Devana Open Library

Company Culture, News

The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is the man who'll get me a book I ain't read. - Abraham Lincoln

There’s this thing in our culture when it comes to books.

We encourage and motivate everyone to read more, and invest in own education. To develop their professional, personal and entrepreneurial skills.

If a company wants to grow – its people have to grow as well. We even have $10 for every book read, and reviewed on keytakeaways.io blog policy.

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I don’t think we’re too much different from majority of other tech companies that invest in developing their own people. I think everybody knows the “CFO asks CEO” anecdote.

The thing that bugged us when it comes to books (opposite to other means of developing employees) is that they can benefit a wider auditorium than Devana employees. They simply sit there on the shelves. So, once again we want to pay forward – go one step further, and try to help entire ecosystem of young (or future) entrepreneurs, product builders, marketers and engineers leverage the fact that we have 400+ books on the shelf, eager to be read. And each month the number increases.

The Devana Open Library hosts a collection of books on various topics:

  • Company building
  • Entrepreneurship
  • Engineering
  • Software development
  • Design
  • Management
  • People/employee development
  • Product development
  • Innovation
  • Branding & sales
  • Customer happiness / experience
  • Philanthropy
  • Inspiration
  • Fiction
  • Work space design
  • And a couple of books in Serbian, for those with poor English

For the past two years our doors have been open to anyone who wanted to rent out our books, discuss them, or simply talk about things we learned from them.

The open library project has been a huge success: we had over 500 great people take out our books over 5,000 times!

Devana collection of books

The list of books we have is publicly available as a Google Spreadsheet, so you can check our what we got, and whether it is currently on the shelf. The list is continually updated, so make sure to check back every now and then.

Our doors are open every Thursday from 16h – 18h, just make sure to announce yourself using the Devana Library email.

Feel free to come over for a fireside chat, a cup of coffee, see what we got and discuss the books or any other topic related to technology entrepreneurship. And of course – help yourself with any book we have.