The best entrepreneurs balance brilliant business ideas with a rigorous commitment to serving their customers' needs. If you read nothing else on entrepreneurship and startups, read these 10 articles by experts in the field. We've combed through hundreds of articles in the Harvard Business Review archive and selected the most important ones to help you build your company for enduring success. Leading experts and practitioners such as Clayton Christensen, Marc Andreessen, and Reid Hoffman provide the insights and advice that will inspire you to: Understand what makes entrepreneurial leaders tick Know what matters in a great business plan Adopt lean startup practices such as business model experimentation Be prepared for the race for scale in Silicon Valley Better understand the world of venture capital--and know what you'll get along with VC funding Take an alternative approach to entrepreneurship: buy an existing business and run it as CEO This collection of articles includes "Hiring an Entrepreneurial Leader," by Timothy Butler; "How to Write a Great Business Plan," by William A. Sahlman; "Why the Lean Start-Up Changes Everything," by Steve Blank; "The President of SRI Ventures on Bringing Siri to Life," by Norman Winarsky; "In Search of the Next Big Thing," an interview with Marc Andreessen by Adi Ignatius; "Six Myths About Venture Capitalists," by Diane Mulcahy; "Chobani's Founder on Growing a Start-Up Without Outside Investors," by Hamdi Ulukaya; "Network Effects Aren’t Enough," by Andrei Hagiu and Simon Rothman; "Blitzscaling," an interview with Reid Hoffman by Tim Sullivan; "Buying Your Way into Entrepreneurship," by Richard S. Ruback and Royce Yudkoff; and "The Founder's Dilemma," by Noam Wasserman.

The one primer you need to develop your entrepreneurial skills. Whether you're imagining your new business to be the next big thing in Silicon Valley, a pivotal B2B provider, or an anchor in your local community, the HBR Entrepreneur's Handbook is your essential resource for getting your company off the ground. Starting an independent new business is rife with both opportunity and risk. And as an entrepreneur, you're the one in charge: your actions can make or break your business. You need to know the tried-and-true fundamentals--from writing a business plan to getting your first loan. You also need to know the latest thinking on how to create an irresistible pitch deck, mitigate risk through experimentation, and develop unique opportunities through business model innovation. The HBR Entrepreneur's Handbook addresses these challenges and more with practical advice and wisdom from Harvard Business Review's archive. Keep this comprehensive guide with you throughout your startup's life--and increase your business's odds for success. In the HBR Entrepreneur's Handbook you'll find: Step-by-step guidance through the entrepreneurial process Concise explanations of the latest research and thinking on entrepreneurship from Harvard Business Review contributors such as Marc Andreessen and Reid Hoffman Time-honed best practices Stories of real companies, from Airbnb to eBay You'll learn: Which skills and characteristics make for the best entrepreneurs How to gauge potential opportunities The basics of business models and competitive strategy How to test your assumptions--before you build a whole business How to select the right legal structure for your company How to navigate funding options, from venture capital and angel investors to accelerators and crowdfunding How to develop sales and marketing programs for your venture What entrepreneurial leaders must do to build culture and set direction as the business keeps growing HBR Handbooks provide ambitious professionals with the frameworks, advice, and tools they need to excel in their careers. With step-by-step guidance, time-honed best practices, real-life stories, and concise explanations of research published in Harvard Business Review, each comprehensive volume helps you to stand out from the pack--whatever your role.

Most startups fail. But many of those failures are preventable. The Lean Startup is a new approach being adopted across the globe, changing the way companies are built and new products are launched. Eric Ries defines a startup as an organization dedicated to creating something new under conditions of extreme uncertainty. This is just as true for one person in a garage or a group of seasoned professionals in a Fortune 500 boardroom. What they have in common is a mission to penetrate that fog of uncertainty to discover a successful path to a sustainable business. The Lean Startup approach fosters companies that are both more capital efficient and that leverage human creativity more effectively. Inspired by lessons from lean manufacturing, it relies on “validated learning,” rapid scientific experimentation, as well as a number of counter-intuitive practices that shorten product development cycles, measure actual progress without resorting to vanity metrics, and learn what customers really want. It enables a company to shift directions with agility, altering plans inch by inch, minute by minute. Rather than wasting time creating elaborate business plans, The Lean Startup offers entrepreneurs—in companies of all sizes—a way to test their vision continuously, to adapt and adjust before it’s too late. Ries provides a scientific approach to creating and managing successful startups in a age when companies need to innovate more than ever.

Rethink how your organization creates, delivers, and captures value--or risk becoming irrelevant. If you read nothing else on business model innovation, read these 10 articles. We've combed through hundreds of Harvard Business Review articles and selected the most important ones to help you reach new customers and stay ahead of your competitors by reinventing your business model. This book will inspire you to: Assess whether your core business model is going strong or running out of gas Fend off free and discount entrants to your market Reinvigorate growth by adding a second business model Adopt the practices of lean startups Develop a platform around your key products Make business model innovation an ongoing discipline within your organization This collection of articles includes "Why Business Models Matter," by Joan Magretta; "Reinventing Your Business Model," by Mark W. Johnson, Clayton M. Christensen, and Henning Kagermann; "When Your Business Model Is in Trouble," an interview with Rita Gunther McGrath by Sarah Cliffe; "Four Paths to Business Model Innovation," by Karan Girotra and Serguei Netessine; "The Transformative Business Model," by Stelios Kavadias, Kostas Ladas, and Christoph Loch; "Competing Against Free," by David J. Bryce, Jeffrey H. Dyer, and Nile W. Hatch; "Why the Lean Start-Up Changes Everything," by Steve Blank; "Finding the Platform in Your Product," by Andrei Hagiu and Elizabeth J. Altman; "Pipelines, Platforms, and the New Rules of Strategy," by Marshall W. Van Alstyne, Geoffrey G. Parker, and Sangeet Paul Choudary; "When One Business Model Isn't Enough," by Ramon Casadesus-Masanell and Jorge Tarzijan; and "Reaching the Rich World's Poorest Consumers," by Muhammad Yunus, Frederic Dalsace, David Menasce, and Benedicte Faivre-Tavignot. HBR's 10 Must Reads paperback series is the definitive collection of books for new and experienced leaders alike. Leaders looking for the inspiration that big ideas provide, both to accelerate their own growth and that of their companies, should look no further. HBR's 10 Must Reads series focuses on the core topics that every ambitious manager needs to know: leadership, strategy, change, managing people, and managing yourself. Harvard Business Review has sorted through hundreds of articles and selected only the most essential reading on each topic. Each title includes timeless advice that will be relevant regardless of an ever‐changing business environment.

Super Founders uses a data-driven approach to understand what really differentiates billion-dollar startups from the rest—revealing that nearly everything we thought was true about them is false! Ali Tamaseb has spent thousands of hours manually amassing what may be the largest dataset ever collected on startups, comparing billion-dollar startups with those that failed to become one—30,000 data points on nearly every factor: number of competitors, market size, the founder’s age, his or her university’s ranking, quality of investors, fundraising time, and many, many more. And what he found looked far different than expected. Just to mention a few: Most unicorn founders had no industry experience; There's no disadvantage to being a solo founder or to being a non-technical CEO; Less than 15% went through any kind of accelerator program; Over half had strong competitors when starting--being first to market with an idea does not actually matter. You will also hear the stories of the early days of billion-dollar startups first-hand. The book includes exclusive interviews with the founders/investors of Zoom, Instacart, PayPal, Nest, Github, Flatiron Health, Kite Pharma, Facebook, Stripe, Airbnb, YouTube, LinkedIn, Lyft, DoorDash, Coinbase, and Square, venture capital investors like Elad Gil, Peter Thiel, Alfred Lin from Sequoia Capital and Keith Rabois of Founders Fund, as well as previously untold stories about the early days of ByteDance (TikTok), WhatsApp, Dropbox, Discord, DiDi, Flipkart, Instagram, Careem, Peloton, and SpaceX. Packed with counterintuitive insights and inside stories from people who have built massively successful companies, Super Founders is a paradigm-shifting and actionable guide for entrepreneurs, investors, and anyone interested in what makes a startup successful.

Learn to be a better negotiator--and achieve the outcomes you want. If you read nothing else on how to negotiate successfully, read these 10 articles. We've combed through hundreds of Harvard Business Review articles and selected the most important ones to help you avoid common mistakes, find hidden opportunities, and win the best deals possible. This book will inspire you to: Control the negotiation before you enter the room Persuade others to do what you want--for their own reasons Manage emotions on both sides of the table Understand the rules of negotiating across cultures Set the stage for a healthy relationship long after the ink has dried Identify what you can live with and when to walk away This collection of articles includes: "Six Habits of Merely Effective Negotiators" by James K. Sebenius; "Control the Negotiation Before It Begins" by Deepak Malhotra; "Emotion and the Art of Negotiation" by Alison Wood Brooks; "Breakthrough Bargaining" by Deborah M. Kolb and Judith Williams; "15 Rules for Negotiating a Job Offer" by Deepak Malhotra; "Getting to Si, Ja, Oui, Hai, and Da" by Erin Meyer; "Negotiating Without a Net: A Conversation with the NYPD's Dominick J. Misino" by Diane L. Coutu; "Deal Making 2.0: A Guide to Complex Negotiations" by David A. Lax and James K. Sebenius; "How to Make the Other Side Play Fair" by Max H. Bazerman and Daniel Kahneman; "Getting Past Yes: Negotiating as if Implementation Mattered" by Danny Ertel; "When to Walk Away from a Deal" by Geoffrey Cullinan, Jean-Marc Le Roux, and Rolf-Magnus Weddigen.