Reading List

Books, newsletters, and people worth your time — for product builders and anyone trying to understand the startup and technology worlds.

Currently reading — AI

• Machines of Loving Grace — Amodei
• Human + Machine Intelligence — Daugherty & Wilson
• The Coming Wave — Suleyman
• Power and Progress — Acemoglu & Johnson
• The Mountain in the Sea — Nayler

Product & strategy

• Lenny's Podcast and Newsletter — Rachitsky
• Stratechery — Thompson
• Dan Hockenmaier on analytics and strategy
• Casey Winters on marketplaces
• Julie Zhuo on product design and culture
• Teresa Torres on user research and product decisions
• NFX on marketplace investing

The fundamentals

• Good PM, Bad PM — Horowitz
• The Hard Thing About Hard Things — Horowitz
• High Output Management — Grove
• The Mythical Man Month — Brooks
• The Lean Startup — Ries
• The Minto Pyramid Principle — Minto

Leadership & self

• 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership — Dethmer et al
• What You Do Is Who You Are — Horowitz
• Grit — Duckworth
• Emotional Intelligence — Goleman
• Mindset — Dweck
• The Score Takes Care of Itself — Walsh
• Start With Why — Sinek
• Trillion Dollar Coach — Schmidt et al

Decision making

• Anything Annie Duke writes
• Antifragile — Taleb
• Thinking, Fast and Slow — Kahneman
• Getting to Yes and Getting Past No — Fisher & Ury
• Skin in the Game — Taleb
• Algorithms to Live By — Christian & Griffiths

Strategy & systems

• 7 Powers — Helmer
• Zero to One — Thiel
• The Cold Start Problem — Chen
• The Outsiders — Thorndike
• The Innovator's Dilemma and The Innovator's Solution — Christensen
• Competitive Strategy — Porter
• The Art of War — Sun Tzu
• On War — von Clausewitz
• Thinking in Systems — Meadows
• Managing Oneself — Drucker

User experience

• The Design of Everyday Things — Norman
• Interaction Design — Preece, Rogers & Sharp
• Designing for Love
• UX Research — Goodman et al

Social ventures

• The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid — Prahalad
• Social Capital — Yunus

More worth reading

• Turn That Ship Around! — Marquet
• The Five Dysfunctions of a Team — Lencioni
• Primal Leadership — Goleman
• The Making of a Manager — Zhuo
• The Ride of a Lifetime — Iger
• Shoe Dog — Knight
• On Innovation
• The Timeless Way of Building — Alexander
• The Death and Life of Great American Cities — Jacobs
• The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces — Whyte

Fiction

• Moonglow — Chabon
• Rules of Civility — Towles
• Between the World and Me — Coates
• The Underground Railroad — Whitehead
• Homegoing — Gyasi
• Pachinko — Lee
• The Nickel Boys — Whitehead
• The Overstory — Powers
• The Garden of Evening Mists — Tan
• A Gentleman in Moscow — Towles