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Vikram Ahuja, is a serial-entrepreneur and is currently Founder and CEO at Byond Travel, an experiential travel platform which creates personal travel journeys that focus on very unique experiences.
Vikram, who has a family background in the Indian Navy, is very also a film-maker and a theatre enthusiast.
The Book of Five Rings by Miyamoto Musashi
Musashi was a samurai and a very skilled swordsman. In the entire book he writes about art of fighting the enemy but the meaning of what he writes is very relevant in a personal as well as in a professional situation. A lot of the book is about self belief and self independence. A lot of the book is about how half your battles are in your mind. If you want to beat an opponent, you need to beat him in the mind first, rather than with your action. So your mind drives your action!
The Hard Things about Hard Things by Ben Horowitz
This book talks about the hard decisions of running a business. So his whole thing is that starting a business is very easy, anyone can start a business. Running a business is very difficult. So there he talks about real issues that you will face when you are running a company. For instance, letting go of people, losing control as a founder of your start-up. Horowitz, who is one of the most respected VCs, talks about his personal experience of building a company and seeing both success and failure. All of the stories are personal anecdotes.
Search Inside Yourself by Chade-Meng Tan
This book is written by a Google executive and is about mindfulness. It's a very interesting book because it talks about mindfulness. Mindfulness is like a practice, it's like meditation, where you slow down your thinking and you find sort of peace and calmness through meditation, connecting emotionally with your employees, motivating them. It's one of those self help books which is not fluffy because the guy who has written it is an engineer. So he explains everything from an engineering perspective and not from a very high-level fluffy perspective and at the same time it is very relevant. Running a start-up can be incredibly stressful, you lose your mind almost every day, so I think a lot of the things he says like how to maintain your own composure
