A Crowdsourced List of Books and Resources for New Venture Capitalists

A simple tweet yielded a really good set of resources for new venture capitalists. I present these all without comment or judgment - I think they are all worth reading.

We have hired quite a few awesome interns at Precursor, and recently, a few folks asked me for a list of resources that new VCs should read or be aware of as they launch their careers in venture. I asked the Internet and some of my friends for recommendations and put this list together as a starting point. A few caveats before we get into the specifics:

• I tried to group resources in a way that makes them easy to digest

• The goal is to give people perspective on how venture works today, how people in the industry believe our industry works, and to provide some fodder for how our industry can improve.

• I decided to present all of these resources without comment or judgment - I think they’re all worth reading and reviewing, even if you disagree with the content, author, or point of view.

This is not a comprehensive list, but it is a list of resources that I have found useful. If you have something you feel should be included, please reply or leave a comment.

Books about the VC Business from Experienced VCs

• Secrets of Sand Hill Road by Scott Kupor

• Venture Deals by Brad Feld

• Founder vs VC by Elizabeth Zalman and Jerry Neumann

• Zero to One by Peter Thiel

Books on Technology Innovation Ecosystems

• Regional Advantage by Annalee Saxenian

• The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America by Margaret O’Mara

• The Innovator's Dilemma by Clayton Christensen

• The New Geography of Jobs by Enrico Moretti

Cautionary Tales

• Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou

• When Genius Failed by Roger Lowenstein

• The Spider Network: The Wild Story of a Math Genius, a Gang of Backstabbing Bankers, and One of the Greatest Scams in Financial History by David Enrich

• Losing the Signal: The Untold Story Behind the Extraordinary Rise and Spectacular Fall of BlackBerry by Sean Silcoff

• How Music Got Free by Stephen Witt

• Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon by Michael Lewis

Good Books about Finance

• The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future by Sebastian Mallaby

• The Quants by Scott Patterson

• Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. by Ron Chernow

• The House of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Finance by Ron Chernow

• The Psychology of Money: Timeless lessons on wealth, greed, and happiness by Morgan Housel

Hard to Categorize Good Reads

• Setting the Table: The Transforming Power of Hospitality in Business by Danny Meyer

• Play Bigger: How Pirates, Dreamers, and Innovators Create and Dominate Markets

• The Wright Brothers by David McCullough

• Hard Landing: The Epic Contest for Power and Profits That Plunged the Airlines into Chaos by Thomas Petzinger, Jr.

Blog Posts I Recommend

• Sequoia Capital Advice on Pitch Deck Structure by Sequoia Capital

• How to design a better pitch deck by YCombinator

• A Rake Too Far: Optimal Platform Pricing Strategy by Bill Gurley

• Why Am I So Lucky? Why You Need to Be Sure You’re Not the Sucker by Mark Suster

• The Danger of Early Hype in Consumer Social by Sarah Tavel

• Running Out of Money Isn’t a Milestone by Eric Paley

• The Option Pool Shuffle by Nivi

• Joining a startup: How to think about equity compensation by Cristina Cordova

• The Partnership by Fred Wilson

• For Fundraising, Seed is No Longer a Round, It’s a Phase by Hunter Walk

• The Next 10 Years Will Be About “Market Networks” by NfX

Podcasts

• 20Minute VC by Harry Stebbings

• Invest Like the Best by Patrick O'Shaughnessy

• Venture Unlocked by Samir Kaji

• Full Ratchet by Nick Moran

• Acquired by Ben Gilbert and David Rosenthal

• 10x Capital Podcast by David Weisburd and Erik Torenberg

• Equity by TechCrunch

• Capital Allocators by Ted Seides

• How I Built This by Guy Raz

Newsletters and Publications

• Lenny’s Newsletter by Lenny Rachitsky

• The Generalist

• The Information

• Strictly VC by Connie Loizos

• Axios Pro Rata by Dan Primack

• First Round Review

Making Venture Capital More Inclusive for All

• Ban Warm Intros by Del Johnson

• For Female Founders, Fundraising Only from Female VCs Comes at a Cost

• Venture capital funds led by people of color face more bias the better they perform, Stanford researchers find

Founder Perspectives on Company Building

• Burn Rate by Andy Dunn

• Founders at Work by Jessica Livingston

• The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers by Ben Horowitz

• Success at Work, Failure at Home by Scott Weiss

Legal and Documents

• NVCA Model Docs

• Cooley Go

• YC SAFE

Leadership and Management

• High Growth Handbook by Elad Gil

• The Great CEO Within by Matt Mochary

• Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts by Annie Duke

• Scaling People: Tactics for Management and Company Building by Claire Hughes Johnson

• Good Strategy Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why It Matters by Richard Rumelt

• The Messy Middle: Finding Your Way Through the Hardest and Most Crucial Part of Any Bold Venture by Scott Belsky

• Founding Sales by Pete Kazanjy

Organizations Who Publish Good Information

• Open LP by Sapphire Ventures

• Venture Forward

• Kaufmann Fellows

• VC Unleashed