Andrew Chen Archives

Today, I was asked for the definitive list of books that I’d recommend as the classics for tech products and business. It’s hard to pare things down to such a short list, since there’s so much great stuff that’s been written.

In addition, a lot of new exciting books have been published in recent years, but they haven’t stood the test of time. My lists solely consists of books that skew oldish, but have aged well and continue to provide value today. This leaves out amazing contributions such as The Hard Thing About Hard Things, Zero to One, and The Lean Startup, which will undoubtedly make a list like this in future years.

With that in mind, here’s my list. I’m sure you’ve read many of them, but hopefully you find a gem or two that you haven’t already read. In no particular order:

• Crossing the Chasm
• The Inmates are Running the Asylum
• The Mythical Man Month
• Designing Interactions
• The Design of Everyday Things
• Founders at Work
• Innovator’s Dilemma
• High Output Management
• My Life in Advertising
• Four Steps to the Epiphany
• Bonus 11th book :) Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd

There’s also a number of great books that just tell the narrative of one company, such as The New New Thing, Startup, eBoys, Only the Paranoid Survive, Breaking Windows, but I’ve left those off the list even though they are very fun to read.

I’m sure I’ve missed some great ones! If you want suggest a replacement and/or share your own list, tweet me at @andrewchen.

Taken a few weeks ago at dinner, at Mission Rock in Dogpatch

tldr
It’s the last week to order Eric Ries’s new book, called The Leader’s Guide. In a very innovative experiment, it’s being published exclusively on Kickstarter. It’s the only way to buy a copy. I’ve already ordered a signed version and encourage you to support his work too. Here’s the link.

Making entrepreneurship mainstream
Like many of you, I’m a huge fan of Eric – he’s created a compelling, cohesive framework for thinking iteratively and entrepreneurially about products. The ideas are so powerful that the ideas in the book – such as “pivoting” and “MVP” – are now part of industry jargon and have even been featured on HBO’s Silicon Valley.  (Also, isn’t it inevitable that he makes a cameo at some point?) The ideas in Lean Startup are amazingly powerful, and I continue to reference them all the time.

How I first met Eric
Last month in March 2015, I hosted a dinner at Mission Rock in Dogpatch where he was a special guest, and we talked about how we first met back in 2008. Eric and I had our first coffee before The Lean Startup was a real thing, when he was between jobs and hanging out at Kleiner Perkins. (PS. if you’re interested in attending events like this in the future, subscribe to my newsletter and you’ll get email updates if I do this again sometime)

Anyway, here’s how I first got to know Eric- at that point, I was writing a niche, mostly unread blog about tech and products, at the end of my stint as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Mohr Davidow Ventures. I had maybe 100 readers total. It was thrilling to find another niche, mostly unread blog full of content I was interested in :) Looking at my referer traffic, I noticed I was getting a tiny bit of traffic from a blog called “Startup Lessons Learned.”

I clicked through, and my mind was blown…

First off, the blog was anonymously written. There were a ton of essays across a bunch of meaty topics – picking products, continuous deployment, landing pages, and metrics. It was obviously from someone who was on the front lines. I couldn’t tell who was writing it, but whoever it was, the content was amazing. I bookmarked it and added it to my Google Reader, and would diligently check for updates every week.

I just couldn’t believe that someone was writing this much great stuff without taking credit for it :) Eventually I found a cryptic email address from the blog, decided to write in to figure out who the hell was writing this amazing content. Soon after, I got a quick reply, and that’s how we first met.

A few months later, Eric told me a few months later he was going to leave Kleiner to work on a book. I was very confused :) Turns out that book he was working on was The Lean Startup, and it ended up doing pretty well!

Fast forward
The success of The Lean Startup has changed the culture of entrepreneurship across the world. And many new ideas, frameworks, and refinements have been built on top of the ideas presented in the original book. There’s a ton of lessons learned from trying to implement these ideas across a wide variety of industries – for example, at the aforementioned dinner event we heard from Eric on how people have tried to apply the ideas to non-tech industries like manufacturing, aerospace, as well as some of the nuances of applying MVPs in a design-centric world of consumer mobile apps.

Because of this, I was thrilled to hear that a lot of these case studies and ideas have been collected into a new book, The Leader’s Guide. I ordered my copy immediately upon hearing about it.

Here’s the link if you want to check it out too:
The Leader’s Guide, by Eric Ries.