Book Recommendations
Book Recommendations from Our Team 📚
Leadership & Management
The Hard Thing About Hard Things - Ben Horowitz [LINK]
“When we drove off the cliff, we left no skid marks”
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The 5 Dysfunctions of a Team - Patrick Lencioni [LINK]
“If you could get all the people in an organization rowing in the same direction, you could dominate any industry, in any market, against any competition, at any time.”
Buy on Amazon
Trillion Dollar Coach - Eric Schmidt, Jonathan Rosenberg, & Alan Eagle [LINK]
“Bill didn’t work the problem first, he worked the team. We didn’t talk about the problem analytically. We talked about the people on the team and if they could get it done.”
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CEO Excellence - Carolyn Dewar, Scott Keller, & Vikram Malhotra [LINK]
“Raising the spirits of your leaders doesn’t happen overnight”
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Principles - Ray Dalio [LINK]
“If you’re not failing, you’re not pushing your limits, and if you’re not pushing your limits, you’re not maximizing your potential”
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Startup Growth & Strategy
The Lean Startup - Eric Ries [LINK]
“When in doubt, simplify.”
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Scaling Up Excellence - Robert I. Sutton & Huggy Rao [LINK]
“They borrowed a motto from the U.S. Army: “Amateurs discuss strategy; professionals discuss logistics”—in other words, the nuances of getting things done.”
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Zero to One - Peter Thiel [LINK]
“The most valuable businesses of coming decades will be built by entrepreneurs who seek to empower people rather than try to make them obsolete.”
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Competitive Strategy - Michael E. Porter [LINK]
“consumers tend to be more price sensitive if they are purchasing products that are undifferentiated, expensive relative to their incomes, or of a sort where quality is not particularly important to them.”
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The 4 Disciplines of Execution - Chris McChesney, Sean Covey, & Jim Huling [LINK]
“If a goal is wildly important, surely you should be able to tell if you've achieved it”
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Will & Vision: How Latecomers Grow to Dominate Markets - Grard J. Tellis & Peter N. Golder [LINK]
"The advantage of being a latecomer is the ability to learn from the mistakes of the pioneers."
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Innovation & Creativity
Loonshots - Safi Bahcall [LINK]
“Keeping the forces in balance is so difficult because loonshots and franchises follow such different paths. Surviving those journeys requires passionate, intensely committed people—with very different skills and values. Artists and soldiers.”
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Made to Stick - Chip Heath & Dan Heath [LINK]
“To make our communications more effective, we need to shift our thinking from "What information do I need to convey?" to "What questions do I want my audience to ask?”
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Hidden Genius - Polina Marinova Pompliano [LINK]
“The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance—it is the illusion of knowledge.”
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Process Innovation - Thomas H. Davenport [LINK]
“We presume that the purpose of introducing something new into a process is to bring about major, radical change.”
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The Martian - Andy Weir [LINK]
“Maybe I’ll post a consumer review. “Brought product to surface of Mars. It stopped working. 0/10.”
Buy it on Amazon
People & Teams
Who Moved My Cheese - Spencer Johnson [LINK]
“If you do not change, you can become extinct.”
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Peopleware - Tom DeMarco & Timothy Lister [LINK]
“You may be able to kick people to make them active, but not to make them creative, inventive, and thoughtful.”
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Dream Big - Bob Goff [LINK]
“I enter each day assuming there’s a thirty-eighth miracle waiting for me if I’ll fully engage life…what would happen in your life if you started doing the same?”
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Search Inside Yourself - Chade-Meng Tan [LINK]
“The more we are able to create space between stimulus and reaction, the more control we will have over our emotional lives.”
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Mergers, Acquisitions, and Finance
Agile M&A by Kison Patel [LINK]
“How agile techniques can be applied to the M&A process”
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Mergers, Acquisitions, and Other Restructuring Activities by Donald DePamphilis [LINK]
“Covers valuation and modeling, deal structuring and financing strategies, and alternative business and restructuring strategies.”
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Corporate Valuation by Robert W. Holthausen & Mark E. Zmijewski [LINK]
“Overview of valuation issues and topics, how valuation is used in practice.”
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Strategy Beyond the Hockey Stick - Chris Bradley, Martin Hirt, & Sven Smit [LINK]
“Social side of strategy is such that companies still tend to take what is known as a “peanut butter” approach—spreading a thin layer of resources smoothly across the whole enterprise, even though it’s clear that opportunities are far greater in some areas than in others.”
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Biographies & Industry Stories
Valley of Genius - Adam Fisher [LINK]
“Two years later, Google perfected their advertising system with AdSense, which turned the entire internet into a billboard that Google could then sell.”
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The Everything Store - Brad Stone [LINK]
“Some of these investments will pay off, others will not, and we will have learned another valuable lesson in either case.”
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Stealing Myspace - Julia Angwin [LINK]
“Identity is provisional. Who we are is whom we choose to be at any given moment, depending on personality, whim, temperament, or subjective need.”
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A Man for All Markets - Edward O. Thorp [LINK]
“I wondered how my research into the mathematical theory of a game might change my life. In the abstract, life is a mixture of chance and choice. Chance can be thought of as the cards you are dealt in life. Choice is how you play them.”
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The Associates - Richard Rayner [LINK]
Their names were Collis Huntington, Leland Stanford, Charles Crocker, and Mark Hopkins, and they were known as “The Big Four” or “The Associates.”
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Economics & Governance
Governing of the Commons - Elinor Ostrom [LINK]
“The rules devised by appropriators may themselves have a major effect on the costs, and therefore the efficiency, of monitoring by internal or external enforcers.”
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The Invisible Hook - Peter T. Leeson [LINK]
“If a state is highly predatory and its behavior goes unchecked, government may not only fail to add to social welfare; it may reduce welfare below its level under anarchy.”
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Venture Capital
The Business of Venture Capital - Mahendra Ramsinghani [LINK]
“Many a GP has struggled with portfolio companies that cannot meet their value-creation milestones, or raise additional follow-on rounds of capital, or generate target returns in a time span of, say, five to seven years.”
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The Venture Mindset - Ilya Strebulaev & Alex Dang [LINK]
“Home Runs Matter, Strikeouts Don’t”
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Venture Deals - Brad Feld & Jason Mendelson [LINK]
“If you feel like your VC is a proctologist, run for the hills.”
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Secrets of Sand Hill Road - Scott Kupor [LINK]
“You have to be partly delusional to start a company given the prospects of success and the need to keep pushing forward in the wake of the constant stream of doubters.”
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The Power Law - Sebastian Mallaby [LINK]
“Remember, above everything, the logic of the power law: the rewards for success will be massively greater than the costs of honorable setbacks.”
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Alternative Investments
Marketing Alternative Investments - Hemali Dassani & Nanda Kuppuswamy [LINK]
“Fundraising is one of the most crucial processes in alternative assets - and this book provides frameworks to make it actionable”
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The Private Equity Playbook - Adam Coffey [LINK]
“Can you walk me through your original investment thesis when you bought this platform company? Is the company performing to expectation?”
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The Allocator's Edge - Phil Huber [LINK]
“Despite their illiquidity, private markets are not immune to the cyclical forces that drive public market volatility.”
Buy it on Amazon
