Books You Need to Read If You Work at Startup

Adven Kluger
1 min readApr 27, 2021

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The book here is curated from several articles and friends who work in several positions in startups. The experience might be personal, but hopefully, the recommendation can shed some light on your book hunting journey.

Strategy

  • Insanely Simple: The Obsession That Drives Apple’s Success by Ken Segall
  • Business Strategy: Managing Uncertainty, Opportunity, and Enterprise by J.C. Spender
  • Tilt: Shifting Your Strategy From Products to Customers by Niraj Dawar

Marketing:

  • The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, by Malcolm Gladwell
  • Contagious: Why Things Catch On by Jonah Berger
  • Fascinate, How to Make Your Brand Impossible to Resist, By Sally Hogshead

Product:

  • The Everything Story: Jeff Bezos and The Age of Amazon by Brad Stone
  • Inspired: How to Create Products Customers Love by Marty Cagan
  • Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products by Nir Eyal

Culture

  • Work Rules!: Insight from Inside Google That Will Transform You Live and Lead by Laszlo Bock
  • Winning With Data: Transform Your Culture, Empower Your People, and Shape the Future by Tomasz Tunguz & Frank Bien
  • Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys’ Club of Silicon Valley by Emily Chang

Growth

  • Explosive Growth: A Few Things I Learned While Growing To 100 Million Users — And Losing $78 Million by Cliff Lerner
  • Hacking Growth: by Sean Ellis and Morgan Brown
  • Blitzscaling: The Lightning — Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies by Reid Hoffman and Chris Yeh

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Adven Kluger

Former consultant at World Bank, Ernst and Young, and International Institute for Sustainable Development. Currently explore freelancing and wish to travel.