A theme
Building a company from the inside: the cash it eats while it grows, the equity founders give away to fund it, and the cultures that form when one person holds all the votes. Read the operators first and the cautionary tales second.
2 to watch and 7 to read.
Growth consumes cash, and a profitable company can still run out.
A memoir that is mostly about working capital. Nike nearly died of its own growth, repeatedly, and the book is honest about why.
Why a profitable company goes bust is a standard technical question, and this is the version of the answer you will remember.
There is often no good option, only the least bad one taken quickly.
Running a company when every available option is bad. Useful for venture and growth interviews, where the question is about operators rather than multiples.
Asked what you look for in a founder, the answer about decision speed under bad information comes from here.
Competition and profit rarely occupy the same market.
A short, contrarian argument for monopoly as the only durably profitable position. Read it as a thesis to argue with rather than accept, which is also how it is most useful in a room.
Venture interviews want to hear what would stop this being competed away. The answer lives in this argument, agreed with or not.
Ask about what people already did, never about what they would do.
A short, practical book on customer conversations that do not produce flattering nonsense. The rule it is named for is the most portable idea in this collection.
Any product case that starts with talk to users is really testing whether you know how to ask a question that cannot be answered politely.
Most founding stories are a pivot nobody planned.
Founder origin stories drawn from the interview series. Light going, and a reliable source of examples when you are asked which business you admire.
Most of the economy is businesses nobody writes about.
Founders in unglamorous industries. A corrective if your mental model of business has been built entirely from technology coverage.
Directed by David Fincher · Columbia Pictures
A co-founder who signs what he has not modelled learns what a cap table is for, too late.
The founding of Facebook, told as a pair of lawsuits. Under the drama sits the most widely seen lesson in founder dilution: a co-founder whose stake shrank when new shares were issued to everyone else, under documents he signed without working through. Dramatised, so treat the people as characters and the mechanics as real.
Asked to explain dilution or why founders vest, the co-founder’s story is one an interviewer will recognise, and you can then do the arithmetic properly.
Growth at any cost is a culture, and it is priced in later.
How a company scaled faster than almost any before it and what that did internally. The governance story matters more than the personalities, and the book is good on both.
Asked about founder control and board structure, this is where dual-class shares stop being a footnote in a prospectus.
An adjusted metric is an argument about what should not count.
A valuation story from first round to withdrawn IPO. Community adjusted EBITDA is the single best example of an adjusted metric built to flatter, and being able to explain it is worth an interview answer.
Asked what you would adjust out of EBITDA and why, this gives you a real example of an adjustment that should never have been made.
Watching and reading are the cheap part. These are where you have to produce something and find out whether it stuck.
Two documentaries, a drama and the reporting that broke it, in an order.
Bank runs, 2008 and a hedge fund the Fed had to rescue.
How a lie is built into accounts, and who should have stopped it.
The deal, the floor and the conflicts inside both.
Squeezes, corners and traders who agree only on risk.
Product judgment, platforms and the silicon underneath.