Ayn Rand: Atlas Shrugged
The astounding story of a man who said that he would stop the motor of the world---and did. Tremendous in scope, breathtaking in its suspense, it is a mystery story, not about the murder of a man's body, but about the murder---and rebirth---of man's spirit.
Steven Johnson: Emergence.
The connected lives of ants, brains, cities and software.
Scott A. Shane: Finding Fertile Ground
Identifying Extraordinary Opportunities for New Ventures
Antony Flew: How to Think Straight
An Introduction to Critical Reasoning
Murray N. Rothbard: Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market (Scholars Edition)
William Poundstone: Prisoner's Dilemma
John von Neumann, game theory, and the puzzle of the bomb.
Michael A. Cusumano: The Business of Software.
Makes for in-depth, very informative tech start-up reading about the software industry.
David Deutsch: The Fabric of Reality
A startingly integrated, rational and optimistic world view that combines four strands: quantum physics and the theories of knowledge, computation and evolution.
Ayn Rand: The Fountainhead
The story of an intransigent young architect, his violent battle against conventional standards, and his explosive love affair with a woman who struggles to defeat him.
Starting up is difficult to grasp for some people, for example my parents. They seem to think, from the empirical evidence and what they see me doing and (so far) achieving: "so, being self-employed must basically mean to live on a level of bare subsistence in terms of earnings while refusing state benefits (but accepting the occasional parental financial support) and working through most of the waking hours instead of a nice comfy eight-hour day, three or four nice comfy weeks of holiday a year, in a nice comfy office, with a nice comfy car and the conveniences only a proper day job can offer."
I haven't quite managed to explain effectively to them what this is all about. Now I have finally found a good explanation of why software entrepreneurs work the way they work, by a guy just nick-named a guy over at The Business of Software:
Well said!