Best Books Roundups
The Best Books For
Entrepreneurs Of
The Past Decade
From more than 800 books honored across a decade of the Non-Obvious Book Awards, these are the ones we most recommend to founders and builders: on starting up, raising money, negotiating, staying small on purpose, and surviving the messy middle.
*This list does not include books published in 2026, which are currently under review as part of our 2026 awards program.
Pivot or Die
by Gary Shapiro
Consumer Technology Association CEO Gary Shapiro has watched thousands of companies rise and fall through CES: here he distills why the ability to pivot is the defining survival skill of any venture.
I Hope You Fail
by Pinky Cole
Slutty Vegan founder Pinky Cole flips every failure in her improbable rise into fuel: a raw, energizing playbook for entrepreneurs who will inevitably hit the wall.
The Power Law
by Sebastian Mallaby
Sebastian Mallaby’s definitive history of venture capital: how a handful of believers in outlier bets built the machine that finances nearly every startup dream.
The Founders
by Jimmy Soni
Jimmy Soni’s deeply reported story of the PayPal mafia, from Musk and Thiel to Levchin, and the improbable beginnings of the network that shaped two decades of tech.
Backable
by Suneel Gupta
Suneel Gupta went from serial rejection to raising millions, and reverse-engineered why: people don’t back ideas, they back people who make them believe. A founder’s guide to being backable.
Company of One
by Paul Jarvis
Paul Jarvis makes the liberating case that staying small is a strategy, not a failure: essential reading for every bootstrapper and solo founder.
Loonshots
by Safi Bahcall
Physicist-entrepreneur Safi Bahcall explains why organizations kill their wildest ideas, and the structures that let “loonshots” survive long enough to change the world.
The Messy Middle
by Scott Belsky
Behance founder Scott Belsky maps the long, volatile stretch between starting and finishing that nobody talks about, and how to endure the lows and optimize the highs.
Lost and Founder
by Rand Fishkin
Moz founder Rand Fishkin’s painfully honest field guide to startups: the anti-hype book every founder should read before raising a dollar.
Entrepreneurial You
by Dorie Clark
Dorie Clark’s practical blueprint for building multiple income streams around your expertise: the book that launched a thousand portfolio careers.
Originals
by Adam Grant
Adam Grant on how non-conformists move the world: when to trust your instincts, how to champion new ideas, and why originality can be cultivated.
Never Split the Difference
by Chris Voss
Former FBI lead hostage negotiator Chris Voss brings life-or-death negotiation tactics to business: arguably the most useful negotiation book ever written.
Hooked
by Nir Eyal
Nir Eyal’s four-step model for building habit-forming products: the framework behind a generation of product design.
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