I have spent the last 17 years building and selling companies, and in that time, I have literally read hundreds of business books. Today, I want to share with you what I consider to be the top five must-read books for beginner entrepreneurs. So, the first book I'd recommend is a book called The Lean Startup. When I was just getting started as an entrepreneur, this was actually the book my first adviser made me read. He was like, If you're going to start a business, if you're going to start a startup, you have to read this book first. It will save you so much time. The reason this book is important for you is that as an entrepreneur, you're going to be taking risks. You're going to be starting this business, and it's going to feel like an uphill battle. You know all those stats; you know that businesses are risky, entrepreneurs go out of business all the time, and that the odds are just stacked against you. But if you approach it this way, that it's a risky thing, and you have to sort of bet

it all on the next venture. What can happen is that you don't get many at-bats. You maybe try one business, you fail, or your first attempt at a business, as your first product, fails, and then the next thing you know, you're back to your regular job. The Lean Startup teaches you how to actually systematically build your business without taking big risks, and specifically, the framework that it will give you is how to find product-market fit. You see, the number one thing that actually kills companies, startups, you name it, is they build something people don't actually want. They build something that maybe is a nice-to-have or, frankly, they can sell, but do the customers actually stick around? No, they leave, they churn. It teaches you how to actually take the assumptions in your business that you think are true, systematically test them with either customers or potential customers, learn what they actually want to buy, and then how to sell it to them. So, if you're thinking about starting a business, I would immediately buy this book. To follow it up, though, I'd also recommend

this next book, which is Traction by Gino Wickman. This book is probably the book that I would say of all of the successful CEOs I know. They all love, they've all read the most, and they all like the most because the thing is when you start a business. Once you learn how to actually build that business and like start to get customers and start to hire employees and things like that, you've all of a sudden got to run the business. Running the business is very different than like coming up with the idea for the business. Everyone can come up with the idea. It's the execution, the day-to-day progress that your business makes that actually determines how successful you'll be. And so, you know, as a beginner entrepreneur, what will happen is you start the business, and then the next thing you know, you're like, Okay, I'm a CEO now. I'm like running this business. What the heck do I actually do? How do I spend my time? What meetings should I have? What meetings do I need to cut out of my day? And if you don't have

a framework for that. You'll just sort of wander around in the wilderness like you're trying different things. You're trying to figure out like what's a good meeting, what's a good cadence, what metric should we track, what metric should we not track. Don't waste your time like you're going to waste years of your life trying to figure this out, and this book just gives it to you like straight out. These are the meetings you need to have every week, these are the metrics you should track, here's how you should track them, here's how you assign responsibilities to different team members. Like, it's such a comprehensive playbook if you just literally copy and paste into your business. That this is like, it would have saved me so much time and headache if someone had just recommended this to me earlier. And so, definitely pick this one up as well. Now, the third book is one of the ones that I also read when I was just getting started out building my last startup. At the time, it had just

come out. It was sort of making, uh, like Big W through Silicon Valley. You know, it was one of those books where all of a sudden it felt like everyone in Silicon Valley had read it, and all the VCs were quoting it, all the startups were trying to like be like it. And the reason was, it felt like for the first time someone who was an actual billionaire who built multi-billion dollar companies was sort of pulling back the curtain and showing you, Here's how it's actually done. You see, uh, this book is called 0 to 1. It's by, uh, Author Peter Thiel. If you don't know Peter Thiel, let me read his resume 'cause it's insane. First co-founder of PayPal. As if that wasn't enough, also co-founder of Palantir, both now multi-billion dollar publicly listed companies. On top of that, first major investor in Facebook. He owned like 20% of it that he bought, I think, for a million dollars. That's worth like $100 billion today. And then on top of that, he

founded Founders Fund, one of the most successful VC funds of all time. Like, their returns are just insane. Their hit rate is insane. So, this guy knows how to build multi-billion dollar businesses, and he's one of the few people that have done it multiple times. So, you know, like, what he recommends is the real deal. He doesn't need to hire a ghostwriter to write some fluff piece. This is him literally showing you his frameworks on how he actually thinks about building a generational-changing company. You see, building a company, you can kind of go two routes. You can build a company that is like sort of a good small business. We build a product the community likes, they buy it from us, and we do, you know, like $50,000, $100,000 a year in sales. That's kind of like one approach to build a business. But if you want to build like a true industry-changing business, you don't run the same playbook that everyone else runs. You have to think

Outside of the box, you have to think unconventionally, and Peto Teal shows you how to do this. It's hard to describe in words in this video, but he really gives you frameworks and questions to ask yourself, and the exact questions that he's asking himself when he makes these multi-billion dollar bets. You can apply those to your life and understand not only how to build a billion dollar company but also how to build a company that doesn't have to play by the rules. Like if you are in your a category of one, you don't have competition, you don't have like we need to be the cheapest or the fastest, you just run in your own swim lane and you dominate the market. Like this is Google for a search, this is Facebook for social media. It's like these, this is the way that things actually get done at the highest level. One of my favorite quotes from this book that's always stuck with me is competition is for losers. This will show you how to build a business.

that has no competition. You just wipe the field. The next book I'd recommend, and this is one that you know I really think every entrepreneur should read, because when you go into the entrepreneurial journey, the stuff that you read online or the videos that you watch from different people, maybe hopefully not myself included, but other sort of like I would call like gurus in the space and things like that, they usually have some sort of angle. Oftentimes, the videos that they're making or the articles that they're writing are them trying to become successful, like they're not actually already successful. And so, they're writing things that maybe they think you want to hear or that are easy to digest and things like that. I think these things don't actually help you. I think they hurt you as an entrepreneur because they don't give you a real picture of reality. And so, because of that, they feel nice, they feel fun, but they're not actually moving you forward in life. The other sort of category of content that you'll find is people who

are still running their company like they're Fortune 500 CEOs and things like that, and they'll hire ghostwriters to write a book on the five principles of leadership or something like this. Sounds nice, it sells a bunch of copies because they're a big CEO, but because they are an active Fortune 500 CEO, they have to pull their punches. They can't tell true real stories of entrepreneurship and what really happens because it would be so messy and so revealing to their personal lives, and you can't do that as a large Fortune 500 CEO. What I like about this book is Ben Horwitz is the author, and he wrote the book called The Hard Thing About Hard Things. It actually shows you what it's like inside a high-growth startup. He doesn't pull any punches, like literally, he names and shames, like first name, last name, and then he'll be like f you for this. He's so aggressively raw with the stories that

he tells and as an entrepreneur. The reason it's so valuable for you is you need to know, like, is this crazy thing just happening to me, or is this something that other startups go through? Like, is what I'm experiencing right now actually an authentic experience in the startup journey, or am I screwing up? And this book really teaches you, like, hey, what you're going through is normal. And it gives you a bunch of great stories. And then what Ben also does, which is why I like it so much, he distills the lessons from those stories. So it doesn't just, like, tell you about the time that his lawyers screwed him out of millions of dollars, or his CPA almost sent him to jail, and things like that. He also shows the lessons that he learned and how to directly apply to your life. And then the final book I'd recommend, it's another book that maybe you don't see a lot in the business headlines or people don't talk about that much, but it's one of the books that I would say, you know

the people that I know that have raised hundreds of millions of dollars consistently point to this book and say, Yeah, this is the one that actually showed me how to close multi-million dollar deals. It's a book called Pitch Anything by Oren Klaff. And you know, it's one of those books where when you read it, the fundamental way you think about pitching and selling and closing deals will fundamentally change, total maybe 90° or 180° turn, and you'll have new mindsets around how to actually get deals done. New entrepreneurs think that getting deals done is about selling the product or the market opportunity or things like that, so they really work on things like their pitch, and they want to maybe walk into a fundraising meeting and pitch like super well, super aggressively. And the reality is that is like not how real business gets done. Like a personal example from my life that I learned from this book is how we raised our $9 million Series A. The fund that ultimately led our $9 million Series A

was this fund called Tribe Capital. They manage now like $1.7 billion, so they're like kind of a big deal in Silicon Valley. But my first meeting with the partner was not in what the kind of situation you'd expect. You might think if you've never been there that, you know, we walk into the boardroom, there's all the members, we sit down, there's a presentation on the screen. No, I walked in and I actually sat on a couch, this like red Ikea couch in the back of another startup's office that they had invested in. And I just hung out with the partner, like sort of side by side, and we chatted about what I was up to. It was never a pitch. I never showed them a deck, just sort of chatted. The second meeting was with another partner called Jonathan, who ultimately joined our board. And that one was like 11:00 a.m. on a Saturday at his house. And so I literally like drive up, park my car, walk in, and he's

in there and he's like, Hey, do you want a coffee? I'm like, Yeah, yeah. Partner makes me a cappuccino. We sit down. This time he's on like one couch. I'm on a different couch in his like super nice mid-century place. We hang out again. We're just chatting about the business, but what's going on behind the scenes is like so much more levels. And then the third meeting, very similar actually, was like a Tuesday night, 7:00 p.m. over drinks. All of these are nothing like what you think of business pitch meeting looks like. But again, after three meetings, about 3 hours spent with this firm, they wire us $9 million. There are levels to the game on this, and there's so many levels of the communication underneath the communication underneath the communication. The words you say actually matter so little, and understanding how to sort of layer in these levels of communication, the body language that you present, how to do what's called pattern interrupts, where maybe you see the conversation going in

a direction that you don't like, and you try to snap it and change the conversation to go more in the direction that you want to go. These are things that this book will teach you how to do. And I would say, um, of all the like skills and lessons that I've learned, these are the ones that have probably made me the most money. In fact, if you do want to learn more on sort of how I actually implement the things in this book, Pitch Anything, I also did a video on the persuasion techniques and some of the sort of like hidden psychology that I use to raise 2 million from venture capitalists. Uh, so also link to that video over here, and hope it helps.

5 Must Read Books for Beginner Entrepreneurs

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