After founding my company Grip in 2016, it developed from a ‘Tinder-like’ professional networking app to the first market engagement platform for event organisers and professionals, for live, virtual and hybrid events. We were fortunate that we continued to grow throughout the difficult pandemic period, supporting the growing demand for digital event experiences, which helped us to secure $13m in our Series A funding round and quadruple our revenue over 2020.

Throughout this period of my life there are certain books which underpinned my experiences and helped me through potentially difficult decisions. As an entrepreneur it’s important to find moments of contemplation at each step of your founder journey, and to think creatively about where you get your advice and ideas from. For me, it all started with one book. 

1. Play Bigger: How Rebels and Innovators Create New Categories - Al Ramadan, Dave Peterson, Christopher Lochhead, Kevin Maney 

Understanding who your company is and what your goals are, is crucial to your success as a founder. Clear company vision comes right from the word go, so you need to understand what you’re changing in your market and where you lie within that. “Play Bigger” helped clarify my vision for Grip and gave me a huge amount of confidence that the business was filling a gap in the market. 

2. Innovators’ Dilemma: The Revolutionary book which will change your business - Clayton Christensen

Based on the idea that great companies can fail precisely because they do everything right, “The Innovator’s Dilemma” is a great read when you’re building a company designed to disrupt an existing market, especially when thinking about pulling together your overarching business strategy. 

For tech innovators in particular, I strongly recommend checking out this book early on in your company's development as it is a fantastic overview of what disruption is, how it works, with a focus on the need for agile risk-taking businesses like your own. 

3. Zero to One - by Peter Thiel

Now at the stage of building your business from the ground up, “Zero to One” is the perfect read to get you thinking about how technology can help in various surprising ways and how digital technologies interact with building businesses today.  

A condensed and updated version of Thiel’s Stamford University taught Masters course, the book is a classic that focuses on the different ways technology fuels and enables the disruption of established fields and markets. With such a huge amount of information available for entrepreneurs online today, this book offers concise, timeless advice for business builders.

4. Hooked Model - Nir Eyal 

Honing your user experience can make or break for a young budding tech company – you need to ensure people like using your product and that it delivers on its promises. 

“Hooked Model” provides a framework on how tech products build lasting habits in the users, consisting of a trigger, action, reward and investment model. This framework can be a great starting point when thinking about shaping your user experience and how to really engage with your customers.  

5. Meditations - Marcus Aurelius

Perhaps not a choice generally associated with entrepreneur literature, "Meditations”, Marcus Aurelius’ series of personal writings on his experiences and philosophy of stoicism, helps me to value my downtime. Founding a company is hugely rewarding, but can feel like it’s taking over your life sometimes – you live it, eat with it and sleep next to it. Having a book which takes you outside of this, slows you down and helps to reframe life once in a while. It’s certainly been a saving grace to me and helped me to enjoy the process of building my company.