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Recommended Reading from Tech Founders
by avergin 137 sources
Tracks and curates reading recommendations from prominent tech founders and investors across podcasts, interviews, and social media
Patrick Collison
martin_casado
Elon Musk
Most compelling: Superintelligence
- Content type: Book · Creator: Bostrom · Link:Musk’s original recommendation.
- Recommended by: Elon Musk, whose current re-share points back to the recommendation, and Martin Casado, who added the historical framing.
- Key takeaway: Musk’s endorsement is unusually direct: “Worth reading,” followed by a call to be “super careful with AI” because it is “potentially more dangerous than nukes.” Casado calls it “the book that framed people’s mental picture of the technology, three years before transformers was published” and “the legacy of Bostrom.”
- Why it matters: This is the strongest high-context reading lead in the set: one recommender supplies a concrete reason to read it—AI-risk caution—while the other presents it as a pre-Transformer reference point for how the technology was understood.
A terse but high-confidence second pick: Nature of Gothic
- Content type: Book/essay · Creator: Ruskin · Link: No direct work URL is supplied; Collison’s recommendation.
- Recommended by: Patrick Collison.
- Key takeaway: Collison says it is “the best thing I’ve read so far this year.” The post gives no summary of the work’s argument or lesson.
- Why it matters: The value here is the strength and specificity of the endorsement, not an extracted framework. Treat it as a reading lead to investigate directly rather than as a claim that Collison’s post has already explained the book.
Patrick Collison
Lenny's Podcast
Lenny Rachitsky
Most compelling: a product-and-community reading list
Tom Verilli, chief product officer at Whatnot and former CPO at Twitch, gave the clearest recommendation set in the Lenny’s Podcast interview. Asked for the two or three books he recommends most, he chose titles for the breadth of operating experience they contain and for their account of how communities form emotional attachment.
- The Hard Thing About Hard Things — book; author: Ben Horowitz. Verilli calls it “the best book written about product management,” specifically because it covers the range of things leaders must attempt, endure, and get wrong. Why it matters: This is a recommendation for the messy operating reality of product work, rather than another abstract product framework.
- The Purpose-Driven Church — book by Rick Warren. Verilli calls it the best book anyone had recommended to him. Its subject is how people emotionally invest in a group and how that investment can be deliberately engineered; he says it is worth reading for anyone working on a community product. Why it matters: The unusual recommendation translates a religious-organizing guide into a practical lens on retention, belonging, and community design.
Aesthetics as a way to think about progress
Patrick Collison’s post turns a complaint about ugly contemporary objects into a reading program about modernism, cultural continuity, stalled cultural progress, and the relationship between beauty and creation.
- Writing on “stuck culture” — essays; creator: Ted Gioia;creator page. Collison points to Gioia’s writing on why so many domains stopped advancing straightforwardly after roughly the 1990s, and asks what changed. Why it matters: It supplies an explanatory question for cultural and product stagnation instead of treating declining quality as mere nostalgia.
- Writing on beauty and creation — essays; creator: Elaine Scarry. Collison cites Scarry’s argument that beauty inspires creation, then draws the inverse possibility that ugliness inhibits it. Why it matters: It gives the aesthetics discussion a concrete hypothesis about how design quality may affect what people choose to make.
- Solzhenitsyn’s Nobel Lecture — lecture; creator: Solzhenitsyn. Collison highlights its claim that beauty has a distinctive kind of irrefutability and that “a true work of art carries its verification within itself.” Why it matters: The lecture offers a philosophical standard for discussing beauty as more than personal preference.
David Perell supplied a more concrete companion recommendation: he said his post on the decline of detail was “Inspired by” The Cultural Tutor’s thread, The Danger of Minimalist Design (& the death of detail). The thread’s title is explicit, while Perell’s accompanying argument compares a richly detailed red phone booth with a grey one and argues that removing individually minor details can collectively drain life from the built environment—even if the result is cheaper. Why it matters: It is a usable design test: evaluate not only whether simplification cuts cost, but also what accumulated detail contributes to perceived quality.
An optimistic AI-growth thesis
Garry Tan offered a strong endorsement of Andrew Ho’s long-form X post, calling it “the best white pill” and pairing it with “Growth is good” and “AI will create unimaginable economic growth.”
- “AI might be humanity’s last hope” — essay-length X post; creator: Andrew Ho;read the post. Ho’s case is more specific than a general optimism slogan: he names falling birthrates, population aging, redistribution, anti-market sentiment, and rent-seeking as long-term headwinds, then argues that AI could reverse them and restore a positive feedback loop for growth. He says he is willing to bet on stronger capabilities because he does not view AI risk as extinction-level. Why it matters: It is a compact statement of the pro-growth case for AI, with explicit premises and a proposed mechanism rather than a bare prediction.
Patrick Collison
Tim Sweeney
Lean
Most compelling: Ugly architecture stops homes getting built
- Content type: Essay from Works in Progress.
- Author/creator: SCP Hughes (@SCP_Hughes). Link:Works in Progress.
- Recommended by: Patrick Collison, who calls it an important contribution for anyone interested in material progress.
- Key takeaway: The essay argues that ugliness is not chiefly a driver of opposition from local residents; instead, unattractive modernist architecture helped mobilize a broader, nonlocal backlash that made heritage conservation restrictive and slowed redevelopment.
- Why it matters: It offers a useful causal lens on housing scarcity: conservation is concentrated in economically important city centers, displacing development toward the periphery, while central densification would create housing where it is most needed and contribute to growth.
Postmortem for Kernel Soundness Bug #14576
- Content type: Technical blog post and incident postmortem.
- Author/creator: The Lean project / Lean FRO. Link:Postmortem for Kernel Soundness Bug #14576.
- Recommended by: Tim Sweeney, who calls the response an exemplary handling of a Lean theorem-prover and proof-verifier bug.
- Key takeaway: An AI-assisted,
sorry-free “disproof” of the Collatz conjecture exposed a kernel implementation bug that could make Lean accept a proof ofFalse; the issue was reduced to a small reproduction and fixed within an hour, with new patch releases issued. - Why it matters: The postmortem is a concrete resource for anyone using AI in formal systems: it explains why an untrusted elaborator must remain separated from an independently soundness-checking kernel, then documents regression tests, follow-up hardening, and ongoing independent checking.
Francis Fleming
Elon Musk
Patrick Collison
Most compelling: The Winged Gospel
- Content type: Book
- Author/creator: Not named in the interview; no URL supplied.
- Recommended by: Patrick Collison.
- Key takeaway: Collison introduces it as “a great book” while describing how aviation-era enthusiasts believed civilization had entered an entirely new era. He uses that analogy to temper today’s millenarian AI narratives, then says he would “take the under” on this being the last couple of years in which people can create companies.
- Why it matters: This is the strongest recommendation because it comes with a reusable test for “now or never” claims about AI and entrepreneurship: compare the present’s transformative rhetoric with earlier technologies whose social effects were real but less total than their advocates predicted.
A strategic AI interview: Sam Altman with Patrick O’Shaughnessy
- Content type: Podcast/video interview
- Title/participants: Patrick O’Shaughnessy’s conversation with Sam Altman, identified in Packy McCormick’s newsletter as Sam’s Invest Like the Best appearance.
- Link:Packy McCormick’s post containing the conversation
- Recommended by: Packy McCormick.
- Key takeaway: Packy calls the conversation a “masterclass” in how Altman communicates about AI. The episode announcement lists Kimi, distillation and open source, OpenAI’s compute bets, the Hugging Face incident, life after AGI, and raising children amid abundant intelligence. Packy’s own takeaway is that he is biased toward seeing “AI as more oil than god,” but the interview made him wonder whether an oil-like AI system would need to become even larger to sustain long-term exponential growth at this scale.
- Why it matters: The recommendation has a concrete analytical payoff rather than resting on guest prominence alone: it connects OpenAI’s communication strategy to a question about the scale and economics required to keep AI’s growth trajectory going.
Mark Steyn’s demographic clip
- Content type: Short video clip
- Creator: Mark Steyn
- Link:Original post with the clip
- Recommended by: Elon Musk, in a quote-post.
- Key takeaway: The original post identifies the clip as from 2010 and presents Steyn’s argument that a population split between 90% having 1.3 children per couple and 10% having 3.5 would produce roughly equal numbers of grandchildren in two generations. Musk calls the clip “extremely important to understand,” restates the point as a blended Western fertility rate, and concludes: “Demographics is destiny.”
- Why it matters: It is a compact statement of the demographic lens Musk is elevating. Treat it as a thesis to investigate rather than a substitute for a full demographic study; its value here is the clarity of the frame and the unusually explicit endorsement.
Garry Tan
jack
Tim Ferriss
Most compelling: The End Times — Peter Turchin
- Content type: Book
- Author: Peter Turchin
- Recommended by: Jack Mallers, in Jack Mallers: Why I Left 21
Mallers explicitly says he would recommend that everyone read The End Times. He describes Turchin’s method as applying science and mathematics to recurring patterns in the rise and collapse of empires. The framework’s two leading indicators are declining real wage growth—prices rising faster than compensation—and “elite overproduction,” in which too many aspirant elites compete for too few positions; Mallers says the combination produces revolutionary tendencies.
Why it matters: This is the strongest recommendation because it comes with a usable analytical lens rather than general praise: two concrete conditions readers can examine when evaluating claims about institutional or imperial decline.
The practical founder pick: Sales Like That — Pete Kazanjy
- Content type: Book
- Author: Pete Kazanjy
- Recommended by: Garry Tan, in his YC interview
Tan says YC gives every founder a copy of Kazanjy’s book. Its central mindset shift is to normalize rejection: 95 no’s out of 100 calls can still be a 5% conversion rate, and five enterprise contracts worth $10,000–$100,000 per year make that outcome a major win.
Why it matters: The recommendation turns an emotionally punishing sales process into conversion math. It is especially useful for founders who mistake a high count of rejected outreaches for evidence that the business is failing.
Science and craft recommendations from Tim Ferriss’s interviews
Longitude — Dava Sobel
- Content type: Book
- Author: Dava Sobel
- Recommended by: Andrew Huberman, on The Tim Ferriss Show
Huberman calls Longitude the book he gifts most often: a short, accessible account of solving the practical problem of timekeeping at sea. He praises the way it combines a technological and scientific challenge with adventure and real-world risk.
Why it matters: It is a compact case study in how an abstract scientific problem becomes an engineering problem with consequential constraints—an accessible entry point even for readers without a science background.
Projections — Karl Deisseroth
- Content type: Book
- Author: Karl Deisseroth
- Recommended by: Andrew Huberman, on The Tim Ferriss Show
Huberman describes Deisseroth’s book as a “beautiful read” about the landscape of psychiatry and the attempt to build tools for manipulating the nervous system that are better than drugs; he adds that readers will learn a great deal of neuroscience.
Why it matters: The appeal is both narrative and technical: it offers a route into neuroscience through a researcher’s account of what better intervention tools might look like.
Of Wolves and Men — Barry Lopez
- Content type: Book
- Author: Barry Lopez
- Recommended by: Tim Ferriss, during his conversation with Joyce Carol Oates
Ferriss says the book impressed him enough that he tried to reach Lopez, only to learn the author was in hospice and died shortly afterward. He was about to begin Lopez’s memoir and said that reading the collected works could change not only how he viewed the craft of writing but also how he looked at life.
Why it matters: This is a personal, experience-backed literary recommendation rather than a title drop: Ferriss connects one book to a broader plan to read an author’s work as a way to change his creative perspective.
Free NSDR/yoga-nidra recordings
- Content type: Free video/audio resources
- Creators named: Kamini Daidesai and Liam Gillan
- Recommended by: Andrew Huberman, on The Tim Ferriss Show
Huberman points listeners to free yoga-nidra recordings on YouTube and names Daidesai and Gillan as examples, emphasizing that listeners should choose a voice they like. He frames yoga nidra and related non-sleep deep-rest practices as zero-cost tools for rest and learning, and says two Cell Reports papers found that a 20-minute protocol after intense focus accelerated plasticity by about 50%.
Why it matters: It is the list’s most immediately actionable resource: a specific, no-cost practice with a research rationale that readers can investigate further rather than a paid product recommendation.
A carefully qualified current-affairs resource
“The Covid Origins Saga Is More Complicated Than Either Side Wants to Admit” — Katherine Eban
- Content type: Article
- Author: Katherine Eban
- Recommended by: Bill Gurley, who called it a “Great summary” with “Useful detail for all”
- Link:Rolling Stone feature on the Covid-origins saga and Fauci hearing
The feature says there is no “smoking gun” proving either a laboratory accident or a natural jump, while newly released documents show that some officials and scientists privately considered a lab leak credible or equally likely even as they publicly argued against it. It concludes that the hearing did not resolve the question and that the uncertainty surrounding the evidence made a definitive conclusion harder.
Why it matters: Gurley’s recommendation is useful as a map of the evidence and its uncertainty, not as a claim that the origin question has been settled.
Tim Ferriss
Patrick OShaughnessy
Tim Ferriss
Most compelling: "The Tail End" by Tim Urban
- Content type: Blog post (Wait But Why)
- Author: Tim Urban
- Recommended by: Tim Ferriss, who received it from Matt Mullenweg
Ferriss credits Mullenweg for introducing him to the post, which visualizes that by the time you graduate from high school, you've spent something like 90–95% of the total hours you will ever spend with your parents . Reading it prompted Ferriss to take family trips despite the discomfort—his family "doesn't really emote much"—because "this runway is not infinite" .
Why it matters: The recommendation carries a chain of provenance (Mullenweg → Ferriss → action) and a quantified insight that converts an abstract realization into behavioral change. It is the period's most compelling pick because the endorsement is backed by a specific, measurable claim and a documented change in behavior.
Tim Ferriss's Q&A: a resource map for the AI age
In a Q&A episode on "Reinvention in The Age of AI," Ferriss fielded questions about navigating the coming decade and organized his recommendations around meta-skills he believes will remain constant: "learning, asking questions, written and verbal communications and negotiating" .
Awareness by Anthony De Mello
- Content type: Book
- Recommended by: Tim Ferriss
Ferriss reads it at least once a year for introspection and steering toward internal rather than external validation, pairing it with IFS (Internal Family Systems), a framework he says "nearly anyone can benefit from" .
"There Are Always More Than Two Options" by Derek Sivers
- Content type: Blog post
- Author: Derek Sivers
- Link: siv.rsoptions
- Recommended by: Tim Ferriss
When people say they have two options, they're stuck—once they start comparing pros and cons of those two, they forget to think of more. Sivers provides concrete alternatives: build your new company outside work hours until side income hits 50% of salary, then quit; or show up to your job but secretly work on your own company until you get fired. After exploring more options, one friend realized he didn't actually want to start a business—he was just avoiding fixing his current situation .
On Writing Well by William Zinsser
- Content type: Book
- Recommended by: Tim Ferriss
Recommended as part of written communication, one of the meta-skills Ferriss says will not be displaced by AI. He notes that writing is how you figure out what you think—quoting Kevin Kelly, "he doesn't write what he knows. He writes in order to better understand what he thinks" .
Negotiation books
- Secrets of Power Negotiating by Roger Dawson — "had a huge impact on me"
- Getting Past No — "had a large impact on me"
- Getting to Yes (co-author William Ury) — Ferriss interviewed Ury on his podcast
Ferriss frames negotiation as a meta-skill for crafting win-win deal structures that won't go away with AI .
Blue Ocean Strategy by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne
- Content type: Book
- Recommended by: Tim Ferriss
"It is going to be increasingly critical and important and certainly for a lot of businesses existential in the coming years. This is going to become more and more valuable real estate to figure out how to navigate" .
Jonathan Haidt's books and research
- Content type: Books and research
- Recommended by: Tim Ferriss
Ferriss directs youth mental health practitioners to look "very very closely" at Haidt's work—not only his books but his research group, which has "changed certain legislation on a state-by-state basis for restricting phone use in schools" .
Michel Thomas method (language learning)
- Content type: Audio courses
- Recommended by: Tim Ferriss
"Outstanding" for acquiring the fundamentals of a language in a week or two. The courses Thomas recorded himself (French, Spanish, Italian, German) are "world class," and even the Korean course—taught by others using his method, which made Ferriss skeptical—was "awesome" .
"The Last Time" by Sam Harris
- Content type: Audiobook chapter / meditation
- Author: Sam Harris
- Recommended by: Tim Ferriss
A meditation on experiences you don't recognize as the last time. Harris went skiing repeatedly, then stopped, not realizing that would be the last time .
Aaron Levie on Dwarkesh Patel's compute cost post
- Content type: Blog post
- Author: Dwarkesh Patel
- Link:dwarkesh.com/p/why-compute-might-get-10x-more-expensive
- Recommended by: Aaron Levie
Levie called the post "thought provoking" and engaged substantively rather than merely endorsing it. He agreed with the core thesis: as AI gets more powerful, inference should flow toward the most economically useful tasks, pricing out everything else, which in a scarce environment could cause inference costs to skyrocket . But he pushed back, arguing that "too many model providers and infra players want these workloads" for the proposed effect to hold, and that market forces will compete to drive down prices until capacity catches up . The original post frames the question around what would be true if a leading lab hits $1T in revenue by the end of next year .
Why it matters: Levie uses the post as a sparring partner, articulating where he agrees and where he diverges. The recommendation is valuable precisely because the engagement is substantive rather than promotional.
Sarah Guo's picks
Stories of changed intelligence
- Content type: Books / fiction
- Recommended by: Sarah Guo
In response to her own prompt—"best stories on a changed level of intelligence?"—Guo offered six titles: Flowers for Algernon, The Culture series, Sirius, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, More Than Human, and Understand.
NYT Opinion article by Clay Routledge
- Content type: Article (New York Times Opinion)
- Author: Clay Routledge
- Recommended by: Sarah Guo
Guo strongly agreed with the piece's argument that "the trend of calling every challenge a 'disorder' weakens the ability to face those challenges and flourish" .
Patrick O'Shaughnessy's conversation prompt from Boyd Varty
- Content type: Conversation prompt / technique
- Origin: Boyd Varty
- Recommended by: Patrick O'Shaughnessy
O'Shaughnessy calls the prompt "something I don't want you to know about me"—which he got from his friend Boyd Varty—"one of my all time favorite conversation starters/deepeners." Answered honestly, it leads to "awesome discussions" .
All items above are organic recommendations made in social posts or long-form interviews; no sponsored, paid, or self-promotional material is included. Recommendations excluded as self-promotional: Sam Altman endorsing an OpenAI blog post, Jack Dorsey linking to Block's engineering blog, and David Perell and Shaan Puri promoting their own podcast episodes.
Mark Zuckerberg
Aaron Levie
Palmer Luckey
Most compelling: Zuckerberg's superintelligence letter
- Content type: Article / letter (shared on X)
- Author: Mark Zuckerberg
- Link:x.com/finkd/status/2082160210399948869
- Recommended by: Aaron Levie, Tobi Lütke, Alexandr Wang, Satya Nadella, David Sacks
Zuckerberg wrote that "we believe the future is for everyone," previewing a positive vision for a world with superintelligence . Five prominent tech leaders independently endorsed the piece within hours—the period's strongest multi-recommender signal.
Alexandr Wang distilled its guiding principles as "individual empowerment, invention over automation, and balance of power through broad access rather than concentrated control" . David Sacks quoted Zuckerberg directly: "The defining question of our age isn't whether superintelligence will exist, but who will have access to it. Will it be centralized and restricted to a few institutions, or will it be a tool that empowers everyone?" Sacks extended the argument, calling concentration of power "the biggest risk of AI" and framing broad access and transparency as the path to actual security rather than regulatory capture .
Aaron Levie called it a "Great piece and vision for AI" . Tobi Lütke called it a "great read" . Satya Nadella tied it to building "a frontier ecosystem that empowers people and orgs everywhere" .
Why it matters: Five leaders across competing AI ecosystems—Meta, Microsoft, Shopify, Box, and Scale AI—converged on the same decentralization argument in the same window. The endorsement pattern itself is the signal: the open-access-versus-control framing is becoming a shared industry position, not a single company's talking point.
A technical walkthrough: "22580: From GPT2 to Kimi3, Explained"
- Content type: Technical article / worklog
- Author: @waterloo_intern (described by Guo as baseten's "intern")
- Link:x.com/i/article/2077616768491585536
- Recommended by: Sarah Guo
Sarah Guo called it a "Great write up on technical innovations in Kimi3 that all can use" . The article traces major architectural developments from GPT-2 (2019) to KimiK3 (2026), framing the journey around a single number: 22,580 GPT-2 models fit inside one KimiK3, a scale-up factor achieved in seven years. It then asks whether that progress is "just... scale" or reflects genuine architectural change, walking through decoder-only architecture, KV caching, and memory mechanisms along the way .
Why it matters: Guo's endorsement emphasizes practicality—"innovations that all can use"—making this a directly accessible technical resource for builders tracking how frontier model architecture has evolved, rather than a marketing announcement.
Palmer Luckey's formative read: "Assassination Politics" by Jim Bell
- Content type: Essay (1996)
- Author: Jim Bell
- Originally published on: Outpost of Freedom website
- Recommended by: Palmer Luckey (in a YouTube interview)
In a long-form interview, Luckey described reading Jim Bell's 1996 essay "Assassination Politics" as a pivotal moment. Bell predicted the emergence of "a cryptographically verifiable semi-anonymous cryptocurrency" and argued it would make large-scale oppressive government unfeasible through anonymous crowdsourced bounty systems . Luckey said the essay prompted him to search for whether such a technology actually existed—leading him to Bitcoin at its ground floor, before any exchanges existed .
Why it matters: Luckey credits a specific essay as the intellectual bridge between a science-fiction idea and his earliest Bitcoin involvement. It is a rare first-person account of the reading that triggered a consequential early bet.
Garry Tan's pick: Nothing Left by Evan W. Chen
- Content type: Book (political memoir)
- Author: Evan W. Chen
- Link:x.com/evanwch/status/2082093236063998261
- Recommended by: Garry Tan
Tan endorsed the book as "Important" for "explaining what is going wrong with the Dem party and how we bring it back to common sense" . Chen described it as his political memoir, released the same day .
Why it matters: Tan's recommendation is concise but deliberate—a Y Combinator leader singling out a political memoir on launch day signals he sees it as relevant to the current policy moment, not a casual mention.
David Perell's pick: the Michael Ovitz biography
- Content type: Book (biography)
- Author: Not specified by Perell
- Recommended by: David Perell
Perell said the most striking part of the Ovitz biography was learning the upper limits of corporate gift giving: Ovitz's gifts office spent roughly $500,000 per year, one of five assistants was solely responsible for gifts, and the guiding rule was "no disposable gifts"—nothing rinse-and-repeat like wine or champagne, but bespoke items such as first edition books or collectible coins tailored to each recipient's interests .
Why it matters: Perell extracted a specific, actionable principle—personalized over generic giving—from a biography, which is a stronger endorsement signal than a passing title mention. The detail about a dedicated gifts assistant tracking clients' hobbies and charities makes the practice concrete.
Amjad Masad's pick: the Erdős problems thread
- Content type: X thread
- Author: @Qiaoqiao2001
- Link:x.com/Qiaoqiao2001/status/2080003441821163958
- Recommended by: Amjad Masad
Masad recommended a thread in which @Qiaoqiao2001 described solving six open Erdős problems in five days using OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol, with a Codex workflow that "does not require deep mathematical knowledge" . Masad framed it as evidence of a new era: "Our generation may explore the computational universe: the vast space of algorithms, programs, proofs, and designs that AI agents can search" .
Why it matters: Masad's endorsement elevates a practitioner thread into a thesis about AI as an exploration tool for mathematics. The thread includes the author's prompts and workflow, making it a reproducible resource rather than a claim.
All items above are organic recommendations made in social posts or long-form interviews; no sponsored, paid, or self-promotional material is included.
Gadi Evron
Brad Feld
Tony Fadell
Most compelling: Post mortem analysis of the Hugging Face incident
- Content type: Security post-mortem / report
- Author/creator: Hundreds of CISOs; reviewed by Hugging Face
- Link:Cloud Security Alliance artifact
- Recommended by: Martin Casado
- Key takeaway: The report was produced collectively over a weekend by hundreds of CISOs and reviewed by Hugging Face. Casado presents it as an example of the security community mobilizing around emerging AI threats.
- Why it matters: It is the day’s most compelling pick because it is a directly accessible, practitioner-led resource on an AI-security incident—not merely a general endorsement. Casado’s recommendation argues that broad industry participation and openness can strengthen responses to new security issues.
Tony Fadell’s picks: negotiation, perception, and decision-making
Getting to Yes
- Content type: Book
- Author/creator: William Ury and others
- Link: No direct book URL supplied; recommendation context
- Recommended by: Tony Fadell
- Key takeaway: Fadell describes the book as being about making the case for why someone should say yes to a proposal.
- Why it matters: It is a focused recommendation for readers who want to improve how they frame proposals and communicate their rationale.
In Praise of Shadows
- Content type: Book
- Author/creator: Not identified in the supplied material
- Link: No direct book URL supplied; recommendation context
- Recommended by: Tony Fadell
- Key takeaway: Fadell says he regularly gives this book as a gift.
- Why it matters: A book someone repeatedly gives away is a stronger signal than a passing mention: it is a resource Fadell chooses to share with others.
Thinking, Fast and Slow
- Content type: Book
- Author/creator: Daniel Kahneman
- Link: No direct book URL supplied; recommendation context
- Recommended by: Tony Fadell
- Key takeaway: Fadell returns to the book because its ideas make him reflect both on the material and on his own life.
- Why it matters: It stands out as a reread rather than a one-time recommendation, making it a useful candidate for sustained reflection on judgment and decision-making.
Brad Feld’s builder shelf: making, world-building, and human–machine questions
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
- Content type: Book
- Author/creator: Robert Pirsig
- Link: No direct book URL supplied; recommendation context
- Recommended by: Brad Feld
- Key takeaway: Feld recommends it to entrepreneurs and says it is a book that anyone who makes things should read; he has revisited it every few years since high school.
- Why it matters: This is Feld’s clearest high-conviction book endorsement and the strongest fit for builders looking for a frequently revisited work rather than a tactical manual.
Neuromancer and Snow Crash
- Content type: Science-fiction books
- Author/creator: William Gibson; Neal Stephenson
- Link: No direct book URLs supplied; recommendation context
- Recommended by: Brad Feld
- Key takeaway: Feld highlights Neuromancer for its early anticipation of technological and social dynamics, including AI and politics. He values Snow Crash for both its technology and geopolitical imagination.
- Why it matters: Together, they illustrate Feld’s view that science fiction can be a way to examine current society through constructed futures.
Hyperion
- Content type: Science-fiction book series
- Author/creator: Dan Simmons
- Link: No direct book URL supplied; recommendation context
- Recommended by: Brad Feld
- Key takeaway: Feld describes the Hyperion Cantos as a multi-century narrative combining AI-versus-human questions with religion, society, gender, augmentation, and geopolitics.
- Why it matters: It is a dense choice for readers who want speculative fiction that deliberately connects technological questions with social systems.
Dune
- Content type: Science-fiction book
- Author/creator: Frank Herbert
- Link: No direct book URL supplied; recommendation context
- Recommended by: Brad Feld
- Key takeaway: Feld praises its world-building and says readers can learn leadership lessons from it.
- Why it matters: It is Feld’s explicit bridge between a canonical fictional world and leadership learning.
Exhalation and The Paper Menagerie
- Content type: Short-story collections
- Author/creator: Ted Chiang; Ken Liu
- Link: No direct book URLs supplied; recommendation context
- Recommended by: Brad Feld
- Key takeaway: Feld highly recommends Chiang’s Exhalation and also recommends Liu’s The Paper Menagerie. He characterizes both as accessible short-story collections with depth, without requiring the commitment of a long novel.
- Why it matters: These are practical entry points for readers who want speculative fiction with substantive ideas in a lower-commitment format.
The Philosophy of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
- Content type: Psychology / philosophy book
- Author/creator: Donald Robertson
- Link: No direct book URL supplied; recommendation context
- Recommended by: Brad Feld
- Key takeaway: Feld found the book interesting and recommends it as a resource for people curious about CBT.
- Why it matters: It is the most direct non-fiction companion to Feld’s fiction-heavy list, aimed at readers exploring cognitive behavioral therapy and its Stoic framing.
Battlestar Galactica
- Content type: Television series
- Creator: Not identified in the supplied material
- Link: No direct series URL supplied; recommendation context
- Recommended by: Brad Feld
- Key takeaway: Feld values the series for its treatment of humans and machines, the evolution of both, and the social boundaries that follow. He sees world-building as a core strength of science fiction.
- Why it matters: It extends the day’s recurring theme beyond books: imagined worlds can help readers and viewers interrogate human–machine relationships and society.
All items above are organic recommendations made in a social post or long-form interview; no sponsored, paid, or self-promotional material is included.
Guillermo Rauch
Andrew Wilkinson
David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH)
Most compelling: Software 2.0 — Andrew Karpathy
- Content type: Essay
- Author: Andrew Karpathy
- Link: No direct essay URL was supplied. Recommendation context
- Recommended by: Guillermo Rauch
- Key takeaway: Rauch calls the essay “canon” and says everybody should read it. He describes its central distinction as deterministic, explicitly coded “Software 1.0” versus systems trained on data, where behavior is probabilistic and can exhibit emergent properties.
- Why it matters: It offers a concise conceptual frame for builders working with AI: the task shifts from specifying every branch of a program to training models and discovering what their learned capabilities can do.
“Everybody must read this because it’s so ahead of its time.”
Operating discipline and durable teams
Profit First
- Content type: Business book
- Author: Not identified in the supplied material
- Link: No direct book URL was supplied. Recommendation context
- Recommended by: Andrew Wilkinson
- Key takeaway: Wilkinson endorses the framework of taking profit from revenue immediately—using an example of removing $30 from every $100—then making the business operate on what remains. He compares it to eating from a smaller plate: constraints make people more deliberate about expenses.
- Why it matters: Wilkinson sees the approach as a way to create spending discipline, particularly in smaller companies, and has asked his CEOs to read it.
Kathy Sierra’s writings
- Content type: Product, user psychology, and marketing writing
- Author: Kathy Sierra
- Link: No direct resource URL was supplied. Recommendation context
- Recommended by: David Heinemeier Hansson
- Key takeaway: DHH calls Sierra one of his all-time greatest writers on what motivates users and makes products effective. He highlights her idea that the best marketing is to “out teach your competition.”
- Why it matters: DHH credits that teaching-over-spending approach to Sierra’s internet writing in the mid-2000s and describes it as foundational to 37signals’ success.
Incorruptible — Eric Ries
- Content type: Business and organizational-culture book
- Author: Eric Ries
- Link: No direct book URL was supplied. Recommendation context
- Recommended by: Diane Penn, Head of Product, AI Research & Labs at Anthropic
- Key takeaway: Penn values Ries’s reframing from simply building great companies to sustaining great teams and companies. She highlights examples of using culture metrics rather than revenue alone to preserve the values an organization cares about.
- Why it matters: The book is a useful prompt for teams that want to articulate their norms and measure more than financial output.
Crucial Conversations
- Content type: Management and communication book
- Author: Not identified in the supplied material
- Link: No direct book URL was supplied. Recommendation context
- Recommended by: Diane Penn
- Key takeaway: Penn uses the book to prepare for difficult discussions and to judge the appropriate level of detail in the moment. She says it helps her become a better manager and coach.
- Why it matters: This is a practical recommendation for leaders seeking a repeatable way to approach high-stakes conversations rather than treating them as purely improvisational.
A personal-development pick
How to Raise an Adult
- Content type: Parenting book
- Author: Not identified in the supplied material
- Link: No direct book URL was supplied. Recommendation context
- Recommended by: Diane Penn
- Key takeaway: Penn recommends the book for its framing that the aim is not simply to raise children, but to develop adults—and for the question of which characteristics parents should foster.
- Why it matters: It supplies a clear lens for thinking deliberately about the traits and capabilities being developed over time.
Elon Musk
Palmer Luckey
Andrew Wilkinson
Most compelling: John Bogle’s low-cost investing framework
John Bogle’s little black book on investing
- Content type: Investing book
- Author: John Bogle
- Link: No direct resource URL was supplied. Recommendation context
- Recommended by: Palmer Luckey
- Key takeaway: Luckey says the book most informed his investing philosophy: keep fees and costs low, invest with the market, and do not try to outperform it through market transactions. He distinguishes that from building wealth by building companies.
- Why it matters: This is the day’s strongest pick because it offers a concrete decision framework rather than a general endorsement: focus effort on company building, while keeping investment costs low and avoiding attempts to outsmart the market.
Practical finance: focus on the high-impact numbers
I Will Teach You to Be Rich
- Content type: Personal-finance book
- Author: Ramit Sethi
- Link: No direct resource URL was supplied. Recommendation context
- Recommended by: Andrew Wilkinson
- Key takeaway: Wilkinson credits the book with shifting his attention from small expenses such as lattes to percentages—specifically credit-card and mortgage interest rates, along with real-estate fees.
- Why it matters: It provides a simple prioritization rule for personal-finance decisions: examine the recurring rates and fees that can have a larger effect than minor spending cuts.
10k diver
- Content type: X account / finance threads
- Creator: 10k diver
- Link: No direct account URL was supplied. Recommendation context
- Recommended by: Sean
- Key takeaway: Sean recommends the account for clear threads on finance fundamentals.
- Why it matters: It is a lightweight alternative to a book-length resource for readers looking to revisit foundational finance concepts in thread form.
Business biographies and unconventional history
Founders
- Content type: Podcast
- Creator: David Senra
- Link: No direct podcast URL was supplied. Recommendation context
- Recommended by: Andrew Wilkinson
- Key takeaway: Wilkinson is “absolutely obsessed” with the podcast, which summarizes business biographies. He uses the summaries both for a cursory understanding of a person and to decide whether a full biography merits the time.
- Why it matters: The format offers a practical filter for biography-driven learning: get the central lessons first, then commit to the longer source selectively.
The Operator
- Content type: Biography
- Author: Not identified in the supplied material
- Link: No direct resource URL was supplied. Recommendation context
- Recommended by: Andrew Wilkinson
- Key takeaway: Wilkinson highlights the book about David Geffen as a favorite from the previous year and calls it fascinating.
- Why it matters: It is a direct, high-conviction biography recommendation from a founder who already spends considerable time with business biographies.
Blitz
- Content type: History book
- Author: Not identified in the supplied material
- Link: No direct resource URL was supplied. Recommendation context
- Recommended by: Sam
- Key takeaway: Sam named Blitz his book of the year; it examines drug use during World War II.
- Why it matters: The recommendation points to an unconventional lens on a heavily studied historical period.
Long-horizon thinking
Foundation series
- Content type: Science-fiction book series
- Author: Isaac Asimov
- Link: No direct resource URL was supplied. Recommendation post
- Recommended by: Elon Musk
- Key takeaway: Musk describes Asimov’s series as a major influence. Alongside the fall of Rome—the historical inspiration for Foundation—it shaped his view that consciousness should extend beyond Earth to avoid a potentially infinite dark age.
- Why it matters: This is a clear example of fiction serving as a long-range intellectual frame: Musk explicitly connects the series’ historical inspiration to his view of civilizational continuity.
Think on These Things
- Content type: Philosophy book
- Author: Krishnamurti
- Link: No direct resource URL was supplied. Recommendation context
- Recommended by: Sean
- Key takeaway: Sean describes the book as a life-philosophy resource that he loves.
- Why it matters: It is the day’s most direct recommendation for readers seeking a philosophical complement to the investing, finance, and business-focused selections.