There are ten books here that we think all software startup founders should read, or at least know the argument of. They are grouped by the problem each one helps with, because a founder short of time should start with the book that matches this month’s difficulty. The numbering is for counting and is not a ranking.
How we chose them
Each book had to be still widely available, still referred to by people who build software companies, and about a different problem from the others on the list. None is new. The newest first appeared in 2017 and the oldest in 1975, and that is deliberate: these are the ones that have lasted.
Two books from the 2019 version of this list have gone. Programming Pearls is a fine book for working programmers and of little use to most founders. Contagious covers one narrow part of marketing. The Lean Startup and The Mom Test replace them.
All ten were written before AI coding tools became part of everyday development. That changes some of the detail and little of the argument, since none of these books is about how to type code.
Books about building the software
1. The Mythical Man-Month, by Frederick P. Brooks Jr. (1975; anniversary edition 1995). Brooks managed the development of IBM’s OS/360 operating system and wrote down what he learned. The book is the source of Brooks’s law: “Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.” New people have to be trained by the people already doing the work, and every addition multiplies the conversations needed to keep everyone in step. The anniversary edition adds the essay No Silver Bullet, which argues that no single technique or tool will make software development ten times more productive. That remains a useful test to apply to any claim made for a new tool. The examples are from the mainframe era and the language is of its time. Read the 1995 edition.
2. Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software, by Charles Petzold (1999; second edition 2022). Petzold starts with Morse code and Braille and builds up, a step at a time, to a working computer. It is written for the general reader and needs no technical background. A founder who is not a programmer will not learn to write software from it, but will come away understanding what the developers are building on, which makes technical conversations easier to follow. Buy the second edition.
Books about finding out what customers want
3. The Mom Test, by Rob Fitzpatrick (2013). A short, practical book about how to talk to potential customers. Its premise is that people are polite: describe your idea and ask whether they like it, and almost everyone says yes, including your mother. Fitzpatrick shows how to ask about what people do now and what they have already tried, so that the answers are facts about their behaviour and not kindness about your idea. For a founder who has not yet built anything, this is the book to read first.
4. The Lean Startup, by Eric Ries (2011). The book that brought the minimum viable product into everyday use. Ries argues that a startup is a series of experiments: build the smallest thing that tests an assumption, measure what happens, and decide whether to carry on or change direction. Some of its examples have dated, and the idea has been misused to excuse shipping poor work. The central discipline holds. Our article on what a minimum viable product is covers the idea in brief.
5. Lean Analytics, by Alistair Croll and Benjamin Yoskovitz (2013). A companion to The Lean Startup about what to measure. Its main idea is the One Metric That Matters: at each stage a company should choose a single number to improve and ignore most of the rest. The book describes the metrics that suit six kinds of business, including software as a service, e-commerce and marketplaces, and the publisher counts more than 30 case studies. Some of the tools it mentions have changed, but the reasoning about which numbers matter has not.
Books about markets and competition
6. Crossing the Chasm, by Geoffrey A. Moore (1991; third edition 2014). Moore’s subject is selling technology to businesses. He observes that the first customers of a new product are enthusiasts who will tolerate rough edges, and that the much larger group of practical buyers behind them will not. Between the two is the chasm, where many products stall. His remedy is to pick one narrow market, serve it completely and use it as a base for the next. Any founder selling software to other businesses will recognise the problem. The third edition has more recent examples.
7. Zero to One, by Peter Thiel with Blake Masters (2014). The book grew out of notes Masters took in a startup course Thiel taught at Stanford in 2012. Thiel argues that the most valuable companies create something new and so have no direct competitors, and that copying an existing model in a crowded market is a poor use of a founder’s years. It is deliberately provocative, and parts of it apply only to companies seeking venture capital. Read it as a challenge to your own plan, to be argued with.
8. The Innovator’s Dilemma, by Clayton M. Christensen (1997). Christensen, a Harvard Business School professor, asked why well-run companies lose to newcomers. His answer is that they listen to their best customers and keep improving the existing product, while a cheaper, simpler alternative grows up in a market they consider too small to bother with. The book gave business the term disruptive innovation, which has since been stretched to cover almost anything. The original argument is narrower and more useful, both for a startup looking for a way in and for one that has become the established player.
Books about leading the company
9. The Hard Thing About Hard Things, by Ben Horowitz (2014). Horowitz co-founded Loudcloud, which became Opsware and was sold to Hewlett-Packard in 2007, and then co-founded the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. Most business books describe what to do when things go well. This one covers the rest: laying people off, demoting a friend, running out of money, deciding whether to sell. It is a memoir of American venture-backed companies, so the scale may not match yours, but the chapters on difficult conversations apply at any size.
10. Product Leadership, by Richard Banfield, Martin Eriksson and Nate Walkingshaw (2017). Drawn from interviews with nearly 100 people who lead product teams, this book is about the job of deciding what gets built and guiding a team to build it. It covers how that job changes as a company grows from a startup to a larger organisation. It is most useful when you are about to hire your first product manager, or have realised that you are doing the job yourself.
How to use the list
Nobody needs all ten at once. Match the book to the problem in front of you:
- You have an idea and no customers: The Mom Test, then The Lean Startup.
- You are about to pay for a first version: The Mythical Man-Month, so that you know why estimates slip and why adding people late does not help. Our planning worksheet then turns what you have learned into something a supplier can quote against, and the cost calculator gives a rough range.
- You have users and are not sure what to improve: Lean Analytics.
- Early customers love the product and sales have stalled: Crossing the Chasm.
- You are hiring: Product Leadership, alongside our guide to hiring a CTO for a start-up.
Books of this kind are mostly American and mostly about companies that raised venture capital. A founder in the UK building a business on revenue will need to translate. The test of each one is whether, a month after reading it, you have changed something you do. Choose one, read it this month and write down the one change you will make.