 A long time ago, a recruiter friend recommended to me the book The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age by Reid Hoffman, Ben Casnocha, and Chris Yeh, and I recently finally got around to reading it. I enjoyed Reid's other book The Startup of You, and this one was great too.
It proposed a different framework for the employer/employee relationship and used a military analogy of a "tour of duty" to represent a more balanced relationship and perspective, in which the employee can have a significant positive impact while also growing in their career. I liked the concrete advice in the book on how to structure and agree on the details of these tours, as well as other advice, such as nurturing corporate alumni networks. Below are my main notes and takeaways. This is a great book for any founder or manager.
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 Several fellow founders recommended to me the book The Mom Test: How to Talk to Customers & Learn if Your Business is a Good Idea When Everyone is Lying to You by Rob Fitzpatrick. It's all about how to run customer conversations the right way, and it really opened my eyes to many things I could improve and many pitfalls that are so easy to make. It also reminded me of some of the lessons in Dale Carnegie's classic book How to Win Friends and Influence People, such as asking questions about the other person and focusing on them instead of you/your ideas. I also loved the lessons about keeping conversations casual and serendipitous and finding secret learning opportunities.
i highly recommend it for any founder who needs to talk to customers and verify if what they're building is what people actually want or need. My main notes and takeaways on the book are below.  I just finished reading The Founder's Dilemmas: Anticipating and Avoiding the Pitfalls That Can Sink a Startup by Noam Wasserman. It was a helpful synopsis of many of the biggest decisions that founders need to make throughout the life of their startups. I enjoyed the various specific case study examples as well as the decision flow charts throughout the book. It was nice to hear what the stats/research say in terms of how various decisions affect various things and what the breakdown of results is, and I appreciated that it was evidence-based. At a high level, many of the dilemmas revolve around the rich vs. king tradeoff, and it was interesting to see how this affects decisions around founding, team (relationships, roles, rewards), investors, hires, and exits.
Below are my main notes and takeaways from the book. |
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