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Books for entrepreneurs

Working on Planypus, which is launching a beta in two weeks, has given me an opportunity not only to learn a lot of Ruby, but to jump head first into entrepreneurship, so I’ve decided to give myself a bit of a crash course on various topics outside of develoment including leadership, and business strategy. Here are my thoughts on a some books I’ve listened to recently (yes, I’ve taken up audiobooks because they work so well for commutes and those times you are just walking around; no time wasted

Seth Godin - Small Is The New Big and The Big Moo — Great books filled with all sorts of inspirational riffs. Godin is one my favorite authors, not only because he often has good ideas, but because of the way he illustrates them, it makes you actually want to go and do something about them. Sure there are a bunch of cliches in the book (including the title), but listening to it can spawn a lot of good thought in your head. Highly recommended.

Steve Chandler - 100 Ways to Motivate Others — I found most of this book to be cliched self-help type stuff but there were some valuable insights. Also Steve Chandler is a very good narrator once you get used to his voice which sounds a bit like Ben Stein, but what he says is actually pretty engaging. I wish they had a condensed verison of this. 5 hours of the same thing was a bit too much.

Kim & Mauborgne - Blue Ocean Strategy - Really great book about how new markets are created and making your competition irrelevant. They attempt to systematize an approach to discovering ideas like Starbucks and Cirque du Soleil. The most valuable thing in this book was their repeated assertion that in order to value innovate you need not only to raise and create new value factors, but also reduce and eliminate factors that are taken for granted in your industry. For example, by eliminating animals and star performance from circus, Cirque du Soleil dramatically cut their costs while raising the factor of the circus tent, which was being phased out in most modern circuses, and introducing the new factors of theatrical theme and interesting music, taken from the alternative entertainment industry of theater.

Probably the hardest thing about designing a product is realizing the features you need to cut out or let go of, and stop getting into the trap of thinking that you need to have them just because the competition has them. A lack of features can be a feature in itself. There is also an entire section in this book about tipping point leadership (meaning concentrating on hotspots and influencers when solving a problem rather than uniformly spreading resources). I found the idea to be obvious and common sense, and way too much time was spent on it. Nonetheless a great book and highly recommended.

That’s all for now, stay tuned for more book reviews…

[...] Who says the wealthy dynasties must lapse into consumptive oblivion? A young member of the Priztker clan is at the helm of this startup. They are pre-beta so I haven’t seen the service yet. I suspect they will look like Whosgoing or Weekendr but with a firm emphasis on reaching existing friends with Renkoo-like communication features and the plans will be public events rather than idiosyncratic personal crap. The blog suggests that the first roll out will be notification only and then later will it enable bilateral communication. I also suspect they will launch the service properly in Chicago as HeyLetsGo did in Boston by hitting a niche demographic, with launch parties and everything, and owning that before rolling out across the country. By the way, for Ruby fans out there, Planypus appears to be a Ruby on Rails production. [...]

Another good book I can recommend is Guy Kawasaki’s “The Art of the Start”.
Keep up the good work.

Yeah I just finished Art of the Start. It has a lot of focus on soliciting investment and what happens once you get it, but a good overall read. I’m also ever so slightly disturbed by kawasaki’s apparent inability to use swear words, substituting various japanese culinary items instead (bullsushi, shitaake). Good book regardless.