On January 27, 2020, I had lunch with an entrepreneur friend. He encouraged me to share what I’d learned from scaling my bootstrapped company to over $10 million in annual revenue. I’m private and was reluctant, but I wanted to help others who were just like me when I started my company—people who didn’t know what they didn’t know. I agreed, and we began a 60-day challenge. We both posted content daily to help other entrepreneurs (see our challenge details here). That challenge began on March 9, 2020, and ended on May 10, 2020. I didn’t miss a day—and I learned to enjoy the habit of reflecting and writing every day.

That was five years ago. Since then, I’ve written and shared a post every single day. That’s over 1,825 consecutive days of sharing my thoughts. When I agreed to the challenge, I had no idea I’d still be posting five years later, but I’m glad I am.

Every March, I reflect on my writing journey. Here are a few reflections:

• Strike zone – I read a book a week, mostly biographies. I used to think of reading and writing as independent hobbies. But writing about the books I’m reading has enhanced my learning and thinking. Combining them feels like it’s put me in my strike zone.  
• Format – I’ve played with a few different formats for creating posts about biographies I’ve read. The format I like best is a deep-dive series about a biography (see examples here and here). I’m aiming to get back to that format, and I’m building software to help with the creation process.
• Luck – Bringing value to others by writing has increased my luck surface area and led to magnetic luck (more on luck types here). When I focused more on writing about biographies, it led to more magnetic luck. Entrepreneurs want to know what other entrepreneurs have figured out but don’t always want to read an entire book.
• Audio – Last year, I tested doing a solo podcast about the books I was reading. It was really an audio version of this blog. I did 100 episodes to get reps and learn. Audio is a powerful format but requires significantly more work than writing. Publishing a podcast episode daily wasn’t sustainable. I’ll revisit doing a podcast, but I’ll need more support next time, and I’ll test different formats.
• Level up – I want to take this blog to the next level and create more value for others. Adding a page detailing all the books I’ve read and creating a profile page for each book (see here) is an experiment and just the beginning.
• Annual contract – Every March, I’ve asked myself if I’m enjoying this and want to keep doing it. If yes, I re-up for another one-year contract with the option to renew. I’ve now signed through 2026.

Those are my reflections. I’m looking forward to the next year. I feel like year six will be epic!

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!

2/26/25 Update: I finally published a list of all 52 books. You can see the list here.

2/27/25 Update: I created a searchable list of all the books I’ve read, and I’ll be updating it weekly. See here.

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 related to this project. Just playing catch-up after being out for a few weeks.

What I learned:

• I’ve been seeing “vibe coding” references lately. A friend explained it to me as “using natural language to create actual code by prompting to focus on features and capabilities but not line-by-line code. It’s different from no code, which is building blocks. Vibe coding is what people are doing in cursor. They prompt something that writes an entire application for them.” This definition was useful to me.
• This same friend shared with me a free DeepLearning.AI course about vibe coding taught by Replit. I signed up for it. Enroll here.
• I had more conversations this week with developers, but when I was asked about the details of the technical stack, I could answer only some of the questions. My gut tells me this signaled negatively to one senior developer I chatted with this week. My developer friend is available and will help transition things, but I need to understand the stack better and be able to communicate how it all works together.
• I looked at data about the posts I’ve written about biographies. The long-form posts about part of an entrepreneur’s journey get more visits than the shorter posts about one takeaway. A few shorter posts have done well, but they’re the exception. I suspect that the longer posts are also shared more.
• I learned about Manus and Gumloop. Manus is an AI agent tool, and Gumloop is an AI workflow tool. They may be able to help me with certain aspects of this project. I plan to experiment with both.

Those are my struggles and learnings from the week.

This week there was lots of discussion in financial media around the CoreWeave IPO. CoreWeave provides cloud-based GPUs to AI developers. The IPO was completed today after the number of shares being sold in the IPO was reduced from 49 million to 37.5 million and the share price was lowered to $40 from the planned $47 to $55. (see here)I haven’t kept close tabs on the IPO market since my last update in October 2024 (see here), so I took a look today. Here are the updated IPO stats through March 28, 2025:

• 2025: 73

For comparison, here are prior years’ IPO stats:

• 2024: 225
• 2023: 154
• 2022: 181
• 2021: 1,035
• 2020: 480
• 2019: 232

IPO activity picked up in 2024. We were pretty much back to the 2019 level. COVID and ZIRP contributed to the 2021 IPO explosion (see here). When interest rates began rising sharply in 2022, we saw an implosion of IPO activity in 2022 and 2023.

Time will tell how receptive the market is to CoreWeave. It took almost a year before public-market investors were interested in buying technology companies that IPOed in 2023 and 2024, such as Reddit, Instacart, and Klaviyo.

CoreWeave has seen explosive growth in the last year or so because of soaring AI demand (OpenAI is one of its biggest customers). I’m sure venture capitalists and technology entrepreneurs are watching to see how receptive public-market investors are to buying the company’s shares.

I’m curious to see how CoreWeave performs and whether we’ll see more technology companies going public via IPOs in 2025.

If you want to see the latest or historical IPO stats, try here (where I get my IPO data).

Two weeks ago, I read a second biography about Albert Lasker, The Man Who Sold America. It mentioned how Lasker worked with Adolph Ochs, who owned The New York Times, to free Leo Frank, who had been charged with the murder of Mary Phagan in Atlanta in 1913. Lasker and Ochs, both Jewish, felt Frank was being wrongly accused because he was Jewish. Learning how Lasker and Ochs created a sophisticated media campaign to draw attention to this case nationally was fascinating.

I’d never heard of Ochs, but I was curious about his journey and how he became the owner of The New York Times. This week, I began reading a biography about him, An Honorable Titan, by Gerald Johnson.

I’m early in the book, but I’ve already been surprised by Ochs’s history: The publisher of a nationally recognized and New York–based newspaper dropped out of school at 14. He wasn’t from an elite family or background. He had to start working full-time at 14.

Adolph began his career as an information entrepreneur in Chattanooga, Tennessee, where he sold a directory at age 19. In 1878, he and a partner created a directory of all the businesses in Chattanooga. This was a manual effort requiring them to canvass the entire city house-by-house to collect the information before they compiled it in a book.

The benefit of this grunt work was that Adolph developed a detailed understanding of the town, its businesses, and the entrepreneurs who owned them. His directory became a valuable resource that allowed him to establish relationships with all the entrepreneurs in town and add value to them by providing aggregated information about where to buy goods and services.

Adolph was selling information that, for the most part, was readily available to everyone in Chattanooga. But by compiling it and making it easy to use, he created something of value that others were happy to pay for. It’s not exactly the same, but it reminds me of how Michael Bloomberg took publicly available bond market data, centralized it, and made it easy for people to make buy-and-sell decisions around bonds (more here). The information product is still, as of this writing, the anchor of his empire and over $100 billion fortune.

It’s interesting how these two information entrepreneurs took a similar approach when they started out though there’s a 100-year gap between them.

I’m curious to learn more about Ochs and how all this led him to The New York Times.

Yesterday, I shared what I learned about how much of the company each Netflix cofounder owned (see here). I also learned from reading Netflix’s S-1 document that VC firm Technology Crossover Ventures (TCV) owned roughly 43% before the IPO and roughly 34% after it. I learned that TCV partner and cofounder Jay C. Hoag has been a Netflix board member since 1999 (see here). Jay and TCV invested before the IPO, so they’ve seen the company go from a promising start-up worth tens of millions to a global, publicly traded company worth over $400 billion.

I view investors who found investment firms as entrepreneurs, so I was curious to learn more about Jay and TCV. I’m early in my research, but I found Jay’s interview (listen here) from 2021 on the Invest Like the Best podcast. A few things I found interesting:

• Netflix stock traded down 15–20% after the 2002 IPO and stayed down for about six months.
• TCV was founded as a private and public (i.e., “crossover”) investor. This means that it invests in private technology companies (i.e., start-ups) and technology companies traded publicly on the stock exchanges.
• In 2011, TCV made a PIPE investment in Netflix after the stock had declined 70%. The stock traded down further after the PIPE investment, which was for $400 million, with T. Rowe Price participating, too. More details are here and here.  
• “By being a private investor, it made us better public market investors” and “By being a public market investor, it made us better private investors.”
• “The capital allocation exercise is to look across the technology landscape, take advantage of all the research and knowledge that we have, and look for the best investment . . . and not be bucketed by either private or public.”

Jay and TCV also invested in Zillow, Peloton, Facebook, Airbnb, Tripadvisor, Spotify, and many more wildly successful technology companies. I’m excited to learn more about Hoad and what led to his outsize success.

Last week I read a biography about Netflix’s early years, That Will Never Work. In one of my posts, I shared how the Netflix cofounders initially divided ownership between the two of them: about 68% for Reed Hastings and about 30% for Marc Randolph. I also shared in a separate post that Marc gave Reed some of his shares in the company when Reed took over as CEO about a year after the company was founded. Both posts were based on what Marc wrote in the biography.

The last part of the book is about going public in 2002 and the day of the IPO. According to my research, the company’s market capitalization (valuation) when it went public was around $300 million (now, it’s more than 1,300 times more: over $410 billion). I was curious how much of the company each cofounder owned when Netflix went public, so I did some digging. I found the company’s 2002 S-1 Registration Statement it filed so it could go public; what I was looking for is on page 66. Here are the details:

• Reed Hastings owned 20% of the company before the IPO and roughly 15% after it. His 15% stake was worth roughly $45 million.
• Marc Randolph owned roughly 5.5% of the company before the IPO and roughly 4% after it. His 4% stake was worth roughly $12 million.

An interesting data point in the S-1 is that VC firm Technology Crossover Ventures (TCV) owned roughly 43% before the IPO and roughly 34% after it. TCV’s ownership stake can be seen on page 66 of the S-1. It’s under the name of TCV founding partner Jay C. Hoag, who is also on the Netflix board. In the biography, Marc says TCV led the company’s series C in early 1999 with a $6 million check and, in April 2000, ten days before the dot-com bubble burst, invested $40 million. IPO documents (page 61) show that TCV invested another $8.3 million in July 2001 via a promissory note and warrants. After the company went public, TCV’s 34% stake was worth roughly $102 million.

The above isn’t a complete picture of everything that happened between the company’s founding and its IPO. Other financial transactions (such as stock options being issued, founders selling shares via secondary transactions, etc.) likely impacted each founder’s ownership at the time of IPO.

I enjoyed Marc’s description of the early days of Netflix. It was helpful for me to see the data around company ownership at IPO.

I finished reading That Will Never Work, the biography about Netflix’s early years. Cofounder and first CEO Marc Randolph’s perspective on taking the company from idea to IPO in seven years is full of wisdom that entrepreneurs will find helpful.

One of his principles I enjoyed was what Marc and Reed Hastings call the “Canada Principle.” For the first twelve years, Netflix served only the United States. But several times during that period, they thought about expanding into Canada. It was close, so shipping costs would be low (it was shipping DVDs then), and the regulatory environment was friendly. Canada looked like low-hanging fruit.

But first appearances were deceiving.

When they dug into it, they learned it would be complicated:

• French is the main language spoken in some parts of Canada, so they’d have translation issues.
• Canadian dollars differ from U.S. dollars, so they’d have to deal with currency issues.
• The postal system in Canada was different, so special envelopes would be necessary.

When they ran the numbers, they learned they’d get a roughly 10% revenue boost by expanding into Canada.

They then considered the “effort, manpower, and mind-power” required to expand into Canada. It would be a big lift for their team. Then they analyzed how much they could increase revenue if they applied the same amount of effort to other aspects of the business.

Using that framework to evaluate the decision made things crystal clear. If they applied that effort in other areas, they could get a far greater return by increasing revenue considerably more than 10%. Expanding into Canada wasn’t the best way to allocate their resources. The return was too low relative to other options requiring similar effort.

They realized that Canada was a short-term, obvious move that would provide short-term benefits. “It would have diluted our focus,” wrote Marc.

After this experience, Netflix adopted what Marc calls the “Canada Principle.” When faced with options, evaluate the potential return of each of them and the effort and resources required to generate it. Pick the highest-return activity and focus on it. Don’t spread yourself thin and lose focus by doing low-return activities.

Marc and Reed realized, through trial and error, that focus is a superpower and that if they could focus on the right high-return activities, they’d have a competitive advantage. The Canada Principle became key to deciding what initiatives to pursue or kill.

The Canada Principle led the company to stop selling physical DVDs and focus entirely on subscription rentals, even though DVD sales were 90% of their revenue. It also helped them decide against pursuing automated DVD rental kiosks, despite promising results from months of testing. (Side note: a team member on the kiosk project helped found Redbox.) All of these were the right decisions. They kept the company focused. They leapfrogged competitors and built a behemoth that’s now publicly traded and has a market capitalization (valuation) of over $410 billion as of this writing.

I didn’t have a name for it when I was building my company, but I applied the Canada Principle several times when making strategic decisions. It was sometimes painful in the short run, but it usually led to the best long-term decision.

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: 55
• Total book digests created: 15
• Total blog posts published: 350
• 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 That Will Never Work, a biography about Netflix’s early years
• Helped one of my parents resolve their medical situation

What I’ll do next week:

• Read a biography, autobiography, or framework book
• Catch up on everything from the last two weeks

Asks:

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

Week two hundred sixty 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 related to this project

What I learned:

• This week, I continued helping one of my parents with a medical situation. I learned about neurological rehabilitation, but not much related to this project. 

Those are my struggles and learnings from the week.