Books I Love

The books Derek Johnson recommends most — a curated reading list on entrepreneurship, business, investing, and living well.

Other

• The Easy Way to Control Alcohol — Allen Carr

  This book completely changed how I viewed alcohol. Instead of relying on willpower, it helped me genuinely lose the desire to drink. It played a major role in helping me get and stay sober.

• Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike — Phil Knight

  The best founder memoir I've read. Phil Knight is honest about how messy and improbable the early Nike days were, selling Japanese shoes out of the trunk of his car, almost going under multiple times. Whenever I read polished founder stories, I come back to this one as the reality check.

• Die With Zero: Getting All You Can from Your Money and Your Life — Bill Perkins

  This book messed me up in a good way. Perkins argues that spending money on experiences while you're young enough to enjoy them is the actual goal, not optimizing for some retirement number. We changed how we approach travel and big purchases after reading it.

• The Simple Path to Wealth — JL Collins

  The clearest case for low-cost index funds I've ever read. Originally a series of letters JL Collins wrote to his daughter. I think about VTSAX every time I make an investment decision. The book that locks in the boring-but-correct approach.

• Number Go Up: Inside Crypto's Wild Rise and Staggering Fall — Zeke Faux

  This was the wildest book I read that year. Zeke Faux is in SBF's penthouse the night before his arrest, then in a crypto-fueled human-trafficking compound in Cambodia. Reads like a thriller, except all of it is true. I'd been crypto-curious until I read this.

• Living with a SEAL: 31 Days Training with the Toughest Man on the Planet — Jesse Itzler

  Jesse Itzler hires a Navy SEAL to live with him for 31 days and put him through pure misery. Funny, motivating, and a great reminder that I'm capable of a lot more than I think when I stop negotiating with myself.

• Clarence Saunders & the Founding of Piggly Wiggly — Mike Freeman

  A piece of retail history I had no idea about. Saunders invented modern self-service grocery in 1916, made millions, built a marble mansion, then lost it all. The rise-and-fall arc is wild, but what stuck with me was how original the self-service idea was at the time.

• Beyond The Exit: What Successful Entrepreneurs Do With the Rest of Their Lives — John Rood

  The book I needed after selling Tatango. Rood interviewed 70+ entrepreneurs about what came after their exits — the identity loss, the loss of purpose, the relationship strain. Most exit content is about getting to the exit. This one is about what happens after.

• Ding Dong: How Ring Went from Shark Tank Reject to Everyone's Front Door — Jamie Siminoff & Andrew Postman

  How Ring went from a Shark Tank rejection to a billion-dollar Amazon acquisition. Jamie Siminoff is honest about the years of being told to quit. As someone who's been underestimated more than once, this one hit close.

• How to Get Rich: One of the World's Greatest Entrepreneurs Shares His Secrets — Felix Dennis

  Felix Dennis being blunt, profane, and honest about what building wealth actually takes. Less a self-help book, more a confessional from a man who lived hard and decided to write down what he learned. I keep coming back to his chapter on the cost of money.

• The 2-Hour Cocktail Party: How to Build Big Relationships with Small Gatherings — Nick Gray

  The book that finally got me hosting at home. Nick Gray treats throwing a party like a system: start time, structured intros, a clear end. We've used the format multiple times and it works every time. Tactical and easy to read.

• How to Win Friends & Influence People — Dale Carnegie

  The granddaddy of relationship books. Reading it now feels like reading the source code for every modern self-improvement book, because they all borrowed from it. Carnegie's framing on how to actually listen and make people feel important has shaped how I run meetings and treat the people around me. I re-read it every few years.

• Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It — Chris Voss

  Chris Voss was an FBI hostage negotiator, and the book applies those techniques to business. The chapter on calibrated questions like 'How am I supposed to do that?' alone changed how I negotiate. I used a lot of what I learned here when I sold Tatango.

• The Lean Startup — Eric Ries

  The book that made 'minimum viable product' a household phrase. Ries argues that the only way to build is to ship something small, get real feedback, and iterate. This was my playbook at Tatango. If you're sitting on an idea waiting for it to be perfect, read this and ship.

• Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley — Antonio Garcia Martinez

  The book Silicon Valley didn't want you to read. Garcia Martinez was inside Facebook during the IPO era and tells the unvarnished version: the politics, the egos, the absurd money. If most Silicon Valley books are press releases, this is what actually happens behind the scenes.

• Setting the Table: The Transforming Power of Hospitality in Business — Danny Meyer

  The hospitality bible. Danny Meyer built Union Square Cafe, Gramercy Tavern, and Shake Shack on a single insight: hospitality is a verb. The 51 percent rule, hiring for emotional skills first, applies to every customer-facing business I've run. Required reading if your business has customers.

• The Whole Story: Adventures in Love, Life, and Capitalism — John Mackey

  John Mackey's own story of building Whole Foods. What got me is how transparent he is about the hard parts: failures, union fights, the Amazon acquisition. He's unapologetically capitalist in a way that's increasingly rare. A founder memoir from someone who actually built something.

• Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don't — Jim Collins

  The most-cited business book of the last 30 years for a reason. Collins's team studied companies that made the leap from average to great and found the patterns. Level 5 Leadership and the Hedgehog Concept are frameworks I still think about. Some case studies haven't aged well, but the principles hold up.

• Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future — Ashlee Vance

  The 2015 biography, before Musk became as polarizing as he is now. Vance got real access and the book shows both the genius and the cost. Pair it with Isaacson's later book and you have two snapshots of the same person at different stages. I prefer this one. It feels more honest.

• The Virgin Way: If It's Not Fun, It's Not Worth Doing — Richard Branson

  Branson's leadership philosophy in his own voice. The big idea: if it's not fun, it's not worth doing. He's run hundreds of businesses across wildly different industries and the common thread is irreverence and curiosity. I read this when I needed a reminder that work and play don't have to be opposites.

• The Many Lives of Michael Bloomberg — Eleanor Randolph

  Bloomberg is one of the most consequential and least-understood billionaires alive. Randolph traces his arc from Salomon Brothers to building the terminal to running NYC. The terminal story alone, how he built a $50B business by adding one button, was worth the read.

• Around the Corner to Around the World: A Dozen Lessons I Learned Running Dunkin Donuts — Robert Rosenberg

  Rosenberg ran Dunkin Donuts for 35 years and grew it from a few stores to a global brand. Twelve crisp lessons, each one stress-tested against decades of operating. The franchise and operator chapters are gold if you're in any business with distributed ownership.

• MONEY Master the Game: 7 Simple Steps to Financial Freedom — Tony Robbins

  Robbins interviewed 50+ of the world's most successful investors (Bogle, Buffett, Dalio) and pulled out the common threads. It's long, but the chapter on the All-Weather Portfolio and the breakdown on fees alone justify the time. My big takeaway: simple beats clever in personal finance.

• Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire — Brad Stone

  The sequel to The Everything Store, covering Amazon from 2013 to 2020: Alexa, AWS, original content, the Bezos divorce. Less of a startup story, more of an empire story. If you want to understand how the second half of Amazon's history played out, this is the book.

• The Ride of a Lifetime: Lessons Learned from 15 Years as CEO of the Walt Disney Company — Robert Iger

  Iger's 15 years as Disney CEO: Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm, Fox. What stuck with me was optimism as a leadership trait. People want to follow leaders who believe the next chapter is going to be better than the last. The chapter on succession is also worth the entire book.

• The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon — Brad Stone

  How Bezos built Amazon from a Bellevue garage to global retail dominance. This is the book that made me actually understand Bezos: Day 1 mentality, working backwards from the customer, relentless long-term focus. If I could only recommend one Amazon book, this is it.

• Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future — Peter Thiel

  Thiel's contrarian take on startups: most businesses are 1-to-N copies of existing things, but the real money is in 0-to-1, creating something that didn't exist. The 'last mover advantage' chapter reframed how I think about market timing. Short, dense, worth re-reading.

• The Skies Belong to Us: Love and Terror in the Golden Age of Hijacking — Brendan I. Koerner

  A wild piece of nonfiction about the 'golden age of hijacking' in the early 70s, when planes were being hijacked weekly in the US. The Roger Holder and Cathy Kerkow story is unreal. A reminder of how recently airline security was basically nonexistent.

• Early Exits: Exit Strategies for Entrepreneurs and Angel Investors — Basil Peters

  The book I wish I'd read before selling Tatango. Peters argues that for most founders, the early exit (under $30M) is the right exit, and that the VC model often prevents founders from taking those exits. If you're building a company and thinking about the endgame, read this first.

• Remote: Office Not Required — Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hansson

  Basecamp's case for working remotely, written years before the pandemic forced everyone to figure it out. The chapter on overcoming 'butts in seats' management is the one that stuck. Reading it in 2013 felt radical. Reading it now feels obvious.

• Grinding It Out: The Making of McDonald's — Ray Kroc

  Ray Kroc's autobiography on building McDonald's. He didn't start until he was 52. The grit and franchise-model thinking apply to almost any scalable business. Read it alongside Sam Walton's book to understand mid-century American operator culture.

• Sam Walton: Made in America — Sam Walton with John Huey

  Walton in his own words. The frugality, the obsession with stores, the willingness to copy what worked. Every Walmart story you've heard is in here. Combined with Mackey's Whole Foods book and Kroc's McDonald's book, it's the trifecta of American operator memoirs.

• Predictable Revenue: Turn Your Business Into A Sales Machine With The $100 Million Best Practices Of Salesforce.com — Aaron Ross & Marylou Tyler

  Ross built Salesforce's outbound sales team and added $100M in revenue. The book lays out the playbook: separate roles for prospecting, qualifying, and closing. We used it at Tatango to build our sales motion. If you're running B2B SaaS, this is required reading.

• The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich — Tim Ferriss

  The book that launched a generation of digital nomads and side hustlers. Some of it is dated, but the bigger lessons (lifestyle design, geo-arbitrage, challenging the default career path) still hold up. I read it as a college kid and it permanently changed what I thought was possible.

• Your Bright Life: Get Clear on What You Want, Overcome Self-Doubt, and Bring Your Dreams to Life — Jessica Johnson

  My wife Jessica's first book. It's about getting clear on what you actually want, pushing through the self-doubt that stops most people, and actually doing the thing. I watched her live every word of this before she wrote it. I'm obviously biased, but it's the real deal, and I've seen it land for people who needed a kick in the right direction.

• Shine Bright: Discover Your Message, Build Confidence Sharing, and Make a Difference — Jessica Johnson

  Jessica's second book. It's about finding your message and having the confidence to actually share it. If you've ever felt like you have something to say but keep talking yourself out of saying it, this one is for you. Watching her write it was something else.

• 10x Is Easier Than 2x — Dan Sullivan & Benjamin Hardy

  I read this when I was burned out from incremental improvements. The big idea, that 10x growth is easier than 2x because it forces you to drop the 80% of work that produces 20% of results, reframed my whole calendar. I revisit it whenever I catch myself optimizing the wrong things.

• The Disruption Formula — Derek Johnson

  My own playbook for finding and breaking into markets that look impossible. Everything I learned building Tatango is in here. I wrote it for operators who care more about building than posturing.

• The Innovator's Dilemma — Clayton Christensen

  The book that finally explained to me why great companies miss the next wave. I think about it every time I see an incumbent dismissing a competitor as 'not a real threat.' Required reading at least once a decade if you're operating or investing.

• Elon Musk — Walter Isaacson

  I went in expecting hagiography and got something more complicated. What stuck with me was the cost (to him, to the people around him) of compressing decades of progress into a few years. Useful as a study in obsession and pace.

• Autonomy: The Quest to Build the Driverless Car — Lawrence D. Burns

  This book gave me the clearest mental map I've found of how robotaxis and autonomy will rewire cities, real estate, and daily life. Most people are still thinking about it as 'cars but self-driving.' Burns explains why that framing misses the whole point.