David Cancel

Here Are The 13 Books I Recommend To Everyone On My Team

2024-10-08T17:22:27Z

This was written and published on August 8, 2016.

I love reading.

But I’m picky about what I read.

And there’s one thing I spend more time reading than anything else: books.

Why? Books have to withstand the test of time. Think about the effort it takes to write a book vs. to write a blog post like this.

(More on how I read and why learning from others is the only shortcut I’ve found in my career here).

Anyway, I love getting good book recommendations, and people often ask me what I’m reading. And since we just launched a book club for our team here at Drift, I thought I’d share the 13 books that I recommend to everyone on my team (they get the books for free 📚 🚀😀).

Ego Is The Enemy. The one thing we all fight everyday — our egos. “Success is intoxicating, yet to sustain it requires sobriety. We can’t keep learning if we think we already know everything.”
The One Thing. This is the book the aligns everything we do at Drift. Focus on the one thing. The big rocks. If you chase two rabbits, you won’t catch either.
Focus: The Future of Your Company Depends on It. Another great reminder.
Do The Work: Overcome Resistance and Get Out of Your Own Way. A classic from Steven Pressfield. Stop getting in the way of great work.
Sam Walton: Made In America. This is the story behind Wal-Mart. The only thing I’ll say about this book — Sam is my role model. This is one of my all-time favorites.
The Score Takes Care of Itself: My Philosophy of Leadership. When the San Francisco 49ers hired Bill Walsh, they were 4–12 and the worst team in the NFL. Three years later, they won their first Super Bowl — and the turnaround happened because of the small things. All of the details matter, because the score will take care of itself.
From Impossible To Inevitable: How Hyper-Growth Companies Create Predictable Revenue. This is the latest book from Jason Lemkin. A great read if you’re in SaaS — a must-read if you work in marketing and sales.
Hooked: How To Build Habit Forming Products. Ever wonder why some products catch on and others don’t? Read this.
Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers. The classic from Geoffrey Moore.
Behind the Cloud: The Untold Story of How Salesforce.com Went from Idea to Billion-Dollar Company-and Revolutionized an Industry. Benioff. Enough said.
Marketing: A Love Story: How to Matter to Your Customers. Bernadette Jiwa is one of the best brand storytellers. “What if, before making a pencil stroke or writing a single line of code, every entrepreneur and innovator began by seeing the world through a marketer’s lens and asking, ‘why will someone care about this?’ How different would marketing be then?”
Predictable Revenue: Turn Your Business Into A Sales Machine. The sales classic from Aaron Ross — doesn’t just apply if you’re in sales. This is another must read if you’re in SaaS.
The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers. The struggle. The grind. This is the reality check that you will always need when you’re going through it.

Have any books you think I should add to the list?

How To Become A Learning Machine: My Tips For Reading More

2024-10-08T17:19:11Z

This was written and published on January 20, 2016.

“A man only learns in two ways, one by reading, and the other by association with smarter people.” — Will Rogers

People ask me all the time for hacks, tips, tricks, shortcuts, etc. when it comes to creating companies/teams/products — in other words how to accelerate success.

Every time I get the question, I cringe.

There’s only one shortcut I’ve learned after five companies: learning from others.

The only way I know to accelerate your progress is through learning from others.

Learning from colleagues, learning from mentors, learning from those that are just a little ahead of you. Learning from those that are decades ahead of you.

Like Warren Buffett said “It’s good to learn from your mistakes. It’s better to learn from other people’s mistakes.”

This is where books come in.

Learning from books is by FAR the cheapest and fastest way to hit the “Ludicrous mode” button on your life.

(Now, learning from the right books is a subject for another day. But in this post we’re just focusing on step one).

Selection Framework: How I Pick Where To Read

My framework for reading starts by prioritizing the medium that I use.

First I prefer to invest my time reading books over magazine articles and blog posts although I do both.

I prefer books because it is easier for me to find those books which have stood the test of time. I’m letting the market filter through the millions of books in publication and surface those that have lasting value.

For the small cost of a book, I am “downloading” the author’s experiences into my brain and shortcutting the learning process.

How I Prioritize Books:

Physical Books — my preferred medium. Reserved for those books that I expect to re-read multiple times, are longer in length and/or I will need to make lots of notes/highlights in.
eBooks (Kindle) — used for books that are shorter in length and/or I expect to read only once. (Note: if I find a hidden gem here I will often also purchase the physical book)
Audiobooks (Audible) — used for entertainment focused books and/or those books that I consider to be disposable.

Online Blog Posts And Articles

Read it ASAP. I want to avoid the cognitive load that comes from TODO lists and trying to remember to do a task. If possible, I read the article immediately and move on.
If I consider an article entertainment (not important) or I simply can’t read it now I put it in Pocket. I rarely go back and read these but it’s a cheap form of bookmarking. When I do go back and read these posts I use the hidden text to speech feature to read the articles to me while walking or driving. Bonus: Pocket makes it easy for me to add articles to Buffer so I can share them on Twitter, Facebook and more.

Notetaking: Remembering What You Read

One of the most important habits I have when it comes to reading is taking notes. I take notes so that I can come back and summarize what I’ve learned.

How I Take Notes

For physical books I use a yellow highlighter. For eBooks I use the built-in highlight function available with Kindle.

Periodically I spend time taking photos of the highlights I’ve made in a book and saving those in Evernote. I create one Evernote note per book and store all the highlights in that note. I store those photos in Evernote because the built-in OCR allows me to search the text in the photos in the future.

Lastly I use a Zapier to create a Trello card for every note I tag with the word “book”. I do this to remind myself to revisit these notes in the future and to have a running list of the books that I have read and highlighted.

Finding Time To Read

We’ve talked about picking reading material and a system to remember what you’ve read, but the hardest part (or the one thing that people always ask about it) is when to read.

Here’s the catch: there are no shortcuts here either.

You have to make it a priority. Just like you’d prioritize time with your family, health and your work, reading needs to be a priority if you want to learn.

And you’ll be surprised how much of an impact you can make on your learning by spending just 15 minutes/day reading.

Start there. Set aside 15 minutes to read everyday, and the rest will follow.

Navigating Growth: Why You Should Hire People, Not Just Skills

2024-10-08T16:58:33Z

This post was written for publication in 2011 a few months before my company, Performable, was acquired by HubSpot.

Companies change. Products evolve. Approaches get thrown out the window. The centrifugal force alone of that kind of rapid development is enough to throw anyone off center. Throughout my experience, one guiding rule on team building in fast-moving companies has emerged: hire people, not skills.

It can be tempting when you’re first growing to hire someone specifically to fill a gap in your company’s skillset. If you hire someone for skills alone, however, they may lose balance as the company grows, when those skills are no longer as central or get placed into a different context. Each time I have built a team, personal traits — not professional skills — have been what propelled the company forward.

So, what traits matter? The answer is going to vary by company and founder, but I look for the following:

Cultural Fit (45%)

Fit is arguably the most important of any qualification. Start-ups can be very hard, and they become impossible if you don’t love the people around you. Getting the culture right is critical. No matter how stellar a candidate’s skills are, if they don’t fit well with your team, it won’t work out for anyone involved. Be careful here though: fit should not signal conformity. You do not need 12 identical personalities. You need a mix of people with differing perspectives but shared values. You need at team that is cohesive because of its differences.

Scrappiness and Drive (35%)

At my startup Performable and then later at Drift, we include scrappiness in the job description. We seek out people who have toppled challenges with very limited resources. This is not just about being lean. It is about the character of the team. The four most powerful words coming from a new hire are: “I’ll figure it out.” Find someone who you can trust to say that and follow through on it, and you’ve found a true asset.

This kind of drive is different than traditional ambition. Ambitious people will succeed at any task laid before them. They will personally excel, quickly rising from manager to director to vice president. A scrappy person who is driven does not rely on titles or defined responsibilities. He or she will push the company forward even when no one’s looking. Driven people move through the responsibilities on their lists, but also keep a constant eye on how the company as a whole can do things smarter and better.

Intelligence and Experience (15% and 5%, respectively)

Intelligence and experience are valuable, but a scrappy person who fits well on the team can learn fast. In a start-up, jobs are always changing. So when you think about intelligence and experience, make sure you are thinking about it in terms of a genuine hunger to learn and level of life experience that enables the candidate to easily adapt and evolve.

Discovering these traits in candidates may come down to a gut feeling for many, but some of it can be illuminated by carefully posed questions and by getting a candidate outside of the typical interview set-up. Whenever possible change the setting, meet candidates outside of the office, at events or out for coffee. Get them talking rather than answering. Find out what it is that makes them tick.

How to Spot These Traits

Hiring for these traits requires more than standard interviews. Get candidates out of the office. Meet them for coffee or at a casual event. Let them speak freely and see what drives them. You’ll get a clearer sense of who they are and whether they’re the right fit for your team.

The Books Every CEO or Founder Should Read

2024-10-08T16:48:40Z

This was written & published on Nov 15, 2015.

Since I’m always talking about the books I’ve read, I often get asked for book recommendations, especially by fellow Startup founders.

This morning Nick Rellas the CEO of Drizly asked me for a list of must-readbooks, so I quickly put together this list.

I think every Startup CEO & Founder would benefit from reading the books on this list.

Sorted by books I’ve re-read the most:

The Hard Thing About Hard Things — The only “real” business book. This book captures what it is like leading a startup.
Made in America — The story of how Sam Walton created Wal-Mart and became the richest man in the world. I have stolen many concepts from this book including the concept of Servant Leadership. Read 3x.
Seeking Wisdom — I can’t remember how I first found this book years ago, but it’s been on my nightstand ever since. I continuously read this book finding new gems each time.
Zingerman’s Guide to Giving Great Service — If you care about creating agreat customer experience read this book.
Managing Oneself — buy this tiny book by Peter Drucker and re-read it every five years.
Behind the Cloud — The story of Salesforce from its founder & CEO, Marc Benioff.
Let My People Go Surfing — The story of the founding of Patagonia and more importantly how to build a company with strong values.
Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind — This and Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion are the best books on Marketing. These books will teach you why you buy the things you do.
Meditations — So deep you need to re-read this book every few years.
Practicing The Power of Now — The best way I’ve found to deal with the daily anxiety of running a business is to focus on the “Now.” Start practicing with Tolle’s book.
Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion — I’m reading this book for the 3rd time now. The best book there is to understand the cognitive biases we all use to make decisions.
Entreleadership — If you want to learn how to work on your business, not in it, read this.
Setting the Table — I’m obsessed with great customer service. Nobody knows delivering great service better than Danny Meyer, one of America’s leading restauranteurs.
The Big Moo — So many great Seth Godin books to read, I’ve read all of them. I always come back to two books, Purple Cow and The Big Moo, a companion book to the Purple Cow.
Re-Imagine! — Too many great Tom Peters books, start with this one.
High Output Management — The book that started the recent OKR trend used by Google and many other companies to manage priorities.
Predictable Revenue — This book is a great guide to running a sales team from an early Salesforce.com sales leader. I had a hard time choosing between this book and The Sales Acceleration Formula (read both).