The Eight Books to Read Before You Start Your Business

6
New Venture Creation: Entrepreneurship for the 21st Century
By Jeffry A. Timmons

Now, after Drucker on management, comes the book about entrepreneurship: Jeffry Timmons's New Venture Creation. But it's dry, dry, dry, you say. Yes, and it's also full of information you don't need right now. (And it's printed on annoyingly shiny paper.) So why read it?

Because no one can teach you or anyone else how to be an entrepreneur, but a good teacher can describe the process. Timmons, who teaches courses at Harvard Business School and at Babson College, is a good teacher, and he draws on lots of experience, from both the classroom and the real world.

Actually, there are four good reasons for slogging through New Venture Creation now, even if you don't read every word of it or work through all the exercises. The first reason is that it's all here. Not the artistry of entrepreneurship, of course. That's where the entrepreneur comes in. But Timmons covers the tools and techniques. Even if you don't need all of them now, isn't it better to know they exist and that you can look them up when you do need them? Second, a casual cruise through the book is sobering: there are maelstroms you could fall into (see, for instance, on page 562, "IRS: Time Bomb for Personal Disaster") and really hard problems you're going to have to solve (see, for instance, "The Family Venture Team," on page 288). The third is that lots of people have already done what you propose to do--that is, start a company--and Timmons has collected many of their experiences here. Why should you stagger through the entrepreneurial process blind when others have already explored and mapped it, and why not at least be aware of what they've learned? The fourth reason for reading the book now is that once you're into the start-up process, you'll never take the time. "Couldn't someone have warned me about this?" you'll be asking yourself someday. Someone did, but if you haven't pushed yourself through Timmons's book, you may miss the message.

7
Startup: A Silicon Valley Adventure
By Jerry Kaplan

By chapter two, Jerry Kaplan had me hooked. I already knew the ending of Startup, just as I knew the ending of Titanic. It was finding out how, exactly, the ship and Kaplan's new venture both went down that held my attention. You want real-life entrepreneurial adventure? This is it, without the banal generalizations that most CEO authors attach to their particular experiences.

The magical "aha," the moment of conception, comes early in the book (on page 13, to be precise). Early in 1987, Kaplan, who had a Ph.D. in artificial intelligence, was working for Mitchell Kapor, founder and then CEO of Lotus Development Corp., on a program that eventually would become Lotus Agenda. Kapor and Kaplan were on a small private jet, and Kaplan saw Kapor typing stuff into a PC. Kaplan stared at him:

"You OK?" [Kapor] asked.

I was quiet for a moment, trying to get my bearings. Suddenly I knew what was bothering me. "Mitchell, suppose you used a pen instead of a keyboard."

"What do you mean?"

"Suppose that instead of typing in text, you write with some sort of stylus directly on the screen. If it was possible to sense where the tip of the pen was, electronic ink could appear on the screen right under it, and it would look like you were drawing a line...."

"A device like that would be more like a notebook or pad of paper than a laptop," Mitchell observed. "In fact, the thing would be so different, you'd need a whole new approach to software."

We both sat in stunned silence as this insight sunk in....

Seven years and $75 million in other people's money later, GO Corp., the company Kaplan founded to create and market a pen-based computer, disappeared into the ether from which it had materialized. But Kaplan had kept a diary, which inspired this entertaining narrative about the entrepreneurial process.

To be sure, Kaplan's adventure is not every entrepreneur's experience: his was a Silicon Valley start-up in which many of the players were already celebrities, and the stakes--at one point his enterprise had a capital valuation greater than $150 million--were not small change.

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