My top start-up resources

Hey there to all company builders, a list of my personal favorites that I keep coming back to when thinking of starting and running new ventures.

Books

This is a mix of books of people/companies who’ve made it and books that simply inspire me.

• Saying No to Jugaad: The Making of Bigbasket The story of India’s largest e-grocery company, a story about customer-centricity, how to scale, build vs buy, team building, competition and emerging markets.
• The Everything Store. The rise of Amazon and how Bezos did it. Got great lessons on strategy and focus
• Wild Ride: Inside Uber’s Quest for World Domination. Story of how Uber scaled. A playbook on scaling quickly across cities and geographies with lessons on operations and marketing.
• How Google Works One of the best books on how to grow a company, hiring smart creatives and motivating a team.
• The Customer-centricity playbook A short little guide on how to build a more customer-centric enterprise, why de-averaging is so important, what customer life time value is, why it’s hard to measure it.
• What it takes. Lessons in pursuit of excellence Steve Schwartzman’s autobiography of how he built Blackstone. Great lessons on perseverance, risk taking and how to be unapologetically arrogant about excellence in your team. Only limited applicability if you are not a white American man with a stellar rolodex and career in Wall Street.
• Bad Blood. Secrets and lies in a Silicon Valley Start-up Well, lessons on what not to do (basically, don’t lie if your product doesn’t work)

Podcasts

• How I built this: Guy Raz interviews founders
• Startup: By Gimlet Media. The story about how to build a podcasting company. a dating company and American Apparel. All seasons are fantastic
• Masters of Scale: Reid Hoffman explains how to scale. Best thing is the insight from top founders

Articles & Magazines

• First Round: A fantastic repository of articles for every single problem or topic you may encounter in the first years of growing and scaling a company
• The Ken: Worth the subscription, amazing long form reporting on India’s start-up scene, technology and VC.