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