15 Books to inspire you to build a Global Business

Launching a startup that will eventually grow into a global business is one of the boldest initiatives one can take in life that requires dedication, consistency and a whole lot of innovation.

You must spend hours to build your products off the ground and turn them into sellable ones.

Entrepreneurs are always busy and rarely have time to read about the latest happenings, tech trends, and advice to help them succeed.

Fortunately, there are lots of books available to guide you on the entrepreneurial journey. The only problem is that it is really difficult to find ones who are worth following.

Below are 15 books you need to read to inspire you to build a global business.

1. Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future Hardcover – Peter Thiel

1. Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action. – Simon Sinek

1. The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley-
  Jimmy Soni

1. The Lean Startup: How today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create
  Radically Successful Businesses by Eric Ries.

1. The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy
  Answers by Ben Horowitz.

1. Super Founders: What Data Reveals About Billion-Dollar Startups by Ali Tamaseb

1. The Startup Owner’s Manual: The Step-by-Step Guide for Building a Great Company
  Steve Blank , Bob Dorf

1. The Elon Musk Method: Business Principles from the World’s Most Powerful
  Entrepreneur by Randy Kirk

1. Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth by Gabriel
  Weinberg and Justin Mares.

1. Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson.

1. Why Startups Fail: A New Roadmap for Entrepreneurial Success by Tom Eisenmann

1. Think Like Jeff Bezos: 23 Life Changing Lessons from Jeff Bezos on Life, People,
  Business, Technology, and Leadership: Jamie Morris

1. Managing by Startups O Reily

1. Mastering the VC Game: A Venture Capital Insider Reveals How to Get from Start-up to
  IPO on Your Terms Hardcover by Jeffrey Bussgang

1. Testing Business Ideas: A Field Guide for Rapid Experimentation- Alexander
  Osterwalder

Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future Hardcover by Peter Thiel

The great secret of our time is that there are still uncharted frontiers to explore and new inventions to create.

In Zero to One, legendary entrepreneur and investor Peter Thiel shows how we can find singular ways to create those new things. Thiel begins with the contrarian premise that we live in an age of technological stagnation, even if we’re too distracted by shiny mobile devices to notice.

Information technology has improved rapidly, but there is no reason why progress should be limited to computers or Silicon Valley.

Progress can be achieved in any industry or area of business. It comes from the most important skill that every leader must master: learning to think for yourself.

Doing what someone else already knows how to do takes the world from 1 to n, adding more of something familiar.

But when you do something new, you go from 0 to 1.

The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine.

Tomorrow’s champions will not win by competing ruthlessly in today’s marketplace. They will escape competition altogether, because their businesses will be unique.

Zero to One presents at once an optimistic view of the future of progress in America and a new way of thinking about innovation: it starts by learning to ask the questions that lead you to find value in unexpected places

Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action by Simon Sinek.

Over a decade ago, Simon Sinek started a movement that inspired millions to demand purpose at work, to ask what was the why of their organization.

Since then, millions have been touched by the power of his ideas, and these ideas remain as relevant and timely as ever.

Start with Why asks (and answers) the questions: Why are some people and organizations more innovative, more influential, and more profitable than others?

Why do some command greater loyalty from customers and employees alike? Even among the successful, why are so few able to repeat their success over and over?

People like Martin Luther King Jr., Steve Jobs, and the Wright Brothers had little in common, but they all started with why.

They realized that people won’t truly buy into a product, service, movement, or idea until they understand the why behind it.

Start with Why shows that the leaders who have had the greatest influence in the world all think, act, and communicate the same way – and it’s the opposite of what everyone else does.

Sinek calls this powerful idea The Golden Circle, and it provides a framework upon which organizations can be built, movements can be led, and people can be inspired. And it all starts with why.

The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley- By Jimmy Soni

Today, PayPal’s founders and earliest employees are considered the technology industry’s most powerful network.

Since leaving PayPal, they have formed, funded, and advised the leading companies of our era, including Tesla, Facebook, YouTube, SpaceX, Yelp, Palantir, and LinkedIn, among many others.

As a group, they have driven twenty-first-century innovation and entrepreneurship. Their names stir passions; they’re as controversial as they are admired.

Yet for all their influence, the story of where they first started has gone largely untold. Before igniting the commercial space race or jumpstarting social media’s rise, they were the unknown creators of a scrappy online payments start-up called PayPal.

In building what became one of the world’s foremost companies, they faced bruising competition, internal strife, the emergence of widespread online fraud, and the devastating dot-com bust of the 2000s. Their success was anything but certain.

In The Founders: The Story of PayPal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley, award-winning author and biographer Jimmy Soni explores PayPal’s turbulent early days.

With hundreds of interviews and unprecedented access to thousands of pages of internal material, he shows how the seeds of so much of what shapes our world today—fast-scaling digital start-ups, cashless currency concepts, mobile money transfer—were planted two decades ago.

He also reveals the stories of countless individuals who were left out of the front-page features and banner headlines but who were central to PayPal’s success.

Described as “an intensely magnetic chronicle” (The New York Times) and “engrossing” (Business Insider), The Founders is a story of iteration and inventiveness—the products of which have cast a long and powerful shadow over modern life.

This narrative illustrates how this rare assemblage of talent came to work together and how their collaboration changed our world forever

The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses by Eric Ries.

Most startups fail. But many of those failures are preventable. The Lean Startup is a new approach being adopted across the globe, changing the way companies are built and new products are launched.

Eric Ries defines a startup as an organization dedicated to creating something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty.

This is just as true for one person in a garage or a group of seasoned professionals in a Fortune 500 boardroom.

What they have in common is a mission to penetrate that fog of uncertainty to discover a successful path to a sustainable business.

The Lean Startup approach fosters companies that are both more capital efficient and that leverage human creativity more effectively.

Inspired by lessons from lean manufacturing, it relies on “validated learning,” rapid scientific experimentation, as well as a number of counter-intuitive practices that shorten product development cycles, measure actual progress without resorting to vanity metrics, and learn what customers really want.

It enables a company to shift directions with agility, altering plans inch by inch, minute by minute.

Rather than wasting time creating elaborate business plans, The Lean Startup offers entrepreneurs a way to test their vision continuously, to adapt and adjust before it’s too late.

Ries provides a scientific approach to creating and managing successful startups in a age when companies need to innovate more than ever.

The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers by Ben Horowitz.

Author Ben Horowitz is a co-founder and general partner of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.

For many years he wrote on a personal blog, giving down to earth business advice and sharing his experiences on building and running startups.

For this business book, he’s adapted most of his original posts and compiled them into an incredible narrative about how to navigate the inevitable difficulties when starting and growing a business.

Horowitz analyzes the problems that confront leaders every day, sharing the insights that he’s gained along the way.

He tells things straight, covering topics like starting a business with friends, firing those friends when things aren’t working out, poaching competitors and cultivating a CEO mentality.

Ben Horowitz, cofounder of Andreessen Horowitz and one of Silicon Valley’s most respected and experienced entrepreneurs, offers essential advice on building and running a startup—practical wisdom for managing the toughest problems business school doesn’t cover, based on his popular ben’s blog.

While many people talk about how great it is to start a business, very few are honest about how difficult it is to run one.

Ben Horowitz analyzes the problems that confront leaders every day, sharing the insights he’s gained developing, managing, selling, buying, investing in, and supervising technology companies.

A lifelong rap fanatic, he amplifies business lessons with lyrics from his favorite songs, telling it straight about everything from firing friends to poaching competitors, cultivating and sustaining a CEO mentality to knowing the right time to cash in.

Filled with his trademark humor and straight talk, The Hard Thing About Hard Things is invaluable for veteran entrepreneurs as well as those aspiring to their own new ventures, drawing from Horowitz’s personal and often humbling experiences.

Super Founders: What Data Reveals About Billion-Dollar Startups Ali Tamaseb

Super Founders uses a data-driven approach to understand what really differentiates billion-dollar start-ups from the rest – revealing that nearly everything we thought was true about them is false!

Ali Tamaseb has spent thousands of hours manually amassing what may be the largest dataset ever collected on start-ups, comparing billion-dollar start-ups with those that failed to become one – 30,000 data points on nearly every factor: number of competitors, market size, the founder’s age, his or her university’s ranking, quality of investors, fundraising time, and many, many more.

And what he found looked far different than expected. Just to mention a few:

- Most unicorn founders had no industry experience

- There’s no disadvantage to being a solo founder or to being a nontechnical CEO

- Less than 15 percent went through any kind of accelerator program

- Over half had strong competitors when starting – being first to market with an idea does not actually matter

You will also hear the stories of the early days of billion-dollar start-ups firsthand.

The book includes exclusive interviews with the founders/investors of Zoom, Instacart, PayPal, Nest, Github, Flatiron Health, Kite Pharma, Facebook, Stripe, Airbnb, YouTube, LinkedIn, Lyft, DoorDash, Coinbase, and Square, venture capital investors like Elad Gil, Peter Thiel, Alfred Lin from Sequoia Capital and Keith Rabois of Founders Fund, as well as previously untold stories about the early days of ByteDance (TikTok), WhatsApp, Dropbox, Discord, DiDi, Flipkart, Instagram, Careem, Peloton, and SpaceX.

Packed with counterintuitive insights and inside stories from people who have built massively successful companies, Super Founders is a paradigm-shifting and actionable guide for entrepreneurs, investors, and anyone interested in what makes a start-up successful

The Startup Owner’s Manual: The Step-by-Step Guide for Building a Great Company Steve Blank , Bob Dorf

More than 100,000 entrepreneurs rely on this book for detailed, step-by-step instructions on building successful, scalable, profitable startups.

The National Science Foundation pays hundreds of startup teams each year to follow the process outlined in the book, and it’s taught at Stanford, Berkeley, Columbia and more than 100 other leading universities worldwide. Why?

The Startup Owner’s Manual guides you, step-by-step, as you put the Customer Development process to work.

This method was created by renowned Silicon Valley startup expert Steve Blank, cocreator with Eric Ries of the “Lean Startup” movement and tested and refined by him for more than a decade. This guide will help you:

- Avoid the nine deadly sins that destroy startups’ chances for success

- Use the Customer Development method to bring your business idea to life

- Incorporate the Business Model Canvas as the organizing principle for startup hypotheses

- Identify your customers and determine how to “get, keep, and grow” customers’ profitably

- Compute how you’ll drive your startup to repeatable, scalable profits.

The Elon Musk Method: Business Principles from the World’s Most Powerful Entrepreneur by Randy Kirk

What does Elon Musk know that you don’t?

Elon Musk built Zip2.com from a start-up to $22 million paycheck in three years.
Then Musk built X.com from a start-up to $160 million paycheck in four years.
Since then, he has created SpaceX and Tesla giving Musk an estimated net worth of $20 billion.

Would you like to achieve even a fraction of his success? Now you can.

Serial entrepreneur and best-selling author, Randy Kirk, exposes 16 secret principles that guide Elon Musk in his entrepreneurial decisions, including:

How to become a visionary that profits;

How to uncover the principles of running a successful business;

How Elon Musk uses networking to scale his businesses;

How you should be using your passion and persistence;

How to maximize the potential of any business regardless of its size;

The counterintuitive thinking about quality and cost;

Why The Elon Musk Method works to generate successful enterprises of any kind.

Follow SpaceX’s founding member’s Jim Cantrell’s advice and listen to this audiobook now because “Randy captures the essence of what drives Elon and this gives us valuable insight into what has become one of the most influential people of our time”.

Filled with dozens of Elon Musk quotes, you’ll have a rare opportunity to gain proven principles and methods that are unlike anything you’ll read elsewhere.

Get your copy now to start applying time-tested wisdom to your business today!

Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth by Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares.

Starting a business, especially for the first time, is a lot like putting together a puzzle—one that doesn’t necessarily have a clear ending.

In this business book, authors Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares pull from their own experiences building and selling multi-million dollar companies to teach other entrepreneurs how to find and focus on the right growth levers that’ll scale their businesses quickly.

Traction presents the compelling argument that the key to success in business isn’t just coming up with “the best idea,” having a brilliant team, or raising more funding than your competitors.

Business success is directly related to how consistently you can acquire new customers (or users) for your product or service—a serious challenge if this is a side hustle idea that doesn’t get your undivided attention.

That’s true traction and once you’ve unlocked your growth lever, it makes everything else significantly easier.

When you have traction, you can raise funds on your own terms, hire the best talent, garner press, establish partnerships and sell to whomever you choose.

Traction is proof that your business is on the right track.

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson.

Steve Jobs has certainly left his mark in the world of business. This business book by writer and journalist Walter Isaacson who’s previously written biographies about Albert Einstein, Benjamin Franklin and others, extensively covers the late Apple co-founder’s professional and personal life.

Based on more than forty interviews with Steve Jobs conducted over two years—as well as interviews with more than 100 family members, friends, adversaries, competitors, and colleagues—Walter Isaacson has written a riveting story of the roller-coaster life and searingly intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing. Isaacson’s portrait touched millions of readers.

At a time when America is seeking ways to sustain its innovative edge, Jobs stands as the ultimate icon of inventiveness and applied imagination.

He knew that the best way to create value in the twenty-first century was to connect creativity with technology.

He built a company where leaps of the imagination were combined with remarkable feats of engineering.

Although Jobs cooperated with the author, he asked for no control over what was written.

He put nothing off-limits. He encouraged the people he knew to speak honestly. He himself spoke candidly about the people he worked with and competed against.

His friends, foes, and colleagues offer an unvarnished view of the passions, perfectionism, obsessions, artistry, devilry, and compulsion for control that shaped his approach to business and the innovative products that resulted.

His tale is instructive and cautionary, filled with lessons about innovation, character, leadership, and values.

Steve Jobs is the inspiration for the movie of the same name starring Michael Fassbender, Kate Winslet, Seth Rogen, and Jeff Daniels, directed by Danny Boyle with a screenplay by Aaron Sorkin.

Why Startups Fail: A New Roadmap for Entrepreneurial Success by Tom Eisenmann

Over the past 23 years at Harvard Business School Tom Eisenmann has helped launch thousands of startups.

An astonishing 13 of these have reached unicorn status. For a decade he has explored the question of why startups fail and in The Fail-Safe Startup explains how you can succeed against the odds.

Eisenmann’s fascinating, often counter-intuitive, advice will help you avoid common mistakes including:

Another book from 2021 tries to provide a more comprehensive account of startup failure.

Tom Eisenmann, who has taught entrepreneurship at Harvard Business School for the past 20 years, surveyed 470 failed startup founders about why their ventures went south. Their responses make up his book, Why Startups Fail.

Eisenmann rejects the idea that most failures come down to the founders, and even criticizes venture capitalists for focusing too much on finding the “right people” who have grit, determination, and industry acumen.

Instead, he suggests that failures more often come down to a misjudgment of market need, growing too fast, and overly idealistic visions (all things, notably, that VCs encourage).

Like any good business school professor, Eisenmann comes prepared with an armload of case studies.

He pays particular attention to startups founded by his students—cases where the postmortem seems almost personal.

Why Startups Fail provides six reasons things go wrong, including neglecting customer research, finding the wrong stakeholders, and falling into a “speed trap” of growth at all costs. Eisenmann emphasizes that these mistakes are avoidable.

But more important, like Ananth he advises founders to understand that failure is often part of the package.

Toward the end of his book, he offers advice on how to handle failure when it inevitably happens.

In today’s startup environment, raising money might be easy—it’s what comes after that’s hard. Will these books help startup founders or investors avoid disappointments?

Perhaps, but in the same way that millions of health books have helped humans avoid disease. Diagnosing the common reasons for death is one thing. Learning to live more healthfully is another.

Think Like Jeff Bezos: 23 Life-Changing Lessons from Jeff Bezos on Life, People, Business, Technology, and Leadership: Jamie Morris

Over the past two decades, he has built this company into a multibillion-dollar e-commerce website that is a leader in its industry.

He has also branched out into other areas, such as inventing new technology and privatizing space travel.

From his lengthy history in business that has led to his major successes, it is inevitable that Bezos has learned a lot of lessons when it comes to being a success.

This audiobook, Think Like Jeff Bezos: 23 Life Changing Lessons from Jeff Bezos on Life, People, Business, Technology, and Leadership, by Jamie Morris, is dedicated to teaching you these lessons.

Within this audiobook you will learn valuable lessons on topics including life, business, and leadership.

You will learn the specific secrets that Jeff Bezos has used to maximize his success in business and ensure that he runs a company that operates like a well-oiled machine.

Despite him now having over 55,000 workers and billions in revenue every year, Bezos still manages to run his business with a highly intimate approach.

As we celebrate Amazon’s 23rd year in business, we will also celebrate Bezos’ 23 best lessons about business, leadership, and life.

This audiobook is a tribute to the brilliant man that Bezos is and all that his own life lessons have to offer us as we strive to create the same excellence within our own lives and businesses.

For anyone who is curious about the teachings of the second richest man in the world and how he came to earn this position, this audiobook is just for you.

Grab yourself a hot drink, settle in, and get ready to learn 23 powerful life-changing lessons.

Eisenmann Thomas-Managing by Startups O Reily

His blog posts contain much of the content of the courses he teaches at HBS – Product Management, Business Models & Launching Tech ventures.

If you want salient advice about your startup, you’ve hit the jackpot with this book.

Eisenmann annually compiles the best posts from many blogs on technology startup management, primarily for the benefit of his students.

This book makes his latest collection available to the broader entrepreneur community.

You’ll find 72 posts from successful entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, such as Fred Wilson, Steve Blank, Ash Maurya, Joel Spolsky, and Ben Yoskovitz.

They cover a wide range of topics essential to your startup’s success, including: Management tasks: Engineering, product management, marketing, sales, and business development Organizational issues: Cofounder tensions, recruiting, and career planning Funding: The latest developments in capital markets that affect startups

Divided into 13 areas of focus, the book’s contributors explore the metrics you need to run your startup, discuss lean prototyping techniques for hardware, identify costly outsourcing mistakes, provide practical tips on user acquisition, offer branding guidelines, and explain how a choir of angel investors often will sing different parts. And that’s just for starters.

Mastering the VC Game: A Venture Capital Insider Reveals How to Get from Start-up to IPO on Your Terms Hardcover – by Jeffrey Bussgang

To do that, you need to woo, impress, and persuade venture capitalists to back your endeavor. That task alone is a challenge.

But finding and choosing the right investor can be harder still. Even if you manage to get backing, you want your VC to be a partner, not some dictator who will undermine your vision and take control of your life’s work.

Jeffrey Bussgang is one of a very few people who have played on both sides of this high-stakes game. By his early thirties, he had helped build two successful start-ups-one went public, the other was acquired.

Now he uses his experience and unique perspective on “the other side” as a venture capitalist helping entrepreneurs bring their dreams to fruition.

In the book, Bussgang offers high-level insights, colorful stories, and practical advice gathered from his own experience as well as from interviews with dozens of the most successful players on both sides of the game, including Twitter’s Jack Dorsey and LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman.

He reveals how to get noticed, perfect a pitch, and negotiate a partnership that works for everyone.

An insider’s guide to the secrets of the world venture capital, Mastering the VC Game will prove invaluable for entrepreneurs seeking capital and successful partnerships.

Testing Business Ideas: A Field Guide for Rapid Experimentation- Alexander Osterwalder

If your organization needs to adapt to harsh new realities, but you don’t yet have a strategy that will get you out in front of your competitors, you need Business Model Generation.

Co-created by 470 “Business Model Canvas” practitioners from 45 countries, the book features a beautiful, highly visual, 4-color design that takes powerful strategic ideas and tools, and makes them easy to implement in your organization.

It explains the most common Business Model patterns, based on concepts from leading business thinkers, and helps you reinterpret them for your own context.

You will learn how to systematically understand, design, and implement a game-changing business model–or analyze and renovate an old one.

Along the way, you’ll understand at a much deeper level your customers, distribution channels, partners, revenue streams, costs, and your core value proposition.

Business Model Generation features practical innovation techniques used today by leading consultants and companies worldwide, including 3M, Ericsson, Capgemini, Deloitte, and others.

Designed for doers, it is for those ready to abandon outmoded thinking and embrace new models of value creation: for executives, consultants, entrepreneurs, and leaders of all organizations.

If you’re ready to change the rules, you belong to “the business model generation!”

Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days Hardcover – Illustrated, by Jessica Livingston

These people are celebrities now. What was it like when they were just a couple friends with an idea?

Founders like Steve Wozniak (Apple), Caterina Fake (Flickr), Mitch Kapor (Lotus), Max Levchin (PayPal), and Sabeer Bhatia (Hotmail) tell you in their own words about their surprising and often very funny discoveries as they learned how to build a company.

Where did they get the ideas that made them rich? How did they convince investors to back them? What went wrong, and how did they recover?

Nearly all technical people have thought of one day starting or working for a startup. For them, this book is the closest you can come to being a fly on the wall at a successful start-up, to learn how it’s done.

But ultimately these interviews are required reference for anyone who wants to understand business, because start-ups are business reduced to its essence.

The reason their founders become rich is that start-ups do what businesses do – create value – more intensively than almost any other part of the economy. How? What are the secrets that make successful start-ups so insanely productive? Listen to this book, and let the founders themselves tell you.