Results
Winner
The Hustle Mindset: How to build a successful start-up through grit and grind
Reece Borg
*The Hustle Mindset* by Reece Borg helps aspiring entrepreneurs develop the mindset, discipline, and resilience needed to build a successful start-up in today’s competitive world. Rather than promoting shortcuts or unrealistic success stories, the book offers practical guidance based on real-world business experience. It encourages readers to think beyond survival and focus on long-term growth, impact, and opportunity.
The book teaches entrepreneurs how to identify strong business ideas, manage uncertainty with confidence, and build effective teams that support business growth. It also highlights the importance of focusing energy on the right priorities and protecting personal motivation throughout the entrepreneurial journey. By combining grit, determination, and strategic thinking, *The Hustle Mindset* inspires readers to turn challenges into opportunities and use business not only as a source of income, but also as a tool for creating meaningful impact and lasting success.
Winner
Go Start Up: Your Best Guide to Unlocking the Values and Culture of Success
Karan Kashyap
Go Start Up serves as a high-utility operational handbook for aspiring small business magnates, who will juggle multiple execution roles simultaneously. It helps aspiring founders to optimise their daily workflows using designs for structured meetings, optimised team selections, and tactical hiring processes.
Because small businesses face severe time constraints, it prioritises actionable systems over abstract prose. The book provides fast-paced refresh rates, via diagrams, quotes and free body schematic images. It gives leaders concrete strategies to build high-performing teams, manage dilemmas, and protect their company culture without suffering founder burnout. By providing clear, step-by-step launch frameworks and operational checklists, it allows allow smaller enterprises to confidently compete in aggressive modern markets. And ensures that small business owners can transition from chaotic daily fire-fighting to structured, profitable growth, to achieve the much coveted success.
Winner
Accelerating Startups: Lessons From Mentors
Michael J. Lyon
I have volunteered as a mentor to hundreds of startups, in the US and globally, through various technology accelerator programs, especially the last nine years at the Creative Destruction Lab, and found that the same issues repeated and applied to startups across technologies and industries. This book is designed as an entrepreneurial guidebook to make the startup process more efficient and give founders a head start. From telling your story, the pitch, to being a good listener, to addressing a problem and squeezing assumption out of your thinking, to drafting a strategic plan, to raising capital and considering international opportunities. This book helps founders make more revenue, quicker, and avoid unnecessary errors. A dozen other mentors also contributed to the book, with a foreword by CDL founder, Professor Ajay Agrawal. Thank you for your consideration.
Finalist
100 Things Successful Startups Do: Little Lessons in Entrepreneurial Success
Nigel Cumberland
100 Things Successful Startups Do equips aspiring and early-stage entrepreneurs with the mindset, habits, and practical skills needed to build a thriving business. Through 100 actionable lessons, readers learn how to navigate challenges, seize opportunities, attract support, lead growing teams, and stay resilient through uncertainty. Combining expert advice with exercises and real-world strategies, the book helps transform big ideas into sustainable ventures. Rather than focusing on talent alone, it shows how success is built through smart decisions, consistent habits, and entrepreneurial thinking. Readers come away with greater confidence, clearer direction, and a practical roadmap for turning ambition into lasting business success.
Finalist
The Set-Up: Build What Matters Fix What's Broken. Finally Make Your Law Firm Work.
Simone Fulmer Gaus
You built your law firm to serve clients and make a difference, not to be buried in stalled cases, late nights, and last-minute emergencies while the numbers stubbornly refuse to add up. The challenge is that most firms still run on an outdated, top-down model that puts all the weight on the owner, fuels burnout, and slows everything down. Thriving and innovative firm owner Simone Fulmer Gaus shares the simple, proven framework she developed to reinvent her practice—replacing the owner-heavy hierarchy with a modern, self-managing approach built on purpose, shared values, and genuine respect for the people who make a law firm run.