The Reading List We Actually Recommend (and How to Read It)

A reading list circulates among Taiwan's operator and venture community: roughly thirty titles on building, raising and thinking, passed around because they are genuinely good. We were handed it too. But a list of thirty books is not advice, it is a to-do list you will never finish. So here is our cut: the handful that earn their place for someone building or backing a B2B company, the ones to read with caution, and the gap the whole canon quietly leaves open.

Why we don't just forward the list

A book list reads like generosity, but forwarding thirty titles is a quiet way of avoiding the hard part: judgment. The work is not collecting recommendations, it is deciding what to ignore. Most of these books were written for a general startup audience, many of them American consumer-software stories. They are useful, but they are not interchangeable, and a few of the most-recommended are actively misleading if you read them as a blueprint for selling into enterprises. So we did the uncomfortable thing and ranked them by one question only: how much does this earn its place for someone building or backing a B2B company in this market?

Three shelves, by the job you're doing

Forget genre. Sort the shelf by the decision in front of you. To raise, the one book that pays for itself is Venture Deals by Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson: it is the clearest explanation of how term sheets, ownership and investor incentives actually work, and it maps directly onto the mechanics we cover in term sheets, the cap table, and valuation and dilution. The local Taiwan playbooks and founder-finance primers on the list are worth it too, but as situational, market-specific references rather than first principles.

To sharpen judgment, the strongest picks are Poor Charlie's Almanack for Munger's latticework of mental models, and Ron Adner's Winning the Right Game for thinking in ecosystems rather than products, which is the single most relevant idea on the list for anyone in B2B. Nassim Taleb's Antifragile and The Black Swan belong here for how an investor should think about risk and rare, outsized outcomes, the same logic behind the power law. To build and lead, Jim Collins' Beyond Entrepreneurship 2.0 is the most durable, with Trillion Dollar Coach, No Rules Rules and The Knack as situational reads depending on whether your problem this quarter is coaching, culture or street-level operating.

What the canon quietly leaves out

Read the whole list back to back and a hole appears. It is strong on mindset, fundraising and general company-building, and almost silent on the thing that actually decides B2B outcomes: how an enterprise buys. None of these books will tell you that a complex purchase now runs through a buying group of six to ten people, that a deal takes nine months not nine weeks, or how a startup gets onto an approved-vendor list. That is not a knock on the authors; it simply isn't what they set out to write. But it is precisely where most B2B companies stall.

That gap is the reason this publication exists. The pieces we keep returning to, on the buying committee, the nine-month sales cycle, and the approved-vendor list, are our attempt to write the B2B chapter the reading list never had. Read the canon for how to think and how to raise; read the market itself for how to sell into it.

How to actually read them

Three habits get more out of a small shelf than a long one. First, read for a question, not for completion. Pick the decision you face this month, raising, a stalled deal, a hiring call, and read only the one or two books that speak to it. A book read against a live problem sticks; a book read to finish a list evaporates. Second, pair every idea with evidence before you act on it. A bestseller is one person's argument, not a finding. When a book tells you to ship the minimum and learn, check it against how your specific buyer actually decides before you build your roadmap around it.

Third, steal the model, not the story. The durable value of these books is rarely the anecdote, which usually comes from a different market and a different decade. It is the transferable model underneath: Munger's inversion, Adner's minimum viable ecosystem, Taleb's asymmetry. Keep the lens, drop the case study. A founder who can name the three models they actually use is further along than one who has read all thirty books and remembers none of the mechanics.

The takeaway

A reading list is not a curriculum, and treating it like one is how good books go to waste. Read narrow and deep against the decision in front of you, pair every idea with evidence, and keep the model rather than the anecdote. Five books read that way will outperform thirty skimmed. And whatever you read, remember the chapter the canon skips: in B2B, the deciding factor is rarely vision or capital. It is whether you understand, and can reach, the people who actually buy.