: Customer Development.

The Lean Startup (Eric Ries)

The Lean Startup takes Blank’s customer development and turns it into a loop: build, measure, learn, then pivot or persevere. Most startups fail, and a good share of those failures were preventable.

Short version: Lean Startup.

Running Lean (Ash Maurya)

Running Lean is the hands-on one: the Lean Canvas, and a way to vet a product idea before spending months building the wrong thing. Get the 3rd edition (O’Reilly, 2022).