High Growth Handbook
by Elad Gil · first published 2018
52% recommend39% neutral9% critical
Why HN recommends it
Practical playbook for scaling a startup, covering operations, company building and the business side. Draws on advice from people who made expensive mistakes; suits founders and managers growing a team.
Summarised by Claude from recommending comments
Well-known technology executive and angel investor Elad Gil has worked with high growth tech companies like Airbnb, Twitter, Google, Instacart, Coinbase, Stripe, and Square as they've grown from small companies into global brands. Across all of these break-out companies, a set of common patterns has evolved into a repeatable playbook that Gil has codified in High Growth Handbook.
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Professionally influential: - High Growth Handbook (general company building tips) - Traction (the one by Weinberg and Mares; engineer-friendy guide to marketing and growth) - Understanding Michael Porter (great intro to business strategy) - Monetizing…
on “Ask HN: Best books you read in the past decade?” ↗…other books. Other books with immediately-actionable advice for improving company processes, systems and culture: - The Great CEO Within, by Matt Mochary - High Output Management, by Andy Grove - High Growth Handbook, by Elad Gil
on “5 Books That Changed My Business” ↗Not published yet but High Growth Handbook [1] looks like a great read. [1] https://www.amazon.com/High-Growth-Handbook-Elad-Gil-ebook/d...
on “Ask HN: 2018 Summer Reading List?” ↗…About the World--and Why Things Are Better Than You Think by Hans Rosling. This book really changed my perception of the world and how I look at market dynamics. It's also a Bill Gates must read. 2) High Growth Handbook by Elad Gil This is supposed to be released next week and looks really good. Some of our investors have been raving about it online.
on “Ask HN: 2018 Summer Reading List?” ↗Zero To One Hard Thing About Hard Things E-Myth Revisited High Growth Handbook Blitzscaling
on “Ask HN: Best Startup Books?” ↗A few books that are relevant to your situation: * High Growth Handbook - covering the operations and biz side * The DevOps Handbook - developer effectiveness in larger orgs with examples * Monolith to Microservices - how to execute the transition * Team Topologies…
on “Recommended books about tech company growing pains” ↗Elad Gil's "High Growth Handbook" is a great resource.
on “How to Keep Your Job as Your Company Grows” ↗…that anymore but it always makes me feel like I don’t belong when somebody points out my foreign accent. I would never recommend it as a conversation starter. I recommend a book published this year: High Growth Handbook: Scaling Startups from 10 to 10,000 People, by Elad B. Gil
on “Ask HN: Which audiobooks did/do you like?” ↗…Enterprise Application Architecture - Data-Driven Marketing - Designing Data-Intensive Applications - Monetizing Innovation - Super Thinking - The Great Mental Models - Nonviolent Communication - High Growth Handbook - Powerful - Trillion Dollar Coach
on “What is expected of a engineering manager?” ↗Most posts offer the obvious suggestions (The Mom Test, High Growth Handbook, The Personal MBA, The Power Law, Hard Thing about Hard Thing, Will It Fly, etc), so I'll focus on some non-obvious suggestions. For tactical advice, I find talks/podcasts and mastermind groups more…
on “Ask HN: What books helped you in your entrepreneurship journey?” ↗…assets, not revenue. And exponential is a funny word for "very slow". If you wanted to grow to a million dollars, do anything but a startup and don't raise VC money. But this shows how the math works. High Growth Handbook: https://growth.eladgil.com/ And this is what you read after you get past 10 employees. Who to hire next, how to manage. There are tons of people who talk about how to get Product Market Fit, but few…
on “Ask HN: Must-Read Books for Startups?” ↗…talking about? It would take me a while to list all the books and courses. The best are religious (even the ones you don't follow, nobody ever RTFMs). But the best agnostic one I'd pick now would be High Growth Handbook; lots of advice from people who have made very expensive mistakes from people who play at the top of the game for a few decades. Lots of the advice is not always true, but having such a toolkit is invaluable.…
on “Ask HN: Which book or course gave you an unfair advantage?” ↗…atop Parse.ly's data, or important sharing features in our existing sites and products. You are the kind of person who'd enjoy the books "Hacking Growth", "Traction", "Four Steps to the Epiphany", and "High Growth Handbook". For bonus points, you also care about SaaS enterprise sales. For example, you are the kind of person who enjoyed Dan Pink’s "To Sell is Human". In this role, you'd run a small team of designers and…
on “Ask HN: Who is hiring? (November 2018)” ↗I'm reading Elad Gil's "High Growth Handbook" and the interview with Stripe's COO Claire Hughes Johnson. In that chapter they mention the Google engineer Urs Holzle who wrote "A Guide To Urs" about the interaction approaches that work best for him…
on “Ask HN: Do you have a public guide to working with you?” ↗* 'Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup' by John Carreyrou * 'Who is Michael Ovitz' by Michael Ovitz * 'High Growth Handbook' by Elad Gil * 'Principles: Life and Work' by Ray Dalio * '1491' & '1493' by Charles C. Mann
on “Ask HN: Books you read in 2018?” ↗