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!

Recently, I caught up with the founder of a high-growth company. The company exploded in growth over the last few years, and now they’re planning for the next twelve months. The founder mentioned that one of his focus areas is maturing the organization. He wants to add more process and structure so they can continue to scale rapidly without the wheels falling off.

When growth is crazy, you normally see a lot of hiring. Things are happening so fast that no one has time to delve into problems or the things holding them back, so they throw bodies at them and hope the smart people they hire will figure it out. The result is continued growth but a lack of process and structure.

When the leaders start planning for continued growth over the next few years, they realize they can’t get there by doing what they’ve been doing. They want more visibility into what’s happening operationally below them, more operational consistency, and assurance that their operations can scale as the company continues to grow.

It’s a cycle I’ve seen before: growth, efficiency, and then more growth. I like to think of it as the company catching up to the expectations implied by its revenue growth. For high-growth companies, it’s part of their normal cycle.

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: 100
• Total blog posts published: 665

This week’s metrics:

• Books read: 1
• Blog posts published: 7

What I completed in the week ending 1/25/26 (link to the previous week’s commitments):

• Read Take the Measure of the Man, the memoir of Comcast Corporation cofounder Daniel Aaron  

What I’ll do next week:

• Read a biography, autobiography, or framework book

Asks:

• No ask this week

Week three hundred 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:

• Same as last week (and the week before): I had trouble getting started on synthesizing another book.

What I learned:

• I listened to this section of an Odds on Open Podcast episode where Alix Pasquet argued that reading books leads to more critical thinking, unique insights, knowledge building, and gaining of analytical reps, whereas using technology like AI doesn’t. AI just helps you acquire information, which is different than knowledge. Because younger people aren’t reading books, Pasquet thinks they’re at a disadvantage. Pasquet also shared and discussed extensively this quote from Henry Kissinger:

Reading books requires you to form concepts, to train your mind to relationships. . . . A book is a large intellectual construction; you can’t hold it all in mind easily or at once. You have to struggle mentally to internalize it. Now there is no need to internalize because each fact can instantly be called up again on the computer. There is no context, no motive. Information is not knowledge. People are not readers but researchers, they float on the surface. . . . This new thinking erases context. It disaggregates everything. All this makes strategic thinking about world order nearly impossible to achieve.

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

This week I spoke independently with two early-stage entrepreneurs who were trying to figure out problems their respective businesses were facing. During our conversations, I realized they didn’t understand the real problem. They just knew they had a problem and wanted to solve it, but they couldn’t articulate it or tell me the root cause. This made it harder for me to help them as I wasn’t sure what I was helping them with and don’t have enough context because I’m not in either business day-to-day.

Both experiences made me think of Kidlin’s Law, a simple but powerful law:

If you write a problem down clearly, then the problem is half solved.

A powerful aspect of this simple law that many overlook is its writing component. It doesn’t say figure things out in your head or describe the problem out loud. It says you should write the problem down. You don’t have to think clearly to sound good when speaking, but writing demands clarity. When you speak, your brain can gloss over unclear steps and still produce a convincing narrative. Writing exposes those gaps. Writing a problem down forces you to evaluate each step of your thinking and understand the problem deeply. It also forces you to figure out the best way to communicate the problem clearly (and preferably concisely) to others. Once you’ve written it down in a way that others can understand, you’ve cemented your understanding of the problem in your brain and made it easier for you to speak coherently about the problem, with extreme confidence, to people who can help you. It should also make it easier for you to articulate precisely how they can help you, which increases the probability that they will help you (if people have to figure out how to help you, they usually don’t bother).

I’m a fan of Kidlin’s Law. It’s something simple that anyone can do, but most people won’t. For those who do, it improves the chances that they’ll solve whatever problem they’re facing.

Today, I had the privilege of participating in a conversation about how to add value to founders in the Atlanta ecosystem. There were suggestions to create educational tracks that address common problems founders face, such as fundraising. All of them were valid and would add value. But they wouldn’t resonate with all entrepreneurs—only those who are experiencing a problem related to that track.

When I think about what resonates universally with founders, two things come to mind:

• Peer community – Entrepreneurship is lonely. Entrepreneurs want to be around other entrepreneurs who are going through the same things—people who can relate to the struggle. And if they’re ambitious and trying to build a company that can grow fast, they want to be around others who are trying to do the same. I once read “Iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.” Founders want to be around other entrepreneurs they can compete with—entrepreneurs who’ll sharpen them.
• Peer accountability – Execution is what matters most in entrepreneurship. Founders want to get stuff done, but they’re human. Sometimes they need a friendly nudge. Sometimes they need to be held accountable by peers they respect, don’t want to let down, and compete with (in a friendly manner).

When I thought about how to present these ideas as a value proposition that would quickly resonate with entrepreneurs in the Atlanta ecosystem, or any ecosystem for that matter, I came up with this:

• Community for high-growth founders
• Facilitated accountability groups of peers at similar stages

Offer those two opportunities to entrepreneurs, and I’d bet most would jump at the chance to be part of something like that, even if they don’t know all the specifics of how it works.

Today brought a good thought exercise. I’m glad I was a part of it because it got me thinking about what value prop would resonate with ambitious entrepreneurs. I think the above would be something entrepreneurs would instantly get and want to be part of.

For the past few years, many people have been talking about diversifying their cash flow. They usually land on the idea of buying a small business that can shoot off cash to them—specifically, buying a mom-and-pop business from someone looking to retire. Buying from a retiring entrepreneur is attractive because revenue can probably be increased by upgrading the business through technology and process improvements. The business’s value increases (assuming multiples stay flat or rise), and its rising revenue translates into higher cash flow (i.e., a higher yield on investment).

This all makes sense, and I generally like how this plan sounds. As time has passed, though, I’ve noticed two hurdles for friends turning this plan into reality.

The first challenge is sourcing. This is true of all investing. How do you find the best opportunities that will generate the highest return—especially when you’re going after tiny companies that don’t publish financial information about their business performance? To properly source good deals that others aren’t aware of, you likely need a great network that’s tapped into baby boomer entrepreneurial circles, and you need to work it aggressively. Or, you could just brute-force it and start cold-calling businesses. Either strategy requires a ton of time and energy.

The second challenge is operational. Entrepreneurs are usually the glue that holds small businesses together (especially those with annual revenue under $1 million). There isn’t enough money to support hiring a staff and becoming an absentee owner. So, once the owner sells and retires, the new owner will have to step in to hold things together and implement improvements to grow the business. Again, lots of time and energy is needed.

After seeing these two hurdles (and others) stop friends, I began wondering if there’s an alternative way to solve the problem, ideally more passively. Could you diversify your personal cash flow by buying a stream of income generated by a business and benefit from some upside potential? Can you do this in a more passive way that doesn’t require as much time and energy but gives you above-average returns (assuming a risk level similar to that of buying a business)?

I think I found an alternative solution. I’ll share my thoughts on it in another post.

Last week, I read a post on X that caught my eye. I shared it with a few folks, which sparked some great dialogue. The post was based on this article. The gist of the post and the article is that the venture capital industry has increasingly focused on coordinating capital across multiple funding rounds for the start-ups it invests in. Therefore, investors focus on fundability—the likelihood they can attract later investors—when making investment decisions. This is a form of consensus seeking. The more capital a company requires from VCs, the more consensus is needed.

For several reasons, it’s harder for smaller VC firms to play and win this game. They need to play a different game if they want to generate alpha (i.e., outsize returns for their investors). Instead of focusing on the fundability of a company, here’s what they should be looking for:

• Companies that are capital efficient and don’t require insane amounts of growth capital to build a great business with a moat. For example, Ho Nam and his firm Altos Ventures invested in Roblox early. He says (see here) that Roblox needed only $10 million total from investors to become cash-flow positive. Roblox has a market cap today, as of this writing, of roughly $50 billion and generated over $1.3 billion in operating cash flow in the last 12 months.
• Companies that don’t need hype or investor consensus to prove they work. With very little capital, they can show in their data that customers demonstrate strong demand for the product because of how well it solves a problem for them.

Interestingly, Ho Nam commented “Agree 100%” below this post.

I’m glad I found this post. It got me thinking about how, going forward, outsize returns can be generated by the smaller funds, especially those that aren’t feeder funds to the big boys.

I tend to still think that founders (and small VC funds that back them) create a lot more optionality for themselves when they focus on providing a good product that customers will pay for (which provides growth capital) instead of on giving the VCs the story they want to invest in. Ironically, if customers love and pay for your product, VCs will love you too. The inverse isn’t always true.  

Last week, I reread Felix Dennis’s book How to Get Rich. Dennis was the founder of Dennis Publishing, Maxim magazine, and Micro Warehouse, a mail-order computer parts company. He was a colorful person who lived an extreme lifestyle, but his thoughts on creating wealth through entrepreneurship were based on his experiences and, in my opinion, spot on.

After reading this book in 2024, I wrote a blog series that captured its main ideas. You can read them:

• Felix Dennis Part 1: Getting Going as a Founder
• Felix Dennis Part 2: Succeeding as a Founder
• Felix Dennis Part 3: Winning and Walking Away

Today I read those posts again, and even after a second reading of the book, I think they capture its essence in a concise way.

His lessons on getting started as a founder got me thinking, especially his advice to find new industries that are growing fast. Lots of people are doing this with AI. His advice to never think small and to act big also resonated with me. He’s right that people stop doing the things that led to their success once they become successful, or they think small and don’t embrace new ideas and ways of doing things.

I’m glad I read this book again. It was a nice refresher.

Side note: I read Dennis’s biography More Lives Than One too. You can learn more about his life journey  here, in the blog post series I wrote based on this biography.

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: 99
• Total blog posts published: 658

This week’s metrics:

• Books read: 1
• Blog posts published: 7

What I completed in the week ending 1/25/26 (link to the previous week’s commitments):

• Reread How to Get Rich, a framework for creating wealth through entrepreneurship written by publishing magnate and founder of Maxim magazine Felix Dennis  

What I’ll do next week:

• Read a biography, autobiography, or framework book
• Write a post sharing what I learned from synthesizing The Art of Execution

Asks:

• No ask this week

Week three hundred four was another week of learning. Looking forward to next week!