What I'm Reading to Learn Venture Capital and Mechanics of Startup Funding, A Reading List You Can Steal

I have done a fair bit of reading about venture capital in the past, which comes with the territory, but never approached it as a structured learning project. I’m changing it now, and this is the initial reading list I’m beginning with. 

To be clear, I'm not planning to become an investor. Since I’ve been writing about Bangladesh's startup and business ecosystem for quite some time, and as we are seeing a lot of movement around building a serious VC ecosystem in the country, I feel I need a more meaningful understanding if I want to write about this and future developments. 

My current understanding of how venture capital and startup funding work is at best surface-level. I know little about what happens when a fund closes a round, when a term sheet gets signed, and when a startup decides to take dilution at a certain valuation, and about many other inner workings of this world.

So over the past several months, I've been building a reading list. Working through books, essays, and the occasional academic papers. Getting fluent in a vocabulary I've been using loosely for years. Trying to understand the mechanics, cap tables, liquidation preferences, power-law portfolio construction, LP dynamics, etc., behind decisions that shape which companies and founders get backed and which markets get taken seriously.

As I do it, I thought I'd share the reading list with you all. I have three expectations for doing so. Some of you may get interested in learning more about this industry, and tag along, and we may put together a small reading circle. Source other resources if I should check out any other blog posts or books. And finally, to test out the idea of public commitment as a tool for self-accountability. 

A few caveats upfront. This is a syllabus I'm working through myself, not one I've completed. It's also Silicon Valley-centric because that's where most of the serious long-form writing on VC comes from. I would have preferred some resources on emerging market venture capital work, but I couldn’t find anything meaningful. 

For now, this is it. 

Books 

• Venture Deals by Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson. This is one of the most commonly recommended ones if you want to learn the basics. It covers the language — SAFEs, preferred stock, pro-rata rights, board composition, anti-dilution provisions — in plain terms, with real deal structures. Understanding the vocabulary is critical. Once you have the vocabulary, everything else becomes easier.
• Secrets of Sand Hill Road by Scott Kupor. This one is fairly recent, came out just a few years back. It goes deep into the VC world, answering questions like: how is the VC firm itself structured? How do funds raise money from LPs? How do decisions actually get made inside a partnership? It's an insider's account written accessibly. I read some parts of this one when it came out in 2019. Good one.  
• The Business of Venture Capital by Mahendra Ramsinghani. This one goes deeper still into fund formation and LP relationships. It also comes with substantial material on LP due diligence and fund-of-funds dynamics that the first edition lacks. 
• Venture Capital and the Finance of Innovation by Andrew Metrick and Ayako Yasuda 

History and Narrative

• The Power Law by Sebastian Mallaby. Often called the best single narrative history of venture capital. I have been meaning to read it for a while, but never managed to get around to it. Hoping it will change now. 
• eBoys by Randall Stross is said to follow Benchmark Capital almost day by day through the late-90s boom. 
• Bad Blood (Theranos) may be read to understand how VC judgment fails. 
• Boom and Bust by  John Turner is said to offer a longer historical context: VC cycles as instances of a repeating pattern, not one-off events.
• Crack the Funding Code: How Investors Think and What They Need to Hear to Fund Your Startup. I sourced this one from Goodreads. A good addition to how to approach raising capital as a founder. 
• The Art of Startup Fundraising by Alejandro Cremades. This one, too, comes from Goodreads scavenging. Has an overall good review and thinks it would be fun. 

I haven’t read any of these books. I plan to go through each one of these and develop an understanding of what it is. 

The Founder's Side

Not strictly related to venture capital or fundraising. However, these books offer excellent mental models for thinking about building businesses. Some of them are hugely popular with venture capitalists, which means learning the language should be useful. I have read most of these before. 

• The Lean Startup by Eric Ries. Gives you the build-measure-learn vocabulary that founders and investors share. 
• Zero to One by Peter Thiel. Gives you the contrarian framework VCs use when evaluating whether a company can build a monopoly, which is ultimately what they're hoping for. 
• The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz. 
• The Founder's Dilemmas by Noam Wasserman. I haven’t read this one. It is said to be quite data-driven, academic in its rigor, and covers the things that actually kill companies at the early stage: co-founder equity splits, the decision of whether to bring in an outside CEO, and hiring too fast. This looks like a very good read to understand some of the reasons startups fail. 
• High Growth Handbook by Elad Gil. I have read several chapters of this one and can’t recommend it enough. I think I have written several reviews based on it as well. 

Blogs 

Instead of linking to individual blog posts, I’m linking to some of the most popular blogs/websites in this category as a whole. I’m a regular reader of most of these sources, and I want you to do the hard work as well 🙂

• Stratechery
• Not Boring 
• https://avc.com/ 
• Above the Crowd 
• Paul Graham 

Additional Reading Material Request

Everything above comes primarily from Silicon Valley. I couldn’t find any meaningful long-form writing on venture capital from an emerging-market perspective from South Asia, Southeast Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, or the Middle East. 

I understand that the mechanics translate, but the local context matters: different LP bases, different regulatory environments, different risk profiles, different relationships between capital and the state.

If you know books, essays, or practitioners writing seriously about VC in these markets, please share. I think some of the most useful suggestions for my context will come from people closer to those ecosystems than otherwise. I have learned this much covering Bangladesh over these years. 

Send them my way.

If you're working through this or similar material and want to compare notes or put together a reading circle, I'm at ruhul@futurestartup.com. 

A Note from the FS Team

Thank you for reading. Future Startup has been a labor of love with the intention to enable and inspire more of us to find our agency and apply it in building meaningful things. If you enjoy our work and find it useful, consider supporting our work here. 

We also have several commercial services, including a narrative studio, advertising, and a research service. If your company has a story worth telling, FS Narrative Studio can help you tell it and reach one of the most sought-after audiences in Bangladesh and beyond, with the same depth you just read. We also help brands reach this audience directly through advertising and interview series sponsorship, and provide custom research services through Future Research on Bangladesh's business landscape.

Explore our products and services →