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This is an email I posted on the newsletter for The CEO Library, as part of a Startup Founder Reading plan. Here’s the entire 16 books list

Hi!

My name is Bobby Voicu, I’m the CEO and co-founder of The CEO Library. Before that, I was the CEO and co-founder of a gaming company called MavenHut, I did some investing, raised about $3,000,000 for startups I was involved with. And I read a lot.

I made a reading plan for any early entrepreneur and I’m gonna send you an email every month with something else to read.

The Hard Thing about Hard Things, by Ben Horowitz, is, without a doubt, the book that reflected the most the feelings I had and I still have while starting and running a business (or startup, if you prefer this term).

I think this should be the first book in the reading plan for an early entrepreneur because it’s the book that will let you know how hard it is.

Let’s do this small exercise. Think about how hard on you do you think starting a business is? Take a small break from reading the email and think about it right now.

Done thinking? Well, now multiply what you thought by 10 and it’s probably close to the happier times of your startup up adventure.

Let me tell you some of my own experience. When we raised the first €500,000 round of investment for MavenHut, my girlfriend asked me: “why aren’t you happy? You should be happy!”. But I couldn’t be happy. Because for me it was already over. It has been “signed” in my mind for the last several weeks, because I’ve put everything to work and, if anything happened, it wasn’t up to me anymore. I was already thinking of what to do next, who to hire, when to hire them and so on. A little bit of context you can read here: The Story of MavenHut’s first year.

So, what did I do after the signing? I sent an email to my co-founders: “Documents signed by all parties.” Then I went to sleep. It was 1 am in the morning and I just stopped working for the day. No parties, no champagne, nothing like that.

Going back to the book. There’s a bit, at some point, about The Struggle entrepreneurs and business owners go through and it really resonated with all the entrepreneurs I’ve talked to. Here’s a small excerpt:

“The Struggle is when you wonder why you started the company in the first place.
The Struggle is when people ask you why you don’t quit and you don’t know the answer.
The Struggle is when your employees think you are lying and you think they may be right.
The Struggle is when food loses its taste.
The Struggle is when you don’t believe you should be CEO of your company. The Struggle is when you know that you are in over your head and you know that you cannot be replaced. The Struggle is when everybody thinks you are an idiot, but nobody will fire you. The Struggle is where self-doubt becomes self-hatred.
The Struggle is when you are having a conversation with someone and you can’t hear a word that they are saying because all you can hear is The Struggle.
The Struggle is when you want the pain to stop. The Struggle is unhappiness.
The Struggle is when you go on vacation to feel better and you feel worse.
The Struggle is when you are surrounded by people and you are all alone. The Struggle has no mercy.
The Struggle is the land of broken promises and crushed dreams. The Struggle is a cold sweat. The Struggle is where your guts boil so much that you feel like you are going to spit blood.”

I’ve gone through all of these feelings. And it’s still painful when I think about it. But the truth is I wouldn’t do anything else.

I urge you to go and read the book. You can also see who Ben Horowitz, the author of the book is and what other entrepreneurs have to say about the book here.

Next month, I’ll recommend yet another book for you to read. Just finish this one until then 😃

P.S.: if you already read this book and want something to read anyway, read Hackers and Painters by Paul Graham. It’s a collection of essays from the founder of Y Combinator, the most successful accelerator in the world (Dropbox, Airbnb are amongst the companies that went through it). You can also read Paul Graham’s essays on his website. This book is not part of the 12 months reading plan, just some off-plan reading.

This is an email I posted on the newsletter for The CEO Library, as part of a Startup Founder Reading plan. Here’s the entire 16 books list

Hello, everyone!

I hope you had the time to read the first book I recommended, The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz. A month should be more than enough :)

That being said, here’s my second book recommendation. I should mention, though, that this read should be the first one for every entrepreneur who decides to build a company around a product or service. Especially if it’s tech related in any way. The book is called The Lean Startup, written by Eric Reis. But don’t take my word for it, there are 29 other entrepreneurs that recommend this title on The CEO Library.

The Lean Startup talks about building a business around a product or a service, how to take that product/service to market fast, how to measure all the modifications and improvements you add to the product. Obviously, there is much more to the book than what I mentioned, but you need to read it in order to really understand why it’s recommended by a shitload of CEOs.

Among the entrepreneurs recommending the book is one of Facebook’s co-founders and initial CTO, Dustin Moskowitz – also co-founder at Asana – as well as the Chairman and co-founder of Intuit, Scott Cook. This is what they had to say:

Dustin Moskowitz: “At Asana, we’ve been lucky to benefit from Eric’s advice firsthand; this book will enable him to help many more entrepreneurs answer the tough questions about their business.”

Scott Cook: “Business is too important to be left to luck. Eric reveals the rigorous process that trumps luck in the invention of new products and new businesses. We’ve made this a centerpiece of how teams work in my company . . . it works! This book is the guided tour of the key innovative practices used inside Google, Toyota, and Facebook, that work in any business.”

Finally, if you want to know what the team at The CEO Library has to say about it, we actually read the book as part of our BookClub and you can listen to us here: Lessons Learned from The Lean Startup & How we Put them into Practice (Book Club Talk)

Look, me and my team used what we learned from the book while building Mavenhut. I read the book 4-5 times in the last 6 years. It’s the one book you should read before starting anything. And read it again in one year. You’ll see that the more your company grows, the more things become clearer as you read the book.

So even if you already read the book, read it again. With every re-read, you will have a deeper understanding of the lean startup concept. This is why, this month I won’t recommend another book, just in case.

Bobby

P.S.: OK, OK, you’re twisting my hand. Here’s an alternative book, if you already read The Lean Startup or if you read fast. Start Small, Stay Small: A Developer’s Guide to Launching a Startup by Rob Walling. It’s a good read about creating a side project, a product business on a smaller level, a, if I dare say, lifestyle business. It’s quite good and you should read this, as well, if you have the time.

Several years ago I made this startup reading plan for The CEO Library’s newsletter.

The setup was that every month you need to read a book (or two, if you have the time) and by the end of the year you would have a general idea of what starting a startup means.

Here are the books, along with the links to the reviews I wrote for all of them. I recommend one main book and a secondary one, in case you read it already or you’re a faster reader.

1. The Hard Thing about Hard Things by Ben Horowitz (secondary: Hackers and Painters by Paul Graham)
2. The Lean Startup by Eric Ries (secondary: Start Small, Stay Small: A Developer’s Guide to Launching a Startup by Rob Walling)
3. Joel Spolsky’s Concise Guide to Finding the Best Technical Talent (sec: Remote, Office Not Required, by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson)
4. Pitch Anything by Oren Klaff (sec: Once You’re Lucky, Twice You’re Good, by Sarah Lacy)
5. Chaos Monkeys: Inside the Silicon Valley Money Machine by Antonio Garcia Martinez (sec: Smartcuts: How Hackers, Innovators, and Icons Accelerate Success by Shane Snow)
6. CA$HVERTISING: How to Use More than 100 Secrets of Ad-Agency Psychology to Make Big Money Selling Anything to Anyone by Drew Eric Whitman (sec: Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap…And Others Don’t, by Jim Collins)
7. Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World, by Rand Fishkin (sec: Business Stripped Bare, by Richard Branson)
8. Startup Boards: Getting the Most Out of Your Board of Directors by Brad Feld and Mahendra Ramsinghani (sec: Shoe Dog, a Memoir by the Creator of Nike, by Phil Knight)

I don’t know if you know, but we have a dog. His name is Sami and he’s a Westie. And he’s really cute. So cute that we always think he could’ve been a Disney character, with those big eyes and big nose.

Well, now we know how he would look like :)

Miruna made a video tutorial about how to turn YOUR dog into a Disney character, as well, in case you want to try.

Oh, and the AI prompts we used are available to copy/paste here.

One thing I like about Bluesky (and Mastodon based apps, in general) is the fact I can use my domain name. Like, yeah, @bobbyvoicu.com.

Well, Bluesky makes it quite easy to do (go into Profile -> Handle and choose there your domain name, add a DNS field and that’s it).

So now, I have @bobbyvoicu.com at BlueSky.

More complete steps (the one I used) here.

I always loved reading gaming magazines. I started after the communism fell in Romania, in 1990, and never truly stopped.

Here’s a list of every English-language video game magazine still in print: GameHistory.org

I’ve discovered Mixed Reality with the new Meta Quest 3 I bought in December last year and I’ve been excited about it since.

I’m even more excited about the soon to be launched Apple Vision Pro.

But if you’re interested, here’s a list of all devices we might get this year.

I’ve been a little bit more tired than usual these days, so I wanted to watch something on Netflix. I remembered hearing a lot of good things about Blue Eye Samurai, a made-for-Netflix anime.

It is really good. The art and animation are really good, the voice acting is amazing. Weird to hear English in an anime, especially since there’s no Japanese audio (at least I didn’t see it), but really good.

Here’s the Wikipedia entry.

I’ve bought a Meta Quest 3 recently for VR and Mr gaming.

The best thing I’ve done was to buy an Elite Strap. It made putting on and removing the headset almost as easy as putting on a cap.

If you have a Quest 3, just go and buy an Elite Strap. It’s about $70 on Amazon (I paid about 90€ on Amazon.de).

Thank me later!

For Christmas we did jigsaw puzzles in our home.

It’s a nice way to spend time together with my wife and we really enjoy the challenge.

What I didn’t know, though, is that there’s a competitive side of jigsaw puzzle: The World Jigsaw Puzzle Championship.

I’ve been mesmerized by the competition and there’s a nice series of videos on 2023’s edition that happened in Valladolid, Spain. Where the 2024 competition will happen, as well. And I might actually go and watch, since it’s just a few hours of driving from where I live.