The following is a guest post by Ty Danco.
Ty is an angel investor and startup mentor. Read more of his thoughts at tydanco.com. Or, check out his recent article “What To Do If You Don’t Have An Idea“
It’s time to review the past year, so without apology for personal taste, here’s my list of the best (and a few of the worst) of 2011.
Best Startup Book of 2011: Mastering the VC Game by Jeff Bussgang of Flybridge Capital
I keep a loaded Kindle copy of this book on my iPad, and I’m constantly showing it to startups raising money. The money chapter: When the Dog Catches the Bus: Making the Pick and Doing the Deal tells you what YOU should be checking out about VCs.
Runners-Up:
The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses, by Eric Ries. Had to rethink my whole approach to my startup after reading this. And I’m going to re-read it again soon.
Venture Deals: Be Smarter than Your Lawyer and Your Venture Capitalist, by Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson. A little dry, but will save you a ton of headaches.
Running Lean, by Ash Maurya. Pragmatic and quick.
Honorary Runners-Up (read by me this year, but written pre-2011):
Inbound Marketing, by Brian Halligan and OnStartups.com’s own Dharmesh Shah. Simply put, a seminal book that gets you traffic.
Do More Faster, by David Cohen and Brad Feld. Really fun.
Pitching Hacks from Naval and Nivi of AngelList.
Best Interview Podcast/Webcast Series with Entrepreneurs: Andrew Warner’s Mixergy
If James Brown was the hardest working man in music, Andrew Warner must be the same in startup journalism. He cranks several hundred of interviews a year, so you can’t expect every show to be pure gold, but he’s produced more good ones than any three other people combined in 2011. A big differentiator: he spends a lot of time looking at failures as well as the easy success stories. You can search through transcripts quickly to see if you want to download the interview, either in audio or video modes. A few favorite interviews from the last half 2011: Joel Spolsky of Trello and Stack Exchange; Sarah Prevette of Sprouter talking about rising from the dead; Eric Ries on Lean Startups; Naval Ravikant on AngelList; David Friend of Carbonite; and for me, the one that hit closest to home, Harley Finkelstein of Shopify talking about biz dev.
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