The key facts
- Jasur Jumayev recommended five books: The Little Prince, The Hard Thing About Hard Things, The Lean Startup, Zero to One, and Never Split the Difference
- He explained how the books' ideas relate to his experience building Uzum in Uzbekistan
- According to him, ready-made business models cannot be transferred between countries without adaptation
Five books from the founder of Uzum
Jasur Jumayev, founder and CEO of the Uzum ecosystem, told Spot.uzwhich books have shaped his thinking, and commented on each of his five recommendations. The list includes The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz, The Lean Startup by Eric Ries, Zero to One by Peter Thiel, and Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss.
How the books relate to the Uzum experience
The most substantive comments are those where Jumayev connects the books' ideas with his own experience. For instance, describing Peter Thiel's Zero to One, he writes that 'we have proven through our own example that ready-made business models cannot simply be transferred from one country to another': user behavior, infrastructure, and the level of financial services penetration all differ. According to him, some decisions at Uzum were adaptations ('there is no point, for example, in reinventing a marketplace'), while others had to be invented from scratch because foreign solutions do not work in the local market.
Management lessons from the other recommendations
Ben Horowitz's The Hard Thing About Hard Things, according to Jumayev, is valuable for its refusal to romanticize entrepreneurship: the book examines situations where the right solution simply does not exist. Eric Ries's The Lean Startup he highlights for the principle of testing ideas early on real users — this, in his view, saves time and resources and separates the entrepreneur's assumptions from people's actual needs. He connects the book by former FBI negotiator Chris Voss with the idea that negotiation is 'a large part of an entrepreneur's work,' and that the habit of seeking compromise often leaves both sides dissatisfied. The Little Prince in his interpretation is a reminder that love, friendship, and trust cannot be measured in numbers, and that the logic of metrics should not be applied to relationships with one's team.
His attitude toward reading
Jumayev clarified that he does not consider himself a book lover in the classic sense: he has no large personal library, and he often gives books he has enjoyed to colleagues and friends. He does not view books as instructions on 'how to live correctly' and does not believe in universal recipes for success — he considers a book good if, after reading it, you start asking yourself questions. In his opinion, the more successful an entrepreneur becomes, the more important it is to keep learning, because the cost of mistakes grows along with the number of employees and customers.
