‘Your own’ and ‘Startup Company’ are two things that casually slip in between the lids of our eyes as we fall asleep, before your boss casually taps your shoulder to click on the next slide. The daydream of being your own boss to tap your own shoulder often comes from a place of yearning and of knowing you can make it on your own. But more often than not, those dreams have an end in mind without a clue on how to get there, and even when you do you tend to worry about the detours along the way. So why not read about other people’s road to successes and failures to put your mind at ease? Why not read about people who were also just as scared as you but ended up where you want to be someday? Aren’t you curious as to what they knew and what they didn’t know along the way? What follows is a little collection of just that:

Image from Stanford

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

A seasoned Silicon Valley entrepreneur and venture capitalist, Ben Horowitz takes you through an honest ride along the challenges and problems facing those who run their own businesses while offering insighs on what he himself has learned along the way. From investing and cashing in, to making the really hard but ultimately practical choices, he gives it to you straight with his sense of humor and penchant for quoting rap lyrics.

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2. Secrets of Sand Hill Road: Venture Capital and How to Get It, by Scott Kupor

Anyone who’s watched a season of Silicon Valley will probably get a good grasp of what a Venture Capitalist firm is, but always fall short of how it actually works and why it actually even does. And if you’re thinking of funding your own startup this way, you might as well know how they operate and how you can potentially make that work for you with Scott Kupor’s book.

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3. Disciplined Entrepreneurship: 24 Steps to a Successful Startup, by Bill Aulet

Remember that tropical storm of stray thoughts and emotions we described earlier? This book just screams FOCUS and really laser-pointers the key things you need to have a good think about in a sequence of organized steps towards problem solving and innovating.

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4. Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future, by Peter Thiel with Blake Masters

Some startups tend to focus on current trends and fall into a “safe” trap of doing something someone else already has but done in either a different way A or way B. Peter Thiel makes it a point to think outside the box and do something different to really stand out and be the One of Something instead of the Nth of a Done Thing, while also covering the ways you can make it sustainable.

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5. Powerful: Building a Culture of Freedom and Responsibility, by Patty McCord

Patty McCord shows you how to maintain focus on high performance and manage the expectations of the talent you hire through the use of radical transparency and experience-based hiring.

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