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 caught up with a founder friend. His company is early-stage, and he’s at an inflection point. They have early customers, and revenue is growing at a moderate clip. But he has a nagging feeling that his market isn’t the ideal market to build a company in. There are lots of competitors, and prices are going down quickly, which is pressuring his margins. His customers could build a comparable solution in-house, but they use his solution because it’s cheaper, for now, than building it themselves. Translation: his customers will build something in-house if they start spending too much with his company. Last, his customers view his solution as a nice-to-have, not a must-have.

The founder is trying to figure out whether he should keep pushing through with his current product. He doesn’t want to feel like he’s giving up too early.

I thought about Felix Dennis and his book How to Get Rich as we chatted. The book is about how to succeed as an entrepreneur, which leads to wealth—it’s not just about how to get rich. One thing Dennis shared was that entrepreneurs need to be persistent. They need to have conviction that they’re right and will be proven right (hopefully shortly). Conversely, though, Dennis said that entrepreneurs shouldn’t be stubborn, which means you’re persisting even when there’s plenty of evidence that you’re wrong or that you shouldn’t persist. In a post about this book (see here), I shared the following:

Acknowledging a mistake and realizing a new plan is needed are signs of clear thinking and help focus your persistence on the right activities. The most successful people I know are persistent but also rational and clear thinkers.

I’m not sure what my friend will do, but I shared with him that giving up on something doesn’t mean you aren’t persistent if the data and the market are telling you it isn’t working. It’s an opportunity to redirect your energy and persist toward the right thing.

My takeaway from this chat and Dennis’s book is that I want to be persistent but not stubborn. I want to think rationally in choosing what to work on and be persistent about the right things.

When I chat with other founders about what I’ve learned from biographies, I try to understand how they learn and ask them about their reading habits. Many have said they want to read more but don’t have the time or haven’t made time. In other words, entrepreneurs have an execution problem around reading. They know the benefits and want to do it, but picking up a book and reading is challenging.

This weekend, I was thinking about the focus sessions I’ve been doing with my developer friend (see here). They’re scheduled execution sessions on video that are focused on deep work. I love them because they’re about executing on something high priority, they add accountability and a feeling of teamwork, and they’re scheduled.

I started wondering if this format could be useful for entrepreneurs who want to find solutions to their most pressing problems by reading (not leisure reading). Could bringing entrepreneurs together early mornings on video to read books help them overcome their execution problem around reading?

I did some research and found groups that are doing something similar: scheduled video sessions for people who want to be more productive and do more deep work. One group has over 1,500 paid members around the world.

I’m going to do more customer discovery on this execution problem entrepreneurs have around reading to understand what a solution to the problem could look like. Maybe it’s focus sessions; maybe it’s something else.

This weekend, I finished reading Direct from Dell: Strategies That Revolutionized an Industry, which is the autobiography of Michael Dell. The book was first published in 1998, so it covers only Michael’s (remarkable!) early journey. Michael turned $1,000 in 1984 into a company doing over $12 billion in revenue during the fiscal year ending February 1, 1998. That’s an astonishing level of growth in 14 years.

Michael is an incredible entrepreneur. He was in his early thirties when this book was published. A lot of Dell’s success can be attributed to him as its leader. (Side note: He’s still CEO over 25 years later.) But in the book, Michael highlighted another factor that led to Dell’s success: the PC market. In 1984, Michael unknowingly stumbled into a market in its infancy that exploded in growth for various reasons (including the internet) over the next 14 years. Dell rode the wave of the personal computer market (later, servers too). Michael’s genius was in combining explosive growth in a new market with an innovative business model (selling direct). He realized what Charlie Munger calls a Lollapalooza effect. The result? Dell became a massive company that grew at a torrid pace for 14 straight years. And Michael amassed a sizeable fortune, $125 billion per Bloomberg as of this writing.

The lesson learned is that markets matter a lot. A rapidly growing market is an ideal place to build a business because it usually means the number of people experiencing the problem is growing rapidly too. In that type of market, a company’s solutions don’t have to be stellar. They need to not suck. If companies can check that box, the demand from the market will yank them along. In this type of market, there’s enough business to go around, so there likely isn’t much price competition and margins and profits are healthy.

Michael Dell built, and still runs, a juggernaut of a company. Dell is a textbook example of why entrepreneurs want to start businesses in markets that are—or will be—growing rapidly.

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: 50
• Total book digests created: 15
• Total blog posts published: 315
• Total audio recordings published: 103

This week’s metrics:

• Books read: 1
• Book digests created: 0
• Blog posts published: 7
• Audio recordings published: 0

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

• Read  Direct from Dell: Strategies That Revolutionized an Industry, the autobiography of Michael Dell
• With the help of my developer friend, added function calling to the code base
• Created schema for book information in website CMS
• Uploaded information about all the books I’ve read into the website CMS
• Created a test blog page listing all the books I’ve read; got feedback from four people
• Finalized the desktop and mobile layout of the book-list page and what information will be displayed on it
• Finished linking all related blog posts and the relevant books on my blog

What I’ll do next week:

• Read a biography, autobiography, or framework book
• Launch 2024 books-read page
• Launch page that will list every book I read going forward
• Finalize descriptions of every book I’ve read

Asks:

• None

Week two hundred fifty-five 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 this week

What I learned:

• We might be able to launch this software’s MVP without having every table I envision built into the database if the system instructions are strong. We’ll test to confirm.
• How good a book is isn’t just a function of what was written. It’s also a function of what the reader is looking for (i.e., what problem they’re trying to solve). A poorly written book that explains a superior solution to a reader’s pressing problem is a stellar book for that reader, while others might say it’s mediocre.
• Quantifying the results of an entrepreneur’s efforts in bullet points—companies founded, sold, acquired, and invested in—makes people want to learn more about the entrepreneur. Adding dollar amounts helps too (e.g., sold XYZ company for $X million).
• Less is more when communicating information about a lot of people in a directory format. Reducing the description of a book to as few words as possible isn’t easy.
• Sharing my deadlines with people close to me but not involved in my work enhances accountability and makes me more focused.
• There’s an art to arranging text and images in a way that resonates quickly with people. I wasn’t blessed with that gift.
• Figuring out how to display the information I want to know about books, entrepreneurs, and the link between the two has helped me crystallize what data needs to be stored in our database and confirm what type of information needs to be extracted.

Those are my struggles and learnings from the week!

There’s an old saying: sometimes you can’t see the forest for the trees. I agree. As a founder, I was jumping from one detail to the next to keep the business operating. It was hard to see the bigger picture.

A few years in, I joined EO and had monthly accountability meetings with other entrepreneurs. To prepare for these meetings, I had to think through the business at a high level and make notes. I then shared my thoughts and the previous month’s metrics with my EO forum members. I engaged in this ritual every month for years, and it was transformative for my business.

The meetings forced me think about my business more broadly. I had to consider what strategic things I wanted to accomplish and what was hindering me. I got perspective from people who didn’t know the details of my business but were familiar enough with it at a high level to ask tough questions, share relevant experiences, and point out insights I was staring at but couldn’t see.

I learned from my years in EO that, as a founder, it was easy for me to live among the trees. But I couldn’t stay there all the time. To take my business to the next level, I had to get a bird’s-eye view of it. These regularly scheduled sessions with credible people I respected—whose only view of my business was from high up—were invaluable.

You’ll always have a ton of problems to solve down among the trees. But being intentional about looking at the business from a higher level on a regular cadence can be transformative. I did it with EO, but you can accomplish this in many other ways. Whatever your method, make time for it. The forest looks different from up there.

I’m making my way through Direct from Dell: Strategies That Revolutionized an Industry, Michael Dell’s autobiography. He’s the founder of Dell and, according to Forbes, worth about $115 billion as of this writing. A big part of Dell’s successful direct-sales model was understanding customer needs deeply and offering appropriate solutions.

Michael said he spent roughly 40% of his time with customers at the time this book was published, even though he was the CEO. How he did that caught my attention. “By spending time with your customers where they do business,” Michael wrote, “you can learn more than by bringing them to where you do business. You can experience the issues and challenges they encounter in their daily lives, and better understand how your product ultimately affects the ways in which they serve their customers.”

This passage gave me pause because it wasn’t the first time I’d heard this. Sam Zell was a prolific entrepreneur and real estate investor. In his book Am I Being Too Subtle? Sam shared a story about learning the value of observing people in their own environments. Because of this lesson, Sam didn’t have people meet him at his office. Instead, he spent over a thousand hours a year on his plane, traveling the world to meet people. He wanted to see them in their environments so he could learn more about them.

Sam, like Michael, was wealthy. He was worth billions when he passed in 2023. People would gladly come to see either of these guys in their office. But both insisted on leaving the office to go see people because observing someone in their home or workplace is an immense learning opportunity. The better you understand someone, the easier it is for you to add value and have a positive relationship with them.

When two credible and unrelated people say the same thing, I take note. The lesson is clear. Get out of your office and go see people—especially your customers—in their offices.

This week, I started reading Direct from Dell: Strategies That Revolutionized an Industry. It’s the autobiography of Michael Dell, founder of Dell. The company is famous for being the first to allow customers to order custom-made computers directly from a manufacturer.

I’m early in the book, but already one line has caught my attention: “The $1,000 required to capitalize a company in Texas was the extent of my initial start-up capital.” Michael incorporated the company in January 1984 while he was in college. He dropped out after he finished his freshman year, to his parents' chagrin.

So, Michael is super young and starts this company with $1,000. By the end of 1986, three years later, the company was doing $60 million in annual revenue. And Michael set a goal to do $1 billion in annual revenue by 1992 (which he exceeded).

In the first three years of Dell’s existence, it did $160 million in total revenue and raised zero outside capital. This is probably one of the craziest growth stories for a bootstrapped company I’ve ever read. Growing fast is expensive. You have to put people, systems, and processes in place ahead of that kind of growth. It’s very rare to grow that fast and not raise outside capital.

This is where the genius of Michael’s model shines. A lot of this can be attributed to how Dell sold computers then. It didn’t make computers ahead of time and ship from inventory. Customers paid up front, and then Dell built and shipped the computers. Getting paid up front was a stroke of genius. It allowed Dell to obtain growth capital from customer revenue instead of having to raise money from outside investors. Now, Dell did have to buy parts and other stuff to assemble the computers, but it did so as close to just in time as possible, minimizing the amount of money tied up in raw materials inventory.

In October 1987, Dell completed a private placement on Black Monday and raised $20 million, even though the stock market was crashing. The following summer, Dell went public. The company merged with EMC Corporation in 2016, so it has changed a bit. But that combined company has a market capitalization (valuation) of over $78 billion as of this writing and over 120,000 employees. And Michael Dell is still CEO, more than 40 years later.

I was impressed when I read the details of Dell’s early growth and how Michael did it. His story is a reminder that customer revenue is always the best source of growth capital, especially if you can get customers to pay up front.

Last month I shared my stats about my reading in 2024 (see here). I wanted to share the list of books, too, but it’s a pain (see here). I said I would share my book list manually in a blog post, but when I started working on that, I didn’t like the result. I looked at different ways to do it in a single blog post, but I didn’t like any of the options. I was hopeful that Airtable or Notion would work, but I didn’t like the idea of managing another external tool solely to house my reading list.

I think there’s another path that will enable me to share not only my 2024 reading list but all the books I read going forward. It’s more involved to set up, but I think it’ll be a better long-term solution and more helpful to anyone looking for biographies to read.

I needed to aggregate all the data from my reading list to do this correctly using this new path. So, last week and this weekend, I cleaned up the reading list I manage in Google Sheets. I did the following:

• Amazon affiliate links weren’t formatted consistently, which meant some links weren’t sending people the correct books (i.e., the edition I read). I formatted this correctly for each book and updated my spreadsheet. I also reviewed each blog post containing an Amazon link to a book and updated each one.
• I noted the edition, format (paperback, hardcover, or Kindle), and publication date of each book in my spreadsheet.
• I added to my spreadsheet a link to the blog post series I wrote about each book. Now I can quickly find my writing about a specific book instead of having to search the site.
• I updated the links to the posts on my blog. For each book, all posts related to that book are now linked.

This was a decent amount of tedious work. I went through every blog post I wrote in 2024, updated links, and added information from posts to my spreadsheet. The exercise wasn’t fun, but now I think it was worth it. The next step is to take the book-list information for past and future books and present it in a way that’s valuable to others.

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