Blink

Blink by Malcolm Gladwell.

Really a tie between Blink, and Atlas Shrugged.

Other books that I've found helpful are the many socioeconomics books out there: Malcolm Gladwell - Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers Tim Harford - The Undercover Economist Nassim Taleb - The Black Swan I enjoyed the Steve Jobs book too, I liked the fact that he believed in what he was working on (no matter how crazy or disruptive) and saw so much beauty in perfection. There's a lot we can learn from his persistence and attitude towards persevering in the face of failure. And for entertainment, I like profound books: The Alchemist, The Little Prince

The one I've enjoyed the most, was probably "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman" but additionally read a couple that kept being mentioned on here: * A Random Walk Down Wall Street * Predictably Irrational * Black Swan * Blink and enjoyed those too. I've also read "How To Make Friends and Influence People" and started "Lords of Finance" but never finished.

I am also reading Fooled by Randomness right now, enjoying it a lot. Black Swan was good. I didn't like outliers very much. Tipping Point and Blink were more interesting to me.

On my desk: Getting Real (37Signals), Hardball (Chris Mathews), Prioritizing Web Usability (Jakob Nielsen) Nearby shelf: The Design of Everyday Things, Maverick, Founders at work, A Brief History of Time, A Pattern Language, Peopleware, Made to stick, Web Standards Solutions, Designing Interactions, The Pragmatic Programmer, The Mythical Man-Month, Oh, the Places You'll Go! Other good reads: Blink, Tipping Point, Long Tail, Freakonomics

- Tipping point (creates a urgency feeling) - Built to last (tips and best practices) - Blink (helps not to waste ideas, shows how your first impressions/thoughts could be useful) - Phylosophy Books (Republic and Politics) - you can understand and have good insights about this social networking and community fever moment. Anything you could read regarding usability, interfaces and scalability would help a lot when dealing with low money web2 related startups. To know about extreme programming would be very good.

About 14 months ago, I had little knowledge of how to execute a startup. In particular, I wasn't familiar with any online marketing tactics. The following books helped me a lot in that respective, and more: 1. Positioning, 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing/Branding, Focus, Marketing Warfare 2. Purple Cow, All Marketers are Liars, Permission Marketing (I didn't like "The Big Moo", "Free prize inside" or "Small is the new Big"). 3. Founters At Work 4. Wikinomics, Wisdom of Crowds, The Tipping Point (Blink! was alright). I am looking forward to reading "The Long Tail" and "The starfish and the spider"...has anyone read them yet? 6. Why We Buy 7. Hackers and Painters 8. The E-Myth revisited 9. The Art of the Start 10. On War, The Art of War by Machiavelli and Sun Tzu (not exactly for startups, but definitely useful) 11. Crossing the Chasm