The most successful entrepreneurs in the world share an everyday habit. They read obsessively, and the books they credit with shaping their thinking rarely come from a business school syllabus. Across interviews, surveys, and recommendation lists, the duplicate titles keep appearing.
These books changed how founders think about risk, strategy, money, and resilience. Here are the ten books that have built more entrepreneurs than any MBA program ever has.
1. The Lean Startup by Eric Ries
Eric Ries changed the way an entire generation of founders approached building companies. His framework of build, measure, and learn became the default operating system inside startup accelerators like Y Combinator and Techstars.
Before this book, the standard approach was to write a detailed plan, raise money, and hope for the best. Ries replaced that model with rapid experimentation and honest customer feedback. Startup programs around the world now teach his methods as part of their foundational curriculum.
2. Zero to One by Peter Thiel
Peter Thiel’s book became an instant classic among founders and investors. Elon Musk praised it for showing how breakthrough companies are built. Marc Andreessen called it the first book any aspiring entrepreneur must read.
The core argument is that the most valuable businesses create something entirely new rather than copying what already exists. Thiel pushes founders to ask what important truth they agree with that very few people do. That single question has launched countless startups that refused to compete in crowded markets.
3. The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss
Tim Ferriss didn’t just write a business book. He launched an entire movement. The 4-Hour Workweek showed people that entrepreneurship didn’t have to mean grinding for decades toward a distant retirement.
In surveys of over a thousand entrepreneurs conducted by Starter Story, this book consistently ranked among the most influential titles founders cited. It resonated especially with first-time entrepreneurs who needed permission to think differently about what a successful business could look like.
4. The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton Christensen
Clayton Christensen’s concept of disruptive innovation became one of the most widely used frameworks in business strategy. Jeff Bezos considered it essential reading for his senior executives at Amazon as the company mapped out its trajectory.
The book explains why great companies fail not because they make mistakes, but because they do everything right for their current customers and miss the threats coming from below. For entrepreneurs, it provides a roadmap for how small startups can topple industry giants.
5. Good to Great by Jim Collins
Jim Collins spent years researching what separates truly exceptional companies from merely good ones. Good to Great introduced concepts like Level 5 Leadership, the Hedgehog Concept, and the Flywheel effect that became standard vocabulary in boardrooms and pitch decks alike.
Jeff Bezos has called it his favorite business book. The reason it resonates so profoundly with entrepreneurs is that Collins grounded every insight in rigorous research rather than opinion. Greatness comes from disciplined people, disciplined thought, and disciplined action sustained over time.
6. Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill
Initially published in 1937, Think and Grow Rich is essentially the origin of the modern entrepreneurial mindset genre. Napoleon Hill studied the habits and philosophies of the wealthiest people of his era and distilled their approaches into principles centered on desire, faith, and persistence.
The book has sold tens of millions of copies and continues to appear on entrepreneur recommendation lists nearly nine decades later. For many founders, especially those from middle-class backgrounds, this was the first book to challenge them to think of wealth as something they could deliberately create.
7. The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber
Michael Gerber’s insight was brutally simple. Most small business owners aren’t entrepreneurs at all. They are technicians, operators, and managers who started a business doing what they already knew how to do and ended up trapped by the very thing they created.
The E-Myth Revisited taught founders to think of their businesses as systems that could run without them. This shift in perspective has helped countless entrepreneurs scale beyond themselves. It solves the problem that kills most small companies before they ever reach their potential.
8. How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie
Dale Carnegie published this book in 1936, and it has never gone out of print. It consistently appears in entrepreneur surveys because it addresses the skill that matters most and is taught least: how to deal with people.
No MBA program can thoroughly teach someone how to make others feel heard or how to persuade without manipulation. Carnegie’s principles are deceptively simple, but founders who internalize them tend to build stronger teams, close more deals, and create lasting partnerships.
9. The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz
Ben Horowitz wrote the book most business authors are afraid to write. Instead of offering tidy frameworks, he described what it actually feels like to run a company when everything is falling apart. He wrote about laying off friends, managing crises, and making decisions when there are no good options.
It became essential reading in Silicon Valley because it validated what every founder secretly felt but rarely heard anyone say out loud. Building a company is brutally hard, and no amount of strategy can replace the mental toughness required to survive the worst days.
10. Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki
Robert Kiyosaki’s book is often the first exposure people have to the idea that building assets is fundamentally different from earning a paycheck. Rich Dad Poor Dad contrasts two mindsets: one that trades time for money, and another that creates systems and investments that generate income independently.
While academics sometimes criticize the book for oversimplifying financial concepts, its impact on aspiring entrepreneurs is undeniable. It consistently appears in surveys as the gateway book that planted the seed of entrepreneurial thinking before founders ever launched their first venture.
Conclusion
The pattern across these ten books is striking. None of them is an MBA textbook. They focus on mindset, systems thinking, contrarian strategy, and the psychological resilience needed to build something from nothing.
An MBA can teach financial modeling and case study analysis. But the entrepreneurs who changed the world learned their most important lessons from books that challenged conventional wisdom and forced them to see business through an entirely different lens. If you want to think like a founder, start with this reading list.