The Entrepreneur's Bookshelf

‌I’ve been a voracious reader for most of my life. Below is my shortlist of reading suggestions for entrepreneurs with a brief description for each.

Have suggestions? Send me your favorite books.

Behind the Scenes

Blue Ocean Strategy: Create new markets instead of competing in existing ones.
The 4-Hour Work-Week: The most important book I read before starting Tortuga Backpacks.
The Lean Startup: Build, measure, learn.

Mastering the Rockefeller Habits: Use these frameworks to set your company strategy. Recommended to me by Sean Keener of Bootsnall. My notes.
Reinventing Organizations: Build a decentralized company made of teams, not a top-down hierarchy. I used the questions in this book as fodder for our biannual reviews at Tortuga. My notes.
The Effective Executive: How knowledge workers (not just executives) can be effective and make the right decisions. My notes.
The Hard Thing About Hard Things: How to manage people. My notes.
Who?: Make hiring a repeatable, objective process. My notes.
Rework: The Basecamp team on how to run an effective business.

Start With Why: “People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.” TED Talk. My notes.
Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion: Market your product to appeal to these psychological triggers.
The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing (concise) and Positioning (detailed): The core principles of marketing and positioning written to educate novices and to remind experts.

Elements of Style: The most basic principles of good writing.
On Writing Well
The Copywriter’s Handbook: Where I found the “Motivating Sequence” template that we use for Tortuga product pages.
Bird by Bird: Writing is a practice.

Have suggestions? Send me your favorite books.