The Tipping Point

The Design of Everyday Things Ways of Seeing The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference

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

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

I enjoyed reading this book, but: (1) some of its arguments have been regularly refuted; for instance, "the power of context" and "broken windows". (2) I've never heard a story about any real business using the "lessons" of this book to accomplish a marketing objective.

Tipping Point

1) Tipping Point by Malcom Gladwell (very interesting ideas) 2) Innovator's Dilemma (for understanding what can work well) 3) Inside Intuit (for a great business story) 4) Eric Sink on the Business of Software

I'm trying to get some recommendations for books that might be helpful for a web startup. Personally, I have really found "The Tipping Point" by Malcolm Gladwell and "Getting Real" by the 37signals folks to be really helpful. I've read lots of great articles via news.YC, and I'm hoping you can all recommend some good offline reading as well.

My list, categorized: Business & Management 1. Innovator's Dilemma and Innovator's Solution by Clayton Christensen 2. Built to Last and Good to Great by Jim Collins. Built to Last is more applicable for startups. 3. Mythical Man Month by Fred Brooks. Anyone who has to manage a team of programmers and hasn't read this will fail utterly, unless they've already failed before (or been on a failing team). There's a lot that's counterintuitive about software project management. 4. Peter Drucker's work. Kinda long and repetitive, but some good insights. Marketing 1. All Marketers are Liars by Seth Godin. I like this better than Purple Cow, Guerilla Marketer's Handbook, and The Big Red Fez. Most of those have fairly obvious stuff. 2. The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell 3. Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore Technical 1. Building Scalable Websites by Cal Henderson 2. High Performance MySQL by Jeremy Zawodny 3. Pragmatic Programmer by...well, it's mentioned elsewhere here. There are lots of other technical books I like, but most of them aren't directly relevant to the startup I'm building

"The Long Tail" is definitely worth reading, although I sort of felt it was a topic that only deserved a long essay expanded into an entire book. Then again, I felt the same way about "The Tipping Point" - interesting idea and points, but it probably could have made just as big an impact in a book half the size.

- 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.

I really liked "The Tipping Point". Anything by Malcolm Gladwell I would have to recommend.

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