CONVICTION
The Beginning of Infinity
The book for the "there is no reason we can't beat them" worldview: optimism sharpened into an intellectual position.
reads.
Books I am actually pulling from. Company-building, taste, technology, cities, fiction, and anything that makes me sharper or more alive.
FOUNDER
Zero to One
For monopoly, secrets, category design, and why copying seats.aero or Rome-style products is not enough.
FOUNDER
Hackers & Painters
For the half engineer, half writer, half founder instinct, and the argument that those are really the same thing.
LEVERAGE
The Sovereign Individual
Read skeptically, but read it: internet leverage, geography, capital, and the individual becoming more powerful.
LEVERAGE
The Almanack of Naval Ravikant
A clean mental model book for leverage, specific knowledge, compounding, judgment, and not losing your soul.
CUSTOMERS
The Mom Test
Probably the highest ROI startup book right now: sharper customer calls and less fake validation.
POSITIONING
Obviously Awesome
Directly useful for SeatFinder and UltraMile positioning: making people instantly understand why it matters.
PRODUCT
Working Backwards
Amazon-style product discipline: PRFAQs, mechanisms, inputs, metrics, and operationalized high standards.
SCALING
High Growth Handbook
For after product-market fit, when the problems become hiring, boards, executives, fundraising, M&A, and scaling.
FOUNDING
The Hard Thing About Hard Things
For the ugly founder stuff: conflict, hard decisions, cash, fear, and still needing to execute.
VISION
The Dream Machine
J. C. R. Licklider and the birth of personal computing: how one person's vision becomes a technological era.
INVENTION
Dealers of Lightning
Xerox PARC, genius teams, and the tragedy of creating the future but failing to capture it.
GREAT WORK
The Art of Doing Science and Engineering
For taste, great work, and choosing problems that actually matter to a technical founder brain.
ENGINEERING
Skunk Works
Small teams, extreme engineering, secrecy, speed, constraints, and building things that feel impossible.
PRODUCT
The Design of Everyday Things
For tools that hide complexity: seeing where products create confusion, friction, and agency.
POWER
The Power Broker
For the "city changes the ceiling of your life" essay: infrastructure, cities, money, and power shaping possibility.
CITIES
The Death and Life of Great American Cities
Language for why density, streets, and proximity change who you become.
LOVE
Anna Karenina
Love, status, desire, family, society, and the consequences of choosing the wrong life.
DEPTH
The Brothers Karamazov
Spirituality, guilt, family, ambition, morality, and wanting something deeper than startup success.
SOLITUDE
Letters to a Young Poet
For when SF feels lonely, or when writing and ambition might be coming from ego instead of necessity.