Comment by lbriner

I think you need to be careful thinking that the books will be the most valuable input you can get as a Startup. The most basic skill of any business is to "Sell what people want to buy", as Paul Graham puts it.

If you just sit and think about that, it encapsulates almost everything that is important about a business: To sell, people need to know about the product/business (marketing), you have to build it (development) and you have to sell it (sales). But you put good people in those roles and they will do their jobs but still not make much money. Why? People need to want to buy it and the main driver for that is a balance of a Customer-focussed Product Manager as well as a DNA of what the company is about and what it is offering. You want to make things customers want but they don't always know what they want and you might be selling something different, in which case your marketing message might be off.

The books might say "Always be closing" or "Marketing is everything" or "Deliver junk and iterate" and these are all partial truths but they can also come at a cost to other more effective parts of the business.

As the CEO, your job is to supervise those various levers/teams/departments so you need to know enough about them to understand if they are working, if the person running them is the right person and whether the changes you need to make are big and small!

p.s. I enjoyed the Mom Test but I think if you have an open mind, a lot of that stuff you would work out just from experience.

Good luck.