High Growth Handbook
Well-known technology executive and angel investor Elad Gil has worked with high growth tech companies like Airbnb, Twitter, Google, Instacart, Coinbase, Stripe, and Square as they've grown from small companies into global brands. Across all of these break-out companies, a set of common patterns has evolved into a repeatable playbook that Gil has codified in High Growth Handbook.
Stats for nerds
12recommend
25mentions
22people
2018–2024years
52% recommend40% neutral8% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- A lot of them have. Which field are we talking about? It would take me a while to list all the books and courses.
The best are religious (even the ones you don't follow, nobody ever RTFMs). But the best agnostic one I'd pick now would be High Growth Handbook; lots of advice from people who have made very expensive mistakes from people who play at the top of the game for a few decades. Lots of the advice is not always true, but having such a toolkit is invaluable. Otherwise we make the same mistakes others have made 20 years ago on the other side of the world.
I dare say the difference in skill is not from experience, but from learning from other people's experiences. And the best books need to be read multiple times. Sometimes with another person who can grok the real meaning.
- The startup playbook. All the basics: https://playbook.samaltman.com/
The Startup Owner's Manual: https://www.amazon.com/Startup-Owners-Manual-Step-Step/dp/09...
Nobody seems to recommend this because nobody has finished reading it, but it's meant to be acted on, not finished. There are literally checklists. It's also hard to get a soft copy, but th soft copies are useful for printing out the checklists. Paul Graham has changed the definition of a startup, but I still love the one from here - the goal of a startup is to have a scalable and repeatable business model.
Startup=Growth, by Paul Graham https://paulgraham.com/growth.html
I'd recommend the whole site, and many do. But start here. Many don't understand that startups are about growing assets, not revenue. And exponential is a funny word for "very slow". If you wanted to grow to a million dollars, do anything but a startup and don't raise VC money. But this shows how the math works.
High Growth Handbook: https://growth.eladgil.com/
And this is what you read after you get past 10 employees. Who to hire next, how to manage. There are tons of people who talk about how to get Product Market Fit, but few who talk about how to build an engine to turn PMF to money. There's tons of podcasts but consider this book a collection of the best ones.
- Most posts offer the obvious suggestions (The Mom Test, High Growth Handbook, The Personal MBA, The Power Law, Hard Thing about Hard Thing, Will It Fly, etc), so I'll focus on some non-obvious suggestions.
For tactical advice, I find talks/podcasts and mastermind groups more useful than books. My favorite podcast (by far) is Rob Walling's Startups for the Rest of Us, which is oriented towards building a capital-efficient bootstrapped business. The archive is full of extremely valuable tactical advice.
The books I've found most helpful on my entrepreneurship journey are about mental health, emotional intelligence, and relationships of all kinds. Sharing a few that have had a profound impact, since they helped me metabolize and understand what drove me to become a founder in the first place.
1. The Self-Compassion Skills Workbook by Tim Desmond
2. Path of Compassion by Thich Nhat Hanh
3. The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read, Philippa Perry
4. Burnout, Emily Nagoski
5. Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents, Lindsay C. Gibson
6. Self-Compassion, Dr. Kristin Neff
7. How to Keep House While Drowning, KC Davis
8. Deploy Empathy, Michele Hansen
9. The Body Keeps the Score, Bessel A. Van der Kolk
10. Atlas of the Heart, Brene Brown
11. What Happened to You? Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing by Bruce D. Perry and Oprah Winfrey
- A few books that are relevant to your situation:
My site has notes for these books and more: https://www.briansnotes.io/books/* High Growth Handbook - covering the operations and biz side * The DevOps Handbook - developer effectiveness in larger orgs with examples * Monolith to Microservices - how to execute the transition * Team Topologies - how to organize teams for effectiveness - The last book on the list (The Advantage, by Patrick Lencioni) is indeed gold. I really like 'The Ideal Team Player', too, as well as his other books.
Other books with immediately-actionable advice for improving company processes, systems and culture:
- The Great CEO Within, by Matt Mochary
- High Output Management, by Andy Grove
- High Growth Handbook, by Elad Gil
- I would recommend that you read a book a week, every week, for the rest of your life. :)
Just start with the ones in the article and Amazon/Kindle will get good at recommending books.
Here's some books recently read on my Kindle:
- No Rules Rules - Never Split The Difference - The Manager's Path - The Almanack of Naval Ravikant - Ultralearning - The Hard Thing About Hard Things - What You Do is Who You Are - User Story Mapping - Inspired - The Lean Product Playbook - Competing Against Luck - Domain Driven Design - Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture - Data-Driven Marketing - Designing Data-Intensive Applications - Monetizing Innovation - Super Thinking - The Great Mental Models - Nonviolent Communication - High Growth Handbook - Powerful - Trillion Dollar Coach
