2/26/25 Update: I created a page with all 52 books I read last year. See it here.

2/27/25 Update: I’ve created a searchable library of every book I’ve read and update it weekly. See it here.

This summer, I set a goal of creating 100 podcasts about books I was reading. It forced me to start tracking my reading in a spreadsheet. It’s nerdy, but it was necessary because every week, I read a book, wrote a blog post series, and created a podcast series about each book. The spreadsheet helped me keep everything organized. I paused the latter two after the summer because they were too inefficient and time-consuming, but I kept updating the spreadsheet and reading a book a week.

I looked at the spreadsheet as I was reflecting on the books I read in 2024. I figured I’d share some stats and learnings.

High-level stat for 2024:

• Books read: 52

2024 breakdown by month:

• January: 0 (I did read, but I can’t remember what books)
• February: 2
• March: 6
• April: 6
• May: 7
• June: 5
• July: 4
• August: 5
• September: 4
• October: 3
• November: 5
• December: 5

Here are a few things I learned along the way:

• Reading two books a week was too aggressive. I tried it in the March–May period, but I wasn’t absorbing as much of what I was reading or making as many connections. I was focused on finishing the books, which isn’t why I read. The pace was too fast, so I reduced it to a book a week, which feels more sustainable.
• Sharing what I learned from my reading was the big unlock. It took my learning and thinking to another level. Writing a blog post series and recording a podcast series forced me to identify insights and organize and communicate my thinking. The key tool in that process was creating a digest of each book, which was an extraction of the information I found important in each chapter, along with my insights.
• E-readers, such as Kindles, are great devices, but I prefer reading physical books. I highlight and add notes about insightful sections and ideas in the books. Those highlights and notes are trapped in each book, so finding and using them later is difficult. See here for more. As I’ve read more, this has become a painful problem. Trying to find something sometimes means reviewing several books’ notes and highlights. Experiencing this pain led me to several feature ideas for the “book library.”
• Reading a book is simple—but learning from what I read is more involved. It’s inefficient and involves lots of steps. The process of sharing what I learn from my reading is complex. It’s hard and has many steps and lots of moving pieces. This realization led me to add several more feature ideas to the “book library.”
• The value in reading lots of entrepreneurial biographies is that you’re exposed to the best ideas and experiences of entrepreneurs, and you can pull from them when you’re faced with a problem. The challenge is that this requires a great memory or knowing exactly where to look to quickly find something you’ve read. I don’t have a photographic memory, and I don’t always remember where I read something. I want to make it easy to find what I’ve read, which will be a big part of the “book library” MVP.
• My best ideas in 2024 came from piecing ideas together from various books. Making those connections was a great way to build upon what other entrepreneurs figured out. Solving a problem by building upon the knowledge of others rather than starting from scratch led to my having better ideas. I’m not an idea guy, so this was perfect for me, and I want to do more of it going forward. I don’t think this has to be completely manual and inefficient. Figuring out how to solve this and incorporate it into the “book library” is challenging, but I think it can be done, and I’m excited to figure this out because it’ll be a huge unlock for myself and others.

Those are my takeaways and reading stats for 2024!

This week, I listened to an entrepreneur share how he took out a loan to buy out his cofounder about a year ago. The good news is that the founder now owns 100% of the company and all its upside. The bad news is that revenue has declined slightly, the company is breakeven (no profit), and the monthly debt payments are affecting the founder’s decision-making. He’s now worried about what will happen if the business can no longer generate enough cash to service the debt payments.

I don’t have enough context to say whether debt was right for that founder, but I think about taking on debt in a business using a simple framework. Here are the steps:

• Do I have a clear plan to invest the proceeds, and can that investment generate a return? If not, I won’t take on the debt. For example, I’m not comfortable taking on debt for consumption, but I’ll take on debt to invest in a project that will allow the business to generate more revenue and cash flow.
• If I use the proceeds to invest in something that generates a return, will the percentage return be higher than the interest rate on the debt? If not, I won’t take on the debt. For example, the loan has a 10% interest rate, but the project I’m planning will likely generate a 5% return. That’s not something I’d take on debt for because the return isn’t sufficient to service the debt payments.  
• Can the current business cash flows support the debt payments? If not, I’d think harder about taking on debt and be less inclined to do so if my conviction about my plan to invest the proceeds isn’t strong.

Debt is a form of leverage and a tool. It provides you with more financial resources than you typically would have from customer revenue alone. Like any tool, it’s not good or bad. How you apply the tool makes all the difference.

This week, I caught up with a friend who’s an investor at a VC fund. We talked about what’s new and what we think about the state of entrepreneurship. But then the conversation turned to what we’ve learned lately. We shared not only what books we’ve read but also why they added value and what we learned.

The conversation struck a chord with me because sharing what we’ve learned through reading added depth to it. I felt like I walked away smarter and excited to read some of the books he mentioned. Hopefully, he felt the same.

I haven’t had many conversations like this, and I want to have more of them. Talking is different when two people who are avid about learning from reading share with each other. It’s hard to explain, but it’s different. I want to explore this to see if I can have more of these conversations and to gauge whether others are interested in having more of them. Maybe this could be the basis for a niche community?

In 2024, I challenged myself to accelerate my learning by reading a book (usually a biography) a week. To date, I’ve done it for 68 consecutive weeks. I wanted to share what I was reading and also keep track for myself, which was difficult (see here), so I created a Library section on this site. I added to it all the books I’ve read since my book-a-week habit began in March 2024, and I’ve committed to adding my latest read to the Library every Sunday (see the latest here).

That left the books I’d read before 2024 unshared and untracked. I set a goal to add my old reading to the Library over time. It began with a Memorial Day Challenge to add five books (see here) and continued with my challenging myself to add two books every weekend until my backlog is gone. This past weekend was my fourth weekend, and I added two more books:

• Where the Money Is: Value Investing in the Digital Age by Adam Seessel
• Investing for Growth: How to Make Money by Only Buying the Best Companies in the World by Terry Smith

That’s the latest update on my weekend goal. I hope that sharing these books will add value to others.

I’m a first-generation entrepreneur committed to learning as much about entrepreneurship as I can. The best way I’ve found to do that is to study entrepreneurs. So, every week, I share a book that I’ve read about an entrepreneur; most are biographies. I post my latest read every Sunday in the Library on this site.

Last month, I read A Short History of Financial Euphoria by John Kenneth Galbraith. It mentioned Ivar Kreuger and the scandal surrounding the loans he made to governments in exchange for national match monopolies. I was curious, so I read a biography about Kreuger, The Match King.

The biography is well-researched with a thorough bibliography and notes section. It’s somewhat dense because of the complexity of Kreuger’s empire, but the complexity is fascinating because it gave me context. It does a great job of detailing Krueger’s rise from working construction jobs to being one of the wealthiest men in the world to being one of the biggest manufacturers of matches (this was before most homes were wired for electricity), and also mastering finance and loaning money to foreign nations (with string attached).

I enjoyed learning more about how governments financed their deficits before central banks by borrowing from financiers like Kreuger, J. P. Morgan Jr. (Jack), and the Rothschild family. Learning about the massive debt of Germany and other nations after WWI, the boom of the stock market in the roaring 1920s, its bust in the 1930s, and the impact of all this was eye opening.

Kreuger’s story was pretty wild and full of cautionary tales. Anyone interested in Kreuger or the 1920s and 1930s might enjoy The Match King.

Current Project: Reading books about entrepreneurs and sharing what I learned from them

Mission: Create a library of wisdom from notable entrepreneurs that current entrepreneurs can leverage to increase their chances of success

Cumulative metrics (since 4/1/24):

• Total books read: 68
• Total blog posts published: 441

This week’s metrics:

• Books read: 1
• Blog posts published: 7

What I completed this week (link to last week’s commitments):

• Read The Match King, a biography of entrepreneur and banker to governments Ivar Kreuger, whose international empire crumbled and was considered by many a fraud  
• Added two more books that I read in 2023, these from Phil Fisher and Edward Chancellor, to the library on this site—see more here

What I’ll do next week:

• Read a biography, autobiography, or framework book
• Add two more books that I read in 2023 to the library on this site—see more here

Asks:

• If you know any senior full-stack developers interested in working on the software for my current project, please introduce us!

Week two hundred seventy-three was another week of learning. Looking forward to next week!

Current Project: Reading books about entrepreneurs and sharing what I learned from them

Mission: Create a library of wisdom from notable entrepreneurs that current entrepreneurs can leverage to increase their chances of success

What I struggled with:

• No material struggles last week

What I learned:

• No material learnings this week

That’s what I learned and struggled with last week.

A few days ago, I posted about the Los Angeles Lakers being sold for $10 billion (see here). The team was bought in 1965 for $5.175 million by Jack Kent Cooke (see here). What a crazy increase in value: $5.175 million to $10 billion over 60 years. Looking at the average rate of growth in team value per year, or compound annual growth rate (CAGR), it’s roughly 13.5%—over 60 years.

I wanted to see how this compares to the returns of great investors. The easiest comparative is Warren Buffett, since he began investing professionally in the 1950s and just retired. According to CNBC, Buffett took over Berkshire in 1965, and from then through the end of 2024, Berkshire shares rose 5,502,284%. CNBC says that equates that to a CAGR of 19.9%. See the details here.

So, owning the Lakers turned $5.175 million into $10 billion, and that was amazing, but investing with Buffett in Berkshire would have far outpaced that, assuming you invested $5.175 million and held the entire time.

Using a reverse CAGR calculator (see here), if you invested $5.175 million in 1965 and got Buffett’s 19.9% CAGR, you’d have $277.3 billion by the end of 2024.

Ten billion dollars and $277.3 billion. That’s the difference between compounding at 13.5% and compounding at 19.9% over 60 years. That 6.4 percentage-point difference is a $267.3 billion difference!

I recently listened to an interview clip with Sam Altman, co-founder of OpenAI and ChatGPT, in which he talks about his ideas on thinking more clearly. Given the success he’s had as a start-up founder, president and partner at Y Combinator, VC investor, and CEO of OpenAI, I was curious to hear his opinions. Here are a few takeaways:

• Altman, a big fan of spiral notebooks, takes tons of notes. He’s particular about the type of notebook he uses. The notebook is a way for him to capture things, and ripping pages out allows him to easily compare and think about what he’s captured. He creates piles of crumpled notebook pages as part of his process and goes through a notebook every two to three weeks.
• Writing is important to Altman because it’s a tool that helps him think more clearly. It’s important for people to learn to write so they can learn to think more clearly.
• Altman is better at generating ideas when he’s sitting alone and writing than when he’s conversing with others.
• Anytime he gets 11 minutes or more free, often in the back of a car, he writes and thinks.
• Figuring out the balance between being with people, getting ideas, and having time alone to think and write is important. His thoughts on this reminded me of the framework I read about in A Technique for Producing Ideas.
• His weekends, with long, quiet blocks of time to think and write, are important to him.

Altman’s process is surprisingly simple and low tech: a good pen (he recommends his favorites), a spiral notebook, and time to think and write.

Given OpenAI’s dominance in the AI market, it stood out to me that he believes writing is still critical as a thinking tool and he writes regularly using pen and paper, not ChatGPT.

The interview clip with Altman is short. If you’re interested in listening to or watching it, go here.

This week, it was announced that the Buss family is selling a majority ownership in the Los Angeles Lakers at a $10 billion valuation. That’s a huge sum for a sports franchise and reportedly the richest deal for a sports team in history (see here).

When I read the headline, I immediately thought about Jack Kent Cooke and Adrian Havill’s biography of him, The Last Mogul. Cooke built a fortune in newspapers and radio in Canada working alongside Roy Thomson (think Thomson Reuters), whose family is now the wealthiest family in Canada. Cooke then moved to L.A. and purchased the Lakers in 1965. He paid what was then a record price of $5.17 million. In 1966, he spent $17 million building the famous Forum in L.A. so the Lakers and the Kings, the NHL hockey team he also owned, could play in the same arena.

Jack signed Wilt Chamberlain to the Lakers. He traded for Kareem Abdul Jabbar. And he drafted Earvin “Magic” Johnson in 1979. The Lakers won a championship under Jack and were on their way to dominating the 1980s.

But Jack ended up getting divorced and, as a result, selling the Forum, the Kings, the Lakers, and his ranch to Jerry Buss in June 1979 for $67 million. Forty-six years later, the Buss family is selling the Lakers for $10 billion.

It’s wild to think about how the valuation of the Lakers has skyrocketed. In 60 years, the team has gone from being worth a little over $5 million to being worth $10 billion. That’s a roughly 13.5% compound annual growth rate—a striking example of the power of compounding (another example here).

If you’re interested in reading more about Jack, Havill’s biography is great. I also posted a series of posts about what I learned from the book. The Lakers deals are specifically covered here and here.