The best entrepreneurs balance brilliant business ideas with a rigorous commitment to serving their customers’ needs.
If you read (or listen) to nothing else on entrepreneurship and startups, listen to these ten 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; and take an alternative approach to entrepreneurship: buy an existing business and run it as CEO.

The Four Steps to the Epiphany launched the Lean Startup approach to new ventures. It was the first book to offer that startups are not smaller versions of large companies and that new ventures are different than existing ones. Startups search for business models while existing companies execute them.
The book offers the practical and proven four-step Customer Development process for search and offers insight into what makes some startups successful and leaves others selling off their furniture.
Rather than blindly execute a plan, The Four Steps helps uncover flaws in product and business plans and correct them before they become costly. Rapid iteration, customer feedback, and testing your assumptions are all explained in this book.
Packed with concrete examples of what to do, how to do it and when to do it, the book will leave you with new skills to organize sales, marketing, and your business for success.
If your organization is starting a new venture, and you’re thinking how to successfully organize sales, marketing, and business development, you need The Four Steps to the Epiphany. A must-listen for anyone starting something new.

More than 100,000 entrepreneurs rely on this book for detailed, step-by-step instructions on building successful, scalable, profitable startups. The National Science Foundation pays hundreds of startup teams each year to follow the process outlined in the book, and it’s taught at Stanford, Berkeley, Columbia and more than 100 other leading universities worldwide. Why?
The Startup Owner’s Manual guides you, step-by-step, as you put the Customer Development process to work. This method was created by renowned Silicon Valley startup expert Steve Blank, cocreator with Eric Ries of the “Lean Startup” movement and tested and refined by him for more than a decade. This guide will help you:
– Avoid the nine deadly sins that destroy startups’ chances for success
– Use the Customer Development method to bring your business idea to life
– Incorporate the Business Model Canvas as the organizing principle for startup hypotheses
– Identify your customers and determine how to “get, keep and grow” customers’ profitably
– Compute how you’ll drive your startup to repeatable, scalable profits.