Christmas is a bumper period for publishers, with around a quarter of book sales taking place in the run-up to the holiday season.
With Christmas just around the corner, London-based Perlego, the self-described “Spotify of books” offering access to more than 1m academic and non-fiction e-books, has crunched the data on the titles most popular with C-suite execs in Europe this year.
Top reads among Perlego’s business readers included Never Split the Difference by Christopher Voss and Tahl Raz, The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel and Currency Trading For Dummies by Brian Dolan.
Sifted also asked some of the region’s leading founders and VCs to share their book recommendations ahead of the holidays.
Insider accounts
Dr. Golnaz Borghei, who recently joined APEX Ventures as a principal after building and leading PwC Germany’s corporate venture capital arm, recommends The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World’s Most Coveted Microchip by Stephen Witt.
"The Thinking Machine is essential reading for any deeptech founder right now. Working with portfolio companies across Europe, I've seen firsthand how the best deeptech companies think long-term about technical infrastructure.
“Witt's book shows how Nvidia went from a GPU startup to the backbone of the AI revolution — that journey from niche hardware to indispensable platform is exactly what European founders need to understand as we work to develop sovereign capabilities in chips and AI."
Edward Keelan, partner at Octopus Partners, recommends Careless People by Sarah Wynn Williams.
“It’s an insider look at how power, incentives and internal politics can distort culture inside Big Tech. I read it alongside Lord of the Flies, and the parallels were hard to ignore.
“As Europe’s tech ecosystem matures, governance, culture and leadership never mattered more. We must question what it means to be a good company and not just a big company.
“Careless People is a timely reminder that the biggest risks inside scaling companies often come from human behaviour, not market forces, and how quickly those driving revenue can claim the short-term narrative.
“Any founder or VC trying to build an enduring European champion that they want to be proud of should read it.”
Deep thinkers
Shayan Roy Chowdhury, interim managing director of the Newton Venture Program, a training platform for VCs, recommends Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman.
“It’s the OG classic that dives into the cognitive biases of humans, offering a rich, psychology-backed view on how we make choices and the predictable traps we fall into (and of course, how to avoid them).
“On the face of it, not an obvious VC pick — certainly not the kind of book a friend might panic‑buy you after a quick Google.
“But investors have to make high‑quality decisions against a backdrop of high uncertainty and sparse information everyday. That means understanding ourselves (and humans at large) is just as essential as understanding markets or trends.”
Writing on LinkedIn, Suranga Chandratillake, general partner at Balderton, recommended Katie Prescott’s new book on Autonomy and Darktrace cofounder Mike Lynch.
“All founders will benefit from the book but especially if you are a technical founder who has the audacity to believe you can also run a business or an 'outsider' then the book becomes a must‑read.
“While much of the mass market interest will be on that topic, I would encourage founders to focus on the rest of the book — it's how you take tech, ambition and energy and turn it, consistently, repeatedly, into gold.”
Perlego listed the top 10 most popular books among European execs on its platform right now:
1/ Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It by Christopher Voss and Tahl Raz
2/ Reward Management by Michael Armstrong and Helen Murlis
3/ The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel
4/ Learn PowerShell in a Month of Lunches by Tyler Leonhardt, Travis Plunk and James Petty
5/ The 12 Week Year by Brian P. Moran and Michael Lennington
6/ Currency Trading For Dummies by Brian Dolan
7/ Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order by Ray Dalio
8/ Measuring and Managing the Value of Companies by Mckinsey and Company
9/ Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist by Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson
10/ Why Nations Fail by Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson
