Entrepreneurship

November is National Entrepreneurship Month!  Here are ten books for those starting their own business, or thinking about it.

Anything You Want: 40 Lessons for a New Kind of Entrepreneur by Derek Sivers - Best known for creating CD Baby, the most popular music site for independent artists, founder Derek Sivers chronicles his "accidental" success and failures into this concise and inspiring book on how to create a multimillion-dollar company by following your passion. Sivers details his journey and the lessons learned along the way of creating and building a business close to his heart. In 1997, Sivers was a musician who taught himself to code a Buy Now button onto his band's website. Shortly thereafter he began selling his friends' CDs on his website. As CD Baby grew, Sivers faced numerous obstacles on his way to success. Within six years he had been publicly criticized by Steve Jobs and had to pay his father $3.3 million to buy back 90 percent of his company, but he had also built a company of more than 50 employees and had profited $10 million. Anything You Want is must reading for every person who is an entrepreneur, wants to be one, wants to understand one, or cares even a little about what it means to be human.

Boss Up!: This Ain't Your Mama's Business Book by Lindsay Teague Moreno - Boss Up! will help you put your business on the map and the ideas you've previously only dreamed about into the marketplace. It will help you overcome your fears and guilt to find a fulfillment that changes you and your families for the better. And it will help you break free of the hard and boring and allow you to have fun along the way.
In Boss Up! Lindsay helps you gain the confidence to know that having ambition doesn't make you a bad mother or wife. That it's okay to have a desire for something more than endless sippy cups, clean-ups, Band-Aids, and groundings. That no matter your education or experience, you can tap into your passions and create businesses that give you increased flexibility, fulfillment, and financial security.
And Lindsay doesn't just do this through commiserating but, instead, through giving you the tools for change. Using the lessons she learned on her own path to success, Lindsay shares real, solid business principles with ten distinct success philosophies that you will encounter on the journey to entrepreneurship, such as:
Think Long Term
Be Unapologetically Yourself
Use the Unsales Tactic
Understand Your Why
and many more
Stay-at-home mom turned multimillion-dollar-producing business owner Lindsay Teague Moreno doesn't just have a passion for entrepreneurship. She has a deep passion for helping women of all walks of life gain the confidence and skills to tap into their ambition and achieve success in their own business endeavors.

Crushing It!: How Great Entrepreneurs Build Their Business and Influence -- And How You Can, Too by Gary Vaynerchuk - In his 2009 book Crush It, Gary Vaynerchuk insisted that a vibrant personal brand was crucial to entrepreneurial success. Now Gary explains why that's even more true today, offering his perspective on what has changed in the last nine years and what principles remain timeless. He also shares stories from other entrepreneurs who have grown wealthier -- and not just financially -- than they ever imagined possible by following Crush It principles. The secret to their success (and Gary's) has everything to do with their understanding of the social media platforms and their willingness to do whatever it took to make these tools work to their utmost potential. Gary dissects every current major social media platform so that anyone, from a plumber to a professional ice skater, will know exactly how to amplify his or her personal brand on each. He offers both theoretical and tactical advice on how to become the biggest thing on old standbys like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest, and Snapchat; podcast platforms like Spotify, Soundcloud, iHeartRadio, and iTunes; and other emerging platforms such as Musical.ly. For those with more experience, Crushing It! illuminates some little-known nuances and provides innovative tips and clever tweaks proven to enhance more common tried-and-true strategies. Crushing It! is a guide to building your own path to professional and financial success and a blueprint to living life on your own terms.

Finish Big: How Great Entrepreneurs Exit Their Companies on Top by Bo Burlingham - The bestselling author of Small Giants returns with an original guide to exiting your company successfully and gracefully Bo Burlingham's book Small Giants became an instant classic for its original take on a common business problem-how to handle the pressure to grow. It used deeply researched entrepreneurship stories to provide fresh insight into what really makes a great small business. Now Burlingham returns with a look at an even more common problem-how to leave your company gracefully. He interviewed dozens of owners who have sold or bequeathed their companies and distilled nine key lessons for success. For example, Ray Pagano turned down an initial offer for his twenty-eight-year-old company that manufactured housings for security cameras in favor of making the business more efficient and profitable. The effort paid off when he sold his newly improved company at the bottom of a recession for four times the original offer. Through stories like Pagano's, Burlingham offers an inspirational and enlightening guide through one of the most stressful processes every business owner must face.

The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers by Ben Horowitz - Ben Horowitz, cofounder of Andreessen Horowitz and one of Silicon Valley's most respected and experienced entrepreneurs, offers essential advice on building and running a startup--practical wisdom for managing the toughest problems business school doesn't cover, based on his popular ben's blog.
While many people talk about how great it is to start a business, very few are honest about how difficult it is to run one. Ben Horowitz analyzes the problems that confront leaders every day, sharing the insights he's gained developing, managing, selling, buying, investing in, and supervising technology companies. A lifelong rap fanatic, he amplifies business lessons with lyrics from his favorite songs, telling it straight about everything from firing friends to poaching competitors, cultivating and sustaining a CEO mentality to knowing the right time to cash in.
Filled with his trademark humor and straight talk, The Hard Thing About Hard Things is invaluable for veteran entrepreneurs as well as those aspiring to their own new ventures, drawing from Horowitz's personal and often humbling experiences.

Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries by Safi Bahcall - Loonshots is a brilliant and wonderfully entertaining book, an unstoppable read, full of surprises and rich with insight into how people create and nurture things that change the world. It's also an important book. Bahcall, a physicist and biotech entrepreneur, is unfolding the secrets behind successes everywhere.' --Richard Preston, author of The Hot Zone and The Wild Trees What do James Bond and Lipitor have in common? Why do traffic jams appear out of nowhere on highways? How did the Allies win the secret war against the Nazis? Why does the world speak English? What do the answers to these questions tell us about building more innovative teams? Loonshots describes a new way to think about innovation: why a company's structure matters more than its culture. Safi Bahcall, a physicist and entrepreneur, applies the science of phase transitions to the behavior of teams. The Nobel laureate Phil Anderson once captured the essence of phase transitions with the phrase "more is different." The collective behaviors of liquids and solids are more than the sum of their parts. They are something new: phases of matter. The same molecules can behave in very different ways. Bahcall explains why the collective behaviors of people in teams and companies are something new: phases of organization. Small changes in structure can transform teams from nurturing breakthroughs to inhibiting them, just like small changes in temperature can transform flowing water to rigid ice. Understanding those phases can help us design more innovative teams. Loonshots describes the science, draws on examples from Pan Am to Pixar, and offers rules that creatives, entrepreneurs, and managers can use to innovate faster and better.

Self Made: Becoming Empowered, Self-Reliant, and Rich in Every Way by Nely Galan with Guy Garcia - What does it mean to be self-made? It's not just about having money, but financial empowerment is where it begins. It means getting out of survival mode, where you are one problem away from catastrophe. It means changing your mindset from instant gratification to goal orientation. It means being able to sleep at night without worry. It means being rich in every way: rich in money, rich in family, rich in love, rich in time--abundant!
 For Nely Galan--entrepreneur, TV producer, and real estate mogul--helping women to become self-made is a movement and a mission. Galan pulls no punches. She is the straight-talking friend and mentor you've always wanted, and here she shares valuable, candid, no-nonsense lessons learned on her own path to becoming self-made ("There is no Prince Charming"; "Think like an immigrant"; "In your pain is your brand"; "Don't buy shoes, buy buildings!"). You'll read inspiring stories of women who started and grew businesses out of ingenuity, opportunity, and need. You'll find exercises to help you identify your goals and your strengths. You'll learn tips and tricks for saving money, making money, and finding "hidden money" that can help jump-start your self-made dreams.
 When you become self-made, the change in you inspires change in those around you, because one of the greatest rewards of a self-made life is seeing how the sparks from your personal revolution can light a fire in others. So come, join the Self-Made movement. The revolution starts inside of you!

She Means Business: Turn Your Ideas into Reality and Become a Wildly Successful Entrepreneur by Carrie Green - More and more women are starting to feel like there are so many opportunities out there to turn their ideas into a reality, build a successful business, and do what they love. The problem is that they don't really know how to go about it, and so they set off on their entrepreneurial journey and quickly feel out of their depth, overwhelmed, confused, and like they're crazy for even thinking that they could do it. The purpose of this book is to inspire and empower these women to take back control of their mind, their ideas, and businesses, and to provide strategies for them to make it happen. Female entrepreneur Carrie Green will teach you how to- - Learn powerful, but achievable techniques to help you move out of your own way and turn your ideas into a successful business. - Feel inspired, empowered, and fired up, ready to take action on making it happen. - Work on your business and implement important strategies to help you make it a success. This book is full of personal stories, tips, and exercises to inspire you and get you in to action. Honest, realistic and practical, She Means Business speaks to today's creative, ambitious and talented generation of female entrepreneurs, as well as those that wish to join their ranks by following their dreams.

The Startup Checklist: 25 Steps to a Scalable, High-Growth Business by David S. Rose - While most entrepreneurship books focus on strategy, this guide provides concrete steps to get your new business off to a strong start. You'll learn the ins and outs of startup execution, management, legal issues, practical processes throughout the launch and growth phases, and how to avoid critical missteps. Instead of simply referring you to experts, this discussion shows you exactly which experts you need, what exactly you need them to do, and which tools you will use to support them -- and you'll gain enough insight to ask smart questions that help you get your money's worth. If you're ready to do big things, this book has you covered from the first business card to the eventual exit. Over two thirds of startups are built on creaky foundations, and over two thirds of startup costs go directly toward cleaning up legal and practical problems caused by an incomplete or improper start. This book helps you sidestep the messy and expensive clean up process by giving you the specific actions you need to take right from the very beginning.

Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future by Peter Thiel with Blake Masters - If you want to build a better future, you must believe in secrets.
The great secret of our time is that there are still uncharted frontiers to explore and new inventions to create. In Zero to One, legendary entrepreneur and investor Peter Thiel shows how we can find singular ways to create those new things.
Thiel begins with the contrarian premise that we live in an age of technological stagnation, even if we're too distracted by shiny mobile devices to notice. Information technology has improved rapidly, but there is no reason why progress should be limited to computers or Silicon Valley. Progress can be achieved in any industry or area of business. It comes from the most important skill that every leader must master: learning to think for yourself.
Doing what someone else already knows how to do takes the world from 1 to n, adding more of something familiar. But when you do something new, you go from 0 to 1. The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won't make a search engine. Tomorrow's champions will not win by competing ruthlessly in today's marketplace. They will escape competition altogether, because their businesses will be unique.
Zero to One presents at once an optimistic view of the future of progress in America and a new way of thinking about innovation: it starts by learning to ask the questions that lead you to find value in unexpected places.