55 books I recommend

Many of you frequently ask me about book recommendations and I often give short answers which is not that great. I sat down and wrote a better answer in this article and hope that you discover some great reads! Which books do you recommend and why?

Below a list of 55 books and the reason why I like the books!

1.    The Inner Game of Tennis: Best analysis of the mental side of sports and business.

2.    The Start-up Owner’s Manual: My daily guide to building start-ups, gives the messy world of building new companies a easy to understand, but hard to execute process.

3.    Ready Player One: Great story about the future dominated by a gaming company, there’s also a great movie by now .

4.    Hatching Twitter: Some interesting insights in Twitter’s journey which are quite similar to the challenges of any start-up.

5.    The man who solved the market: The most successful hedge fund, powered by ML and run by guys who don’t know what they are buying and selling, very fun read.

6.    The master switch: Learnings about the dominance of some of the biggest media companies of the 20th century that can be transferred to 21st century internet companies.

7.    Letters to a young contrarian: One of my favorite books of all time, encourages to not just agree with whatever most people agree on, but rather think for yourself and speak up. Good introduction to Christopher Hitchen’s way of life.

8.    Barbarian days: Never thought a book about surfing can be so interesting, feels a bit like meditation while reading it

9.    The price we pay: Explains the US healthcare system with the highest level of clarity and shows some better ways forward

10. Shoe dog: Great story about a bootstrapped company that taught me patience vs. today’s expectations to build large companies in a couple of years

11. Deep learning illustrated: Nice book to really understand deep learning without having a deep level of programming experience

12. What if?: Fun book with lots of scientific humour

13. The ultimate hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy: A science fiction classic

14. The making of a manager: Practical books to be a good manager in a tech company

15. Principles: life and work: Ray Dalio has some good concepts like radical transparency and giving direct feedback which are a bit uncomfortable in the beginning, but extremely efficient

16. High output management: My favorite guide for a start-up operator

17. Sure you’re joking, Mr. Feynman: Learn to enjoy what you are doing by developing a high degree of curiosity turns boring into interesting things. One of the most important lessons for me to enjoy every day of work and life. 

18. Darknet: Good science fiction

19. One up on wall street: Taught me a lot of lessons when I started investing in stocks, definitely helped me to not having to make some of the typical mistakes of a stock picking beginner

20. Factfulness: Positive statistics about the world’s progress, good antidote to the many clickbait headlines online news tend to push every day

21. Eats, shoots & leaves: Increased my level of attention on writing well

22. But beautiful: a book about jazz: Entertaining book about the history and evolution of jazz 

23. The master algorithm: Nice beginning if you want to learn about the potential future impact of machine learning

24. Vacationland: Give this book to a person and you’ll find out if they have a good humor 

25. The untethered soul: Good perspective on life and great guide to drop goals that don’t really make you happy

26. Less: Extremely well written story, good read for vacation

27. The everything store: Insights about the early years of Amazon, taught me one or two things about how basic most great companies felt like in the beginning

28. Foundation #1: Science fiction classic which includes so many crazy and creative ideas about how the world could be, there will be an Apple TV+ series coming out next year!

29. The meaning of it all: thoughts of a citizen-scientist: If you are in the Feynman fan club, read this one as well

30. Zero to one: Peter Thiel’s start-up wisdom, mainly helped me to understand that some people are good at 0 to 1 and some people are good at 1 to n, those people are often not the same, but both groups of people are equally important. Important to find out which group you belong to, can save you a lot of trouble and make you much more successful

31. The Almanack of Naval Ravikant: Amazingly condensed wisdom for the tech age

32. Deep work: Some good work rules, pick your favorite!

33. Measure what matters: Nice primer on how OKRs work. If you don’t know what OKRs are, read this book

34. The ride of a lifetime: Some interesting insights in key challenges Bob Iger faced when building the Disney company

35. Leonardo Da Vinci: Enjoy figuring things out is much more important than gaining prestige. Back then Leonardo Da Vinci broke many rules to gain new insights that he is known for today. A more practical learning from the book is that it’s a good idea to take a lot of observational notes in the form of texts and drawings.

36. Onward: Lessons of building Starbucks by Howard Schultz, similar to the book about Amazon, shows how basic big business operate and feel like in the beginning

37. On the future: Good help when you want to think about a positive future for the world and human kind

38. Loonshots: Interesting concept to allow for innovation in your company

39. The elements of style: Writing well is important, especially if you are a manager or founder, this books helps getting better at it.

40. Winter world #1: Good science fiction

41. Mouth full of blood: Extremely well written essays, speeches and meditations 

42. Foundations edge #4: Another book of Isaac Asimov’s foundation series

43. Delivering happiness: While I don’t really like Zappos as a company, the story of building it includes a lot of interesting challenges that are relevant for most start-up founders

44. Managing oneself: Important to be able to manage yourself before you start managing others, kind of like if you want to become a psychotherapist, first you need to do psychotherapy to not project your problems/past on others

45. The innovators: If you need some inspirations, that’s your book

46. Never split the difference: Good negotiation book, there’s also a class by the author on Masterclass which is a good start to enjoy negotiations a bit more

47. Titan: Fun reading about a very different generation of founders. Rockefeller definitely had some interesting management concepts!

48. Only the paranoid survive: Similar to ‘high output management’, but more focused on Intel’s story

49. The intelligent investor: Value investing legend explains investing, had to read it in university and was surprised how easy he explains it all. Bible for Waren Buffet’s investment bible.

50. Nine perfect strangers: Very easy read for vacation 

51. Founder’s at work: A nice mix of stories assembled by y combinator’s founder. Tells a lot about the similarities of the challenges early stage founders face

52. Second foundation #3: Another book from the foundation series

53. The design of everyday things: Made me more aware of the thoughts behind things you use everyday but don’t really think about when you think about design

54. Losing my Virginity: Great and fun story about Richard Branson’s life. Although hard to believe that building companies can be so fun, but apparently he makes it work. I’m just not yet there I guess!

55. Screw it, let’s do it: Another Richard Branson book and great title of the book. Something you could tell yourself when you are still working in a job but thinking about whether you should really take the risk of starting your own company…

Bonus / Arguably: Very entertaining collection of essays by Christopher Hitchens. Fun to read how he explores serious and less less serious topics.

Let me know if you have opinions on these books and which books you recommend!