Shoe Dog
The rawest founder memoir I've read. Knight doesn't romanticize — he shows the terror, the debt, the near-death moments that built Nike.
Phil Knight built Nike on borrowed money, borrowed time, and a kind of irrational stubbornness that looks like genius in hindsight. This book is less about building a company and more about what it costs a person to refuse to quit. The writing is unusually good for a business memoir — vivid, self-aware, occasionally funny. Required reading if you want to understand what obsession actually looks like from the inside.