entrepreneur Book Summaries

The Millionaire Fastlane is about getting wealthy and retiring in 10 years rather than 40 years. At first the title may sound unrealistic, but MJ DeMarco offers hard-earned business wisdom based on his success making millions of dollars after building a limousine booking website.

How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big is about the hilarious wisdom and many business failures of Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert. He shares pragmatic strategies for increasing our odds of success—by using systems over goals, building a talent stack and repeating (mysteriously powerful) affirmations.

The Everything Store is the story of Amazon and Jeff Bezos—one of the most successful and influential entrepreneurs today. Brad Stone explores how Amazon became the largest online retailer in the world, through a mix of customer obsession and ruthless competition.

Grinding It Out is about how McDonald's grew to be one of the biggest companies in the world. Ray Kroc did it through seizing the right opportunity, perfecting the fundamentals of the business, always emphasizing growth, and persisting until he found the successful strategy.

Contagious shows how entrepreneurs and marketers can make their content more viral and products more shareable. Jonah Berger simplified years of his research into six principles of contagiousness which are: social currency, triggers, emotion, public, practical value and stories.

The Lean Startup shows how to achieve business success by learning what customers want fast. Eric Ries explains how to launch a minimum viable product, why you should ignore vanity metrics, and how to use 'split-testing' to avoid wasting years of your life building a product nobody wants.

The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing was published in 1993. Some examples are outdated, but the laws are true as ever. The authors go against common sense which says products can win by being better. Instead, they say to be the leader, you must be first in a product category.