What I'm Reading to Learn Venture Capital and Mechanics of Startup Funding, A Reading List You Can Steal

I have done a fair bit of reading about venture capital in the past, which comes with the territory, but never approached it as a structured learning project. I’m changing it now, and this is the initial reading list I’m beginning with.

To be clear, I'm not planning to become an investor. Since I’ve been writing about Bangladesh's startup and business ecosystem for quite some time, and as we are seeing a lot of movement around building a serious VC ecosystem in the country, I feel I need a more meaningful understanding if I want to write about this and future developments.

My current understanding of how venture capital and startup funding work is at best surface-level. I know little about what happens when a fund closes a round, when a term sheet gets signed, and when a startup decides to take dilution at a certain valuation, and about many other inner workings of this world.

So over the past several months, I've been building a reading list. Working through books, essays, and the occasional academic papers. Getting fluent in a vocabulary I've been using loosely for years. Trying to understand the mechanics, cap tables, liquidation preferences, power-law portfolio construction, LP dynamics, etc., behind decisions that shape which companies and founders get backed and which markets get taken seriously.

As I do it, I thought I'd share the reading list with you all. I have three expectations for doing so. Some of you may get interested in learning more about this industry, and tag along, and we may put together a small reading circle. Source other resources if I should check out any other blog posts or books. And finally, to test out the idea of public commitment as a tool for self-accountability.

A few caveats upfront. This is a syllabus I'm working through myself, not one I've completed. It's also Silicon Valley-centric because that's where most of the serious long-form writing on VC comes from. I would have preferred some resources on emerging market venture capital work, but I couldn’t find anything meaningful.

I haven’t read any of these books. I plan to go through each one of these and develop an understanding of what it is.

Not strictly related to venture capital or fundraising. However, these books offer excellent mental models for thinking about building businesses. Some of them are hugely popular with venture capitalists, which means learning the language should be useful. I have read most of these before.

Instead of linking to individual blog posts, I’m linking to some of the most popular blogs/websites in this category as a whole. I’m a regular reader of most of these sources, and I want you to do the hard work as well 🙂

Everything above comes primarily from Silicon Valley. I couldn’t find any meaningful long-form writing on venture capital from an emerging-market perspective from South Asia, Southeast Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, or the Middle East.

I understand that the mechanics translate, but the local context matters: different LP bases, different regulatory environments, different risk profiles, different relationships between capital and the state.

If you know books, essays, or practitioners writing seriously about VC in these markets, please share. I think some of the most useful suggestions for my context will come from people closer to those ecosystems than otherwise. I have learned this much covering Bangladesh over these years.

If you're working through this or similar material and want to compare notes or put together a reading circle, I'm at ruhul@futurestartup.com.

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