5 'Must Reads' for a tech entrepreneur

Do you know that 88 percent of world’s richest people read for at least 30 minutes a day (compared to just two percent of the general population)?

So if you wish to join the ranks, reading is invaluable. You might not replicate someone’s success by reading about his/her success story but one can surely learn some insightful and precious lessons. Books navigate us into new ways of thinking, help us push through the tough times, and teach us how to become successful business men and women.

Five must reads for any aspiring entrepreneur:

1. Choose Yourself, James Altucher

Altucher’s writes like an old friend and his self-depreciating style is raw, honest, and the kick in the pants every entrepreneur needs.A mind-boggling book, indeed.

“The only skills you need to be an entrepreneur are the ability to fail, to have ideas, to sell those ideas, to execute on them, and to be persistent so even as you fail you learn and move onto the next adventure,” reads a quote from the book.

2. Lean Startup, Eric Ries

Lean Startup is probably the most important book for any aspiring entrepreneur to read. Ries' philosophies are highly specific and sometimes too tailored to technology, such as his belief in pursuing a very rough MVP before anything else.

That strategy, while a great idea for most scalable startups, is not a fit for many other types of businesses. However, his underlying message of "fail lean, fail fast, scale once you hit" is the central mantra of many of the most successful growth companies of the past decade.

3. The Hard Thing About Hard Things, Ben Horowitz

Although Horowitz could be baffling at times- such as a whole chapter explaining the hardship of a bad IPO (how many founders, self-included, would kill to have an IPO - however poorly engineered!) the book makes a very key core central point: transformative success is very, very hard.

Great founding stories don't look like The Social Network: three scenes in a dorm room, followed by three California pool parties, and a skip jump to a $600 million lawsuit. It's a long road - one great founder is prepared for and deeply motivated to take.

4. Purple Cow by Seth Godin

Godin is one of the greatest entrepreneurial minds in the world. In Purple Cow, he advocates building something so amazing that people can’t ignore you. There are a lot of great lessons in this book—it’s definitely one you’ll be making notes on throughout.

“You must design a product that is remarkable enough to attract the early adopters – but is flexible enough and attractive enough that those adopters will have an easy time spreading the idea.”

5. Startupland, MikkelSvane

It's no secret that you have to have special skills, and a major opportunity, to make it big as a founder. But not all - in fact not most - great founders are birthed in Silicon Valley, or at Harvard.

That is the great lesson of Startupland: if they possess the skills, drive, and relentlessness, real people with families, lives, and responsibilities can make it big too. And, isn't that ultimately what entrepreneurship is about