Max Levchin is the co-founder and CEO of “Affirm,” the next generation financial services company offering consumer credit at the point of sale. Previously, he was the CTO and one of the original cofounders of PayPal. He helped start Yelp, and also founded “Slide,” which was acquired by Google later on. In a recent Product Hunt Live Chat Levchin recommends following books for early stage entrepreneurs.
Quote: "The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerberg won’t create a social network. If you are copying these guys, you aren’t learning from them. It’s easier to copy a model than to make something new: doing what we already know how to do takes the world from 1 to n, adding more of something familiar. But every time we create something new, we go from 0 to 1. The act of creation is singular, as is the moment of creation, and the result is something fresh and strange."
[su_divider top="no" text=" " divider_color="#e8e7e6" link_color="#edde29" size="1" margin="10"][/su_divider]
2. The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz
Quote: "Great CEOs face the pain. They deal with the sleepless nights, the cold sweats, and what my friend the great Alfred Chuang (legendary cofounder and CEO of BEA Systems) calls “the torture.” Whenever I meet a successful CEO, I ask them how they did it. Mediocre CEOs point to their brilliant strategic moves or their intuitive business sense or a variety of other self-congratulatory explanations. The great CEOs tend to be remarkably consistent in their answers. They all say, “I didn’t quit."
[su_divider top="no" text=" " divider_color="#e8e7e6" link_color="#edde29" size="1" margin="10"][/su_divider]
3. The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton M. Christensen
Quote: "To measure market needs, I would watch carefully what customers do, not simply listen to what they say. Watching how customers actually use a product provides much more reliable information than can be gleaned from a verbal interview or a focus group. Thus, observations indicate that auto users today require a minimum cruising range (that is, the distance that can be driven without refueling) of about 125 to 150 miles; most electric vehicles only offer a minimum cruising range of 50 to 80 miles."
[su_divider top="no" text=" " divider_color="#e8e7e6" link_color="#edde29" size="1" margin="10"][/su_divider]
4. Good to Great by James C. Collins
Quote: "Greatness is not a function of circumstance. Greatness, it turns out, is largely a matter of conscious choice, and discipline."
h/t: Product Hunt
[su_note note_color="#ffffff" text_color="#363232" radius="0"]Have a list of favorite business books, why not share with the world? Post your list of favorite business books by using FS Network.[/su_note]
