Reading list

The vocabulary every founder now uses — pivot, MVP, validated learning. Worth reading because most people quote it second-hand without ever reading the actual book.

The discipline that became Customer Development, which became Lean Startup. Worth reading the original because Blank's argument is sharper than its derivatives.

Whether you agree with Thiel or not, he forces you to think about what makes a genuinely new venture rather than a marginal improvement. Worth disagreeing with carefully.

The book that turned 'disruption' from a vague metaphor into a specific institutional dynamic. Most people quote the conclusion without reading the supporting argument.

The book to read after you've absorbed Ries and Blank. Where the methodology stops applying and real judgment starts.

My MS&E colleague Kathy Eisenhardt's most accessible synthesis of her foundational research on strategy in dynamic environments. The argument that a handful of simple rules outperforms elaborate strategy in fast-moving markets is one of the most useful frameworks I've encountered for thinking about founder decision-making.

Two long-time Amazon executives on the PR-FAQ method — writing the press release and FAQ for a product before any code is written. A discipline that has migrated out of Amazon into how serious product organizations now decide what to build. Worth reading alongside Customer Development.

The book that set up the framing I still use when thinking about how AI changes the economic landscape for founders and workers. Brynjolfsson is a co-author on the Nature paper on the algorithmic financing of misinformation; this is the longer arc of the argument he's been making since well before generative AI made it urgent.

Wasserman's empirical synthesis of the choices founders make about co-founders, equity, control, and timing — and which ones predictably blow up the company. Built on a survey methodology that's a close cousin of the alumni studies I've run at MIT and Stanford, and the cleanest single text I recommend to students wrestling with the practical decisions of team formation before they've made them irreversible.

The book that gave the economics profession a usable framing for what AI actually is — a sharp drop in the price of prediction. Pre-dates the LLM moment by several years but ages better than most of what came after. I use the framework when thinking about how AI changes founder cognition, venture diligence, and which parts of the entrepreneurial workflow get automated next.

Isaacson's popular history of the computing pioneers — Babbage, Lovelace, Turing, the Bell Labs transistor group, the early personal-computer hobbyists, the web. Broad-stroke and readable; the right book to hand someone who wants the engineering-history arc in one volume. The implicit argument that innovation is always team-based and institutional, not solitary, dovetails with how I teach venture formation.

Jim Utterback's classic on dominant designs, technology life cycles, and how product and process innovation evolve through industry phases. Required reading at MIT Sloan when I was a doctoral student, and the book that established the empirical pattern most people now start with as their mental model for technology change. Part of the MIT Sloan intellectual lineage I inherited through Ed Roberts.

Eric von Hippel's argument that innovation increasingly comes from users — lead users, communities of practice, open-source and open-hardware producers — not just from corporate R&D labs. The foundational book in the user-innovation research program, and freely available from MIT Press. Part of the MIT Sloan intellectual lineage; pairs with Utterback's dominant-design framework as a structural counterpoint to the supplier-side view of innovation.

Cusumano, Gawer, and Yoffie's empirical synthesis of what works and what fails in two-sided platform businesses — drawing on the platform-strategy research program Gawer and Cusumano started in the early 2000s. The most relevant single text to my own platform-governance work with Wesley Koo (the SMJ 2021 and Org Science 2025 papers). Cusumano is part of the MIT Sloan intellectual lineage that goes back through Ed Roberts.

Brown and Eisenhardt's classic on how firms navigate the edge between rigid structure and unbounded improvisation in fast-moving markets — the foundational text for what later became the dynamic-capabilities research program. Kathy is my MS&E colleague and co-author on our 2017 SMJ paper on institutional intermediaries in emerging economies. Pairs naturally with Simple Rules above as the deeper-research version of the same set of ideas; the two books together cover most of what a founder needs to know about strategy when the ground keeps shifting underneath.

Why Silicon Valley beat Route 128. Foundational text for thinking about ecosystem dynamics. I assign chapters to almost every entrepreneurship class.

How returning Indian and Chinese immigrants reshaped the global geography of technology entrepreneurship. Anchor text for thinking about cross-border founder networks.

The foundational SPRIE volume on Silicon Valley as an innovation ecosystem — edited by William Miller (my longtime collaborator on the Stanford alumni economic-impact study) and colleagues at Stanford's Asia-Pacific Research Center. The closest thing to a textbook on what makes the Valley work institutionally.

My doctoral advisor's foundational study of MIT entrepreneurship. The methodology and many of the questions in my own research trace back to this book.

Why government efforts to engineer entrepreneurship usually fail. Required reading before designing any public entrepreneurship program.

The counterargument to Lerner: public funding is foundational to most 'private' innovation success stories. Worth reading both sides.

Historian's account of how Silicon Valley actually got built — the federal money, the universities, the institutional networks that the founder mythology airbrushes out. Pairs well with Saxenian and Miller on the institutional ecosystem side.

Miller's narrative history of how the semiconductor industry got concentrated in a few firms and a few fabs — and what that concentration now means as export controls and industrial policy are used to reshape it. Essential background for the export-controls and global-reallocation-of-venture-capital strand of my own research.

Mazzucato's sequel to The Entrepreneurial State, moving from 'public funding underwrites private innovation' to a concrete case for mission-oriented industrial policy. Reads best paired with Lerner's Boulevard of Broken Dreams as the opposite pole of the same conversation — what kind of state ambition actually produces innovation, and what kind just produces failed programs.

Acemoglu and Johnson on who actually captures the gains from technological progress, and what determines whether new technology raises broad living standards or just concentrates power. A useful corrective to the techno-optimist default — and a piece of the puzzle for thinking about industrial policy, platform design, and the institutional choices around AI.

Dan Wang on how China actually builds — the political economy of industrial scale-up, the relationship between the engineering state and the entrepreneurial sector, and what the U.S. still misunderstands about the speed and the trade-offs. Closest companion to the export-controls and battery-subsidies research I've been doing with PhD students.

Ed Roberts's career retrospective on the MIT Entrepreneurship Center he founded — what it took to build the academic infrastructure that produces founders, told by the person who did it for half a century. Ed was my doctoral advisor; almost every empirical method I use traces back to the alumni-survey approach he handed me as a PhD student. Reads as both institutional history and an underrated playbook for any university trying to build the same thing.

Lin's account of how TSMC and Taiwan's broader semiconductor ecosystem actually got built — written from inside the ecosystem rather than from a Western policy vantage. The natural complement to Chris Miller's Chip War: where Miller frames the geopolitics, Lin gives you the firm-level and institutional choices. Reads especially well alongside my ongoing work on Taiwan's deep-tech ventures through the ITRI–Stanford program.

Malone's history of Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard — not the company, the relationship and the management philosophy that produced the company. The closest thing to a long-form case study on how a founding partnership and a durable institutional culture actually compound. Pairs with The Silicon Valley Edge as the operator's view of the same Stanford / Silicon Valley story.

The book that maps entrepreneurship across civilizations — Mesopotamia, Neo-Babylon, the Islamic Middle East, China, Japan, Colonial India, and the medieval-to-modern West — with chapters by leading economic historians. The argument is that the institutional conditions for productive enterprise have varied enormously across time and place, and the question is always 'why here, why now,' never 'why entrepreneurship.' Useful long-arc context for almost any contemporary debate about innovation policy and the institutional layer.

Mowery and Rosenberg's argument that 20th-century American technological change was driven by the simultaneous rise of engineering and applied-science disciplines inside universities alongside corporate R&D labs and federal research investment — the institutional layer arriving as a system, not as a sequence of standalone breakthroughs. Reads as a long-form antecedent to the 2026 WEF essay I wrote on the institutional layer between state and market. Rosenberg taught at Stanford for decades; his economic history of technology is part of the institutional DNA of how we think about innovation here.

Gertner's history of Bell Labs is the definitive account of the institutional layer Mervin Kelly built to convert basic research into the transistor, the laser, information theory, and Unix. The single best long-form case study of the intermediary-institutions argument I made in the 2026 WEF essay — when the institutional layer is real, federal research dollars produce industries; when it isn't, the same dollars produce papers.

Ben Rich's memoir of running Lockheed Skunk Works after Kelly Johnson. Engineering-institution design at the limit — what it takes to maintain rapid prototyping inside a giant defense prime. Useful counterpoint to the long-horizon Bell Labs story (The Idea Factory above): both institutional designs work, both are deliberate, both compound on the specific question they were built to answer.

Nathan Rosenberg's foundational essays on what economists had previously ignored about technology — that technical change is endogenous, cumulative, and shaped by institutional arrangements rather than falling from the sky as exogenous shocks. The single most influential book in the economics of technology. Rosenberg taught at Stanford for decades; his work is part of the institutional DNA of how we think about innovation here, and pairs with Paths of Innovation above as the historical-economics companion to that book's empirical sweep across 20th-century American industries.

The actual working textbook for the Customer Development approach. What I assign for Customer Development modules in E145.

MIT's textbook approach to building a startup. Useful for students who want a step-by-step framework alongside the looser Lean Startup material.

The book I most often recommend to first-time-thinking-about-entrepreneurship undergraduates. Stanford colleague's clearest writing on creative confidence.

The textbook I teach from in E145. Tom Byers is the STVP co-founder and the steady hand behind two decades of Stanford entrepreneurship education — this book is the most complete classroom treatment of technology entrepreneurship as a discipline.

Savoia's framework for pretotyping — building cheap, fast fakes of a product to test whether people actually want it before committing to a real prototype. The most underrated discipline I teach. The methodology shows up across the customer-development literature but Savoia is where you find the cleanest version of it.

The text I'm teaching from in the Stanford BOSP Shenzhen Global Seminar this summer. Juan Du, an architect and urban historian who lived and worked in Shenzhen for years, complicates the standard 'fishing village to megacity in 40 years' narrative — Shenzhen's pre-1980 villages, networks, and informal-economy infrastructure shaped what the Special Economic Zone could become. The single best book for understanding the institutional and physical layers that made Shenzhen's innovation ecosystem possible, beyond the policy-only story most observers tell.

How to talk to customers without asking leading questions that produce comforting lies. Short, practical, and quietly became required reading in serious entrepreneurship classes. I assign it before any student goes out to do customer interviews.

Behavioral economics canon. The framing of System 1 vs System 2 thinking shows up in how I think about founder decision-making and angel investing.

Why how you think about your own ability matters as much as the ability itself. Stanford colleague; the underlying research is more careful than the popularization suggests.

Duckworth's argument that long-term perseverance matters more than raw talent. I keep returning to it because the empirical work is sharper than the TED-talk version implies.

My MS&E colleague Bob Sutton on what makes a good idea actually spread inside organizations and ecosystems — the gap between knowing what works and getting it adopted at scale. Closely connected to the questions I keep returning to about why entrepreneurship education works in some places and not others.

Raymond's essays on open-source as an organizational form — written in the late 1990s but still the clearest account of why decentralized, peer-to-peer production beats top-down planning in certain information environments. I keep returning to it when thinking about platform-mediated entrepreneurship and how distributed networks of founders can outperform more tightly coordinated firms.

Fred Turner's intellectual history of how Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Catalog, the WELL, and the late-1960s counterculture became, by the 1990s, the cybernetic-libertarian ethos of Silicon Valley. The book I keep returning to — and citing in talks — when explaining why Silicon Valley reads the institutional environment around technology entrepreneurship the way it does, and what that reading misses. Pairs with Margaret O'Mara's The Code as the academic-grade history of how the Valley actually got built.

Kidder's Pulitzer-winning account of the Data General team building the Eclipse MV/8000 minicomputer. The closest thing to canon for what engineering team formation actually feels like at high stakes — the schedules, the moral economies of 'signing up,' the way a project recruits its own particular kind of person. I assign chapters when teaching team formation.

The most carefully executed early study of generative AI's effect on real workers — a field experiment showing 14% average productivity gains, with the largest effects on the least experienced workers. Brynjolfsson is my co-author on the Nature paper, and this is the work I now point to when founders ask me what the evidence actually says about AI in their teams.

Tina's latest, structured around a sailing metaphor — your 'crew' is the network of relationships that produce most lucky breaks, your 'sail' is the deliberate action that catches the wind when it blows. Drawn from twenty-five years teaching entrepreneurship at Stanford and stories from the Knight–Hennessy scholars. The natural follow-on to What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20 (already on this list). Tina is my STVP colleague and holds the NAE Gordon Prize for engineering education — when she writes about how engineers learn to create their own opportunities, it lands.