The key facts
- Jasur Jumayev recommends five books: Saint-Exupéry, Horowitz, Ries, Thiel, and Voss
- He explains his choices through his own experience of building Uzum: adapting foreign models and a culture of experimentation
- In his view, the more responsibility a leader carries, the more important reading becomes
Five books from the founder of Uzum
Jasur Jumayev, founder and CEO of the Uzum ecosystem, has revealed which books influenced his thinking, in a column for Spot.uz. The list includes Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince, Ben Horowitz's The Hard Thing About Hard Things, Eric Ries's The Lean Startup, Peter Thiel's Zero to One, and Chris Voss's Never Split the Difference. All five titles are available on the Uzum marketplace, making the selection not only a personal recommendation but, in effect, a showcase of his own platform.
How the books connect to the Uzum experience
The value of the piece lies not in the list itself, but in how each book is tied to a specific experience of Jumayev's. Zero to One he discusses through the differences between markets: in his words, Uzum has 'proven by its own example that ready-made business models cannot simply be transferred from one country to another' — user behavior, infrastructure, and the penetration of financial services all differ. Some solutions the company adapted ('there is no point, for example, in reinventing a marketplace from scratch'), while others it came up with from the ground up. Eric Ries's The Lean Startup he links to a culture of early hypothesis testing on real users, while Never Split the Difference by former FBI negotiator Chris Voss he connects to negotiations as 'a big part of an entrepreneur's work': with the team, suppliers, and regulators.
A view on reading
Jumayev emphasized that he does not see books as instructions on 'how to build a successful business' and does not believe in universal recipes. In his view, a good book is one after which you start asking yourself questions, and even a single idea taken from it at the right moment can repay the time spent. He also noted that the more successful an entrepreneur is, the more important it is to keep learning: when decisions affect thousands of employees and millions of customers, the cost of a mistake grows. He does not build a large library and often gives books he likes to colleagues.
