My favorite books to inspire you to get off your butt and start a business

I absolutely love this book! It’s an easy read, reads like a novel, but it’s packed with very valuable lessons on entrepreneurship, venture capital, and leadership.

The story is told through a conversation between a venture capitalist (Komisar) and two young entrepreneurs who are planning to start a business for all the wrong reasons. It’s humorous, touching, and very entertaining. I laughed a lot.

In the end, you learn that a business needs much more than nuts and bolts. It needs heart and soul.

Equally as important as what you learn about startups, the story will teach you how to avoid the Deferred Life Plan, putting off what you want to do, and instead live your life with passion.

I’ve always believed that the most successful entrepreneurs don’t do what everyone else has done. They carve new paths.

Peter Thiel was the co-founder of Paypal, Palantir, and several other very successful ventures.

In each case, he created something completely new; he went from zero to one. Later he became a venture capitalist investing in unique ventures.

Blake Masters was his student at Stanford and the notes he took in class became an Internet sensation. According to Thiel, there is no formula for success because a great innovation is by definition new and unique.

The best new companies are the result of new thinking.

Thiel encourages entrepreneur wannabes to think for themselves and to not be afraid of creating a monopoly like Google and Amazon did by developing a product that didn’t exist in the market and from which multiple additional products and applications could be spun off to serve a variety of smaller markets.

According to Thiel, all happy companies are monopolies that solved a unique problem. All failed companies are those that could not escape competition.

I like this book because it’s very complementary to Peter Thiel’s book.

It emphasizes how to make yourself the focus of your “zero to one” effort.

Too many entrepreneurs burn out before they go the distance, usually because they’re exhausted and frustrated trying to manage their employees and all the tasks associated with the business.

Brantley, a successful entrepreneur, proposes a new approach that gets entrepreneurs out of micromanaging (which they tend to do) by leveraging the time and talent of their best people.

I tend to get myself into the weeds on things that are important to me (like a business), and this book helped me see what I was doing before I did any real damage.

I think you’ll feel like he wrote the book for you. No fluff, just great advice and tools you can actually use.

I enjoyed this book a lot because it’s full of so much actionable information.

A best-selling author and speaker, Robbins’ enthusiasm is contagious and if anything will get you off your butt and moving toward your goals, the five-second rule will do it.

It also works when you find yourself in situations that require some courage – like meeting a venture capitalist for the first time to pitch your business? Don’t let fear or lack of self-esteem keep you from doing what you know you want to do.

The secret is The 5 Second Rule, and this is the book that shares that secret.

For a couple years, Noam Wasserman was an entrepreneurship colleague of mine at the University of Southern California.

Founders Dilemmas is the first book to focus on the critical decisions founders of new ventures must make starting on day one. Wasserman studied nearly 10,000 founders including Tim Westergren of Pandora and Evan Williams of Twitter.

It should be no surprise that he found that people are the leading cause of startup failures. The best recommendation I can give is to tell you that Wasserman offers solutions that I have personally used and passed along to hundreds of founders, because they work.

This is not a fluffy book. It’s a serious book that is well worth your time to read. If you’re going to start a business, it’s required reading! And take notes!

Not only will it help you decide if you have what it takes, it will help you learn what you’ll face during the launch of your new business.