What we’re reading at Compass.to
Before another beautiful and inspiring summer is over we’d like to share some of the books that inspire and motivate us most to work on ourselves and to share knowledge within the team.
To be creative and hungry to grow and build great sustainable ideas and products. All of them should be must reads for entrepreneurs and startups. To be continued..
1. Creativity Inc.
by Ed Catmull with Amy Wallace digs deep into the creative world of Pixar. It helps us to learn how to build talent, creating teams, fueling the creative process,alignment, useful communications, organizational structures, and about the importance of storytelling. Biggest learning to motivate ourselves and the team: building something great makes them us proud of one another.
2. The Lean Startup
by Eric Ries was and is the blueprint for us how to organize developing a product most efficiently. It took me personally 3 years and 2 pivots to finally understand how to learn faster from (potential-) customers and about the importance to get rid of ego when building successful features. Build-measure-learn:-)
3. The Art of Startup Fundraising
by Alejandro Cremades is the handbook for startups based on the authors experience as C-founder and Chairman at Onevest, currently operating with 1000 Angel investors. An easy introduction into the world of startup financing.
4. The Checklist Manifesto
by Atul Gawande is a great read for everyone who wants to improve solving complex and even unexpected tasks and it helps teams to work and to communicate better. For better results despite the confidence about with intuition or gut instinct.
5. The Second Machine Age
by Erik Brynjolfsson is a terrific, fascinating and optimistic read not only for tech entrepreneurs about technology changing the world. Explaining the economics behind the tech revolution we’re all part of.
6. Outliers: The Story of Success
by Malcolm Gladwell. Actually all of his books are amazing summer vacation reads to keep the brain creative and to have a good time reading. This is about the surprising rules and mathematics behind serendipitous events and why some people succeed while others never reach their potential.
7. The Startup Owner’s Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company
by Steve Blank is the bible how to run and grow a scaleable startup. Excellent entrepreneurship education!
8. The Five Temptations of a CEO
by
9. Zero to One
by Peter Thiel with Blake Masters is based on a course about startups Thiel taught in Stanford 2012. One student’s (Blake Masters’) notes revised for a broader audience.