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3 Tech-Business Books You Should Read
Reading is by far one of the best strategies for business development out there. It may be important to keep up with industry trends and innovation. However, it is equally important to understand the breakdown of some of those trends and innovations. Books are a good medium for getting insight into how the best organizations and industry leaders think.
The following are a 3 books that I think will be valuable to you if you are interested in understand how some tech companies operate. Also to get a glimpse of the lives of the people behind them.
They are not ranked in any order.
1. The Upstarts: How Uber, Airbnb, and the Killer Companies of the New Silicon Valley Are Changing the World by Brad Stone
As the title suggests, this book talks about the birth of a few of the worlds most famous apps and the companies that built them. What’s interesting about this is that it reveals just how challenging it was to get their platforms off the ground.
I mean, it is popular to believe that all you need to succeed is a great idea. But this book reveals that there is more to it than just that. A lot more.
The author does a great job of giving you a picture of how the start of these businesses were, up to how the businesses have grown and evolved. You might even be shocked to discover some of the truths about getting into tech-businesses that this book shares.
2. Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future by Peter Thiel
Don’t let the subtitle full you. This book is really deep (or at least to me it felt that way). In this book, Peter talks about the need for businesses to focus on innovating and coming up with new instead of refining what has always existed.
I can best describe it by using an example that can be found in the book. To go from zero to 1 is to invent a typewriter to take the place of handwriting on paper. That is innovation. But to make different types of type-writers… well not really.
What’s great about the book, is that it gives you insight into the minds of people like Elon Musk who was able to popularize electrical cars and make people pay attention to renewable energy. It’s definitely worth going through.
3. Rework by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson
If you are in the tech-business or thinking of getting into it, you find this book very valuable. In this book, the authors challenge the traditional or maybe even popular methods of running and building successful businesses.
While it mostly focuses on technology/software companies, it most likely can apply to other fields.
Anyway, as owners of Basecamp, they talk about their journey building their company and client base. They provide specifics on how they went about it. They describe what worked for them, why it worked for them. And they also talk about what not to do and the consequences of following some of the more traditional methods of growing a business.
Rework, as the name suggests, is about rethinking the way you work.
Share some of your best tech-business books
If you have suggestions for books I should take a look at, feel free to mention them in the comments below. They don’t necessarily have to be in the tech-space, but if they can help a tech-business get better at doing what tech-businesses do… then feel free to mention them.
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