Reading List: Ben Houston of ThreeKit

“Reading List” is an occasional series where we ask ecommerce professionals to name some of their favorite books and blogs and tell us why.

For this installment, we corresponded with Ben Houston. He is chief technology officer of ThreeKit, which specializes in creating images for online sellers in 3D, virtual reality, and augmented reality.

 

5 Favorite Books

“Building Products for the Enterprise: Product Management in Enterprise Software“ by Blair Reeves and Benjamin Gaines

“This is a great book by product managers at Adobe. Enterprise product management is significantly more challenging than traditional product management in software. This book helps delineate the differences in a clear fashion, including recommendations for success.”

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“The Solution Selling Fieldbook: Practical Tools, Application Exercises, Templates and Scripts for Effective Sales Execution” by Keith M. Eades, James N. Touchstone, and Timothy T. Sullivan

“This book was recommended by our sales lead, John Kim. It is a guide to selling software to enterprises. In hindsight, it all seems obvious but many people usually just wing it and sort of follow the guidelines in the book without having the structure that this book effectively communicates.”

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“Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies” by Reid Hoffman, Chris Yeh, and Bill Gates (Foreword)

“This is one of the favorite books of Godard Abel, our executive chairman. He recommended it to me. It was incredibly interesting in that it explained the unique challenges that come with rapid scaling of a company once it has achieved product-market fit. Like product management for enterprises, there are unique challenges that I would not have otherwise anticipated without this book.”

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“Physically Based Rendering: From Theory to Implementation, Third Edition” by Matt Pharr, Wenzel Jakob, and Greg Humphreys

“This book contains a wealth of knowledge about photorealistic movie graphics. It is full of very technical advice that is clear enough for a non-programmer to understand.”

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“Light Science & Magic: An Introduction to Photographic Lighting” by Fil Hunter, Steven Biver, and Paul Fuqua

“This book offers a deep dive into the complexities of lighting and the way it affects photographs. The concepts are approached in a very scientific way, and have been helpful in understanding the fundamental principles of photography.”

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5 Favorite Blogs

MIT Technology Review

“This contains many cutting-edge projects to stimulate your thinking about where technology is going. A surprising number of the far-off endeavors covered in this site end up becoming consumer or enterprise products within a couple of years.”

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WIRED

“I loved Wired as a kid. The articles were amazing. Somehow I purchased the first four years of its print run. I spent months reading through them until I had read just about every article in every issue. Very formative.”

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The Economist

“The Economist is concise and clear with an international perspective. We often lose track of what others are doing around the world.”

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Harvard Business Review

“Again, a great resource. It contains many amazing nuggets of information relevant to running a business — such as coaching, employee reviews, presentations, and the latest hiring trends.”

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Make

“This website is great for finding fun projects to do with my daughter, such as 3D printing, costume making, and simple electronics.”