The 25 Best Business Books I Ever Read

1. Million Dollar Weekend by Noah Kagan

• Yes, I included my own book. It would be weird not to.
• The process I used to start eight businesses, including AppSumo, in a weekend each.
• Ask one person for $1 today. Get three paying customers before you build anything.
• #1 on Amazon and Audible, #8 New York Times.

Free first chapter

2. The Ultimate Sales Machine by Chet Holmes

• This book has so many frigging tips I can't even start.
• Sales is an education process, not a hard sell.
• Dream 100: list the 100 customers you actually want and go after them directly.
• Follow up. Almost 99% of people never do. The 1% who do get what they want.

3. Million Dollar Consulting by Alan Weiss  ·  🌮🌮🌮🌮 4 tacos

• My college girlfriend's rich dad gave me this because I wanted to get rich too. He said read it and you'll be rich. Good advice.
• Price on the value you create, not the hours.
• Tell a client when your thing isn't the right fit. They trust you more, and buy more.

I interviewed Alan twice on the podcast

4. Permission Marketing by Seth Godin

• No one wants your annoying ass marketing.
• Get their permission and deliver more than what they expect.
• Same rule for my newsletter: no schedule, I send it when I have something worth sending.

5. Amp It Up by Frank Slootman  ·  🌮🌮🌮🌮🌮 5 tacos

• What a BOSS of a book.
• Frank doesn't start companies, he grows them. Took Snowflake from $4 billion to the largest software IPO ever.
• If you could only do one thing for your business the rest of the year, what would it be and why?
• How could we do this project in half the time?

My full notes

6. Mastering the Rockefeller Habits by Verne Harnish  ·  🌮🌮🌮🌮🌮 5 tacos

• Almost nothing is written for businesses that already work. This fills the gap.
• For getting from $1 million to $10 million to $100 million.
• Be a broken record about your goal, your strategy, your vision. When the goal is clear, people know what they're working towards.

7. The Road Less Stupid by Keith Cunningham  ·  🌮🌮🌮🌮🌮 5 tacos

• Carve out thinking time every week.
• Ask: what's the unasked question? Is this the problem or the symptom? Is this a fact or a story I'm telling myself?
• Dashboards match the vehicle. A tricycle doesn't need one. A jet does.

8. Maverick by Ricardo Semler  ·  🌮🌮🌮🌮🌮 5 tacos

• The book that inspired how I run and lead companies.
• Hire them. Pay them well. Let them do what they're good at. Get out of their way.
• Semler let people work when they want 20 years before remote work.

9. Work Rules! by Laszlo Bock  ·  🌮🌮🌮🌮 4 tacos

• How Google actually hires.
• Recruiting KPIs: what percent of hires come from referrals? (We pay referral bonuses for engineers at AppSumo.)
• Share how decisions get made. People do better work when they're not guessing.

10. The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni  ·  🌮🌮🌮🌮🌮 5 tacos

• A fable about a leadership team that can't say the hard thing to each other.
• Absence of trust, fear of conflict, lack of commitment, no accountability, inattention to results. In that order.
• Read it before your next offsite.

11. Small Giants by Bo Burlingham

• Companies that chose to be great instead of big.
• Just because your restaurant is popular doesn't mean you have to franchise.
• Keep the team small. Handwrite the letters. Chasing every opportunity is an ego thing.

My notes

12. Setting the Table by Danny Meyer

• Create an experience that is like nothing else.
• Be authentic to yourself.
• Treating customers exceptionally is the differentiator. It's a restaurant book. It applies to every business.

13. The Score Takes Care of Itself by Bill Walsh

• The 49ers coach who took one of the worst teams to one of the best.
• Do the right processes and the outcome takes care of itself.
• Keep your desk clean. Control the inputs: posts published, sales emails sent, calls made.
• You can't control the weather. You can control how you dress for it.

14. Essentialism by Greg McKeown

• My favorite book of 2014. I bought it for the whole team at AppSumo.
• Less but better.
• If you don't prioritize your life, someone else will.
• The word priority stayed singular for 500 years. We pluralized it in the 1900s.

My quotes from it

15. The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron  ·  🌮🌮🌮🌮🌮 5 tacos

• Morning pages: three pages in a journal, first thing, no rules on what to write.
• Takes a lot of crap off your mind so you make better decisions. I did it most mornings for a year.
• I read The Creative Act after this one. Julia Cameron is so much better.

My book report

16. The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz

• At restaurants, close the menu after you find the one dish you like.
• Choices can be evil.
• Being satisfied will make you so much happier than always going for the maximum.

I interviewed Barry about it

17. The Big Five for Life by John Strelecky  ·  🌮🌮🌮🌮🌮 5 tacos

• A dying businessman shares the five things he most wanted to do, see or experience.
• Museum days: if every day of your life were cataloged, would you be proud of the exhibit?
• The average American gets about 28,500 days.
• Before you hire someone, ask them what their big five are.

My notes

18. Die With Zero by Bill Perkins  ·  🌮🌮🌮🌮🌮 5 tacos

• Money is a tool for memories. It's worth the most at the ages when you can actually use it. Not at 80.
• "Do you have fears of running out of money?" I said, "I hope I run out of money!"

Bill on the podcast

19. The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel  ·  🌮🌮🌮🌮 4 tacos

• At Mint I was surprised how many people didn't know how to manage money. Super common, super avoidable. Most of it is psychology, not math.
• There is no reason to risk what you have and need for what you don't have and don't need.
• Know when you have enough.

My takeaways

20. The Snowball by Alice Schroeder  ·  🌮🌮🌮🌮🌮 5 tacos

• The 900-page Warren Buffett biography, by the one writer he gave full access to.
• Long. Worth it.

21. Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson  ·  🌮🌮🌮🌮🌮 5 tacos

• Standards. He made people rebuild parts nobody would ever see, because he would know.
• Read it next to Amp It Up. Same lesson from two directions.

22. Masters of Doom by David Kushner  ·  🌮🌮🌮🌮🌮 5 tacos

• Two guys built id Software, shipped Doom and Quake out of a shared office, and invented an industry.

23. Billion Dollar Whale by Tom Wright and Bradley Hope  ·  🌮🌮🌮🌮🌮 5 tacos

• How a 27-year-old talked Goldman Sachs and half of Hollywood out of billions.

24. American Kingpin by Nick Bilton  ·  🌮🌮🌮🌮🌮 5 tacos

• The Silk Road story. A guy ran a billion-dollar marketplace from a laptop in a San Francisco library.
• Product, growth, hiring, all of it, on the wrong side of the law.

25. Authentic by Paul Van Doren  ·  🌮🌮🌮🌮 4 tacos

• Damn this was great. The founder of Vans.
• Hard work, great product, great price, and focus on a specific customer: skateboarders.
• Basics work.