One of my favorite entrepreneurs is John H. Johnson. He was a publishing entrepreneur who created Ebony and Jet magazines. Both were iconic magazines in the Black community for several decades. Johnson bootstrapped his company, and by 1987 it was doing over $174 million in annual revenue—almost $481 million in 2024 dollars. Johnson’s autobiography was one of my favorite reads last year. I bought several copies and wrote a five-part deep dive on it (see here).

I wanted to learn more about Johnson and found Empire: The House That John H. Johnson Built, a biography of him. It was written by Margena A. Christian, who used to work at Johnson’s Johnson Publishing Company.

I’m still reading the book, but a few things have caught my attention:

• Start-up capital – Johnson “borrowed” the customer list (20,000 names) of the insurance company that employed him. He then wrote a letter to every customer asking them to prepay for a subscription to a magazine he hadn’t created yet. Three thousand people agreed to pay $2, giving him $2,000 in start-up capital—more than $100,000 in 2024 dollars. This biography highlighted Johnson’s copywriting in that letter. He worded the sales letter in a highly effective way and made people want to buy, sight unseen. Johnson noted that this letter was so unique that he could never replicate those results.
• Curation – Johnson’s first magazine, Negro Digest, didn’t include any original articles. He aggregated all its articles from various publications about Blacks. Making information readily available in a single place made his first magazine successful.
• Cloning – Johnson didn’t try to reinvent the wheel or create something new. He “borrowed” from successful magazine formats and used them to communicate to the Black community. Life magazine was a picture-based magazine that was wildly successful. Johnson used that format when he launched Ebony magazine.

Those are some of my early takeaways from the book. I’m looking forward to reading the rest of it.

I’m finishing up the second biography of Albert Lasker, The Man Who Sold America. The story is set in the early twentieth century, but it’s still a remarkable one for learning about the history of the advertising industry and one of the figures who heavily influenced it and American consumption habits.

Lasker was a complex person who struggled with bouts of severe depression and anxiety. Even with those ailments, he managed to understand consumers and how to communicate to them in an unrivaled way. It took decades, but his skills and his agency’s success eventually shaped American consumer behavior and politics. Lasker’s ability to communicate messages that resonated with everyone led to him heavily influencing American politics all the way to a presidential election.

I’m glad I decided to read these books about Lasker; they’ve made me aware of a period in the advertising industry that I might not otherwise have known about. They also helped explain the strategy behind some of the advertising methods still in use today.

I’m looking forward to reading more about Lasker and others who helped birth modern advertising.

I’ve been working on a project to share more about the books I’m reading. It all started with my frustration around how painful it was to share the books I’d read in 2024 (see my post here). Two days ago, I shared a list of the 52 books I read in 2024, sorted by month (see my post here). Yesterday, I shared My Learning Library, a searchable list of all the books I’ve read, and I’ll update it weekly (see my post here).

Those were all lists of books, but I built something else, too. Today, I’m sharing the third part of this project: Book Profile Pages. Each book I’ve read has a dedicated page on my blog that includes a description, my notes, and other information about the book. The stories of entrepreneurs often overlap. It’s common for entrepreneurial biographies to describe deals or battles with other entrepreneurs. They also mention other books (I find most books I read this way). But it wasn’t easy for me to see those connections visually, so I built Book Profile Pages to solve this problem. It’s something I hope other people find helpful because it makes it easier for them to discover books and other information about people they’re interested in learning more about.

To see examples of book profile pages, check out the page for The Gambler, a biography about Kirk Kerkorian. This biography helped me discover another entrepreneur, Billy Wilkerson, and I read two biographies about him. Another example is A Passion to Win, the autobiography by Sumner Redstone. See the profile page for A Passion to Win here.

This is the third part of this project that I’ve shared this week, but the project isn’t done yet. I need to do more work on other parts before sharing them, which I hope will be in a few weeks. In the meantime, I hope the book profile pages and other pages I launched this week are useful!

In yesterday’s post, I shared that my 2024 reading list is live and that creating that list led to a much bigger project. I realized I don’t just want to share my reading list at the end of each year; I want to share it in real-time. I want people to know what I’m reading every week, not once a year. I want people to be able to see the personal library I’m building to help me learn.

So, today I’m sharing the second part of this project: My Learning Library. This is a searchable list of all the books I’ve read, and I’ll be updating it weekly. It includes a description of each book, my notes about it, and when I read it (some I’ve read multiple times).

If you want to see a list of the books I’ve read in 2024 and 2025, check out my learning library here!

This is the second part of a bigger project, but there’s still more that I’ll share in the coming days.

On January 3, I shared my reading stats for 2024 (see here). After I wrote that post, I realized I wanted to share a list of the individual books—and how hard it is to do that (see here). I tried creating lists in GoodReads and played with creating something in Airtable, but I didn’t like those options. I wanted something that didn’t require updating another platform and that would look good visually on my blog. So, I ended up building something, which turned into a bigger project than I’d planned for.

To create this reading list, I had to create a database with lots of details on each book. Some of that I shared here. But the thing I underestimated most was creating descriptions for each book (see here). Most of that tedious work is now done (I still have a few descriptions I need to clean up).

I’m sharing the first part of this project today: my much-promised 2024 reading list. This is a list of every book I read; it includes a description of each book, my notes on each book, and the month I read it.

So, if you’re interested in seeing the 52 books I read in 2024 and what they’re about, take a look here!

Like I said, this is just the first part of a bigger project. I’ll share the rest of it in the coming days, but hopefully this 2024 reading list will be helpful.

Early-stage founders often take one of two paths. Sometimes they lived a problem and used their experience to build a solution and market it to people like them. Other founders learn about a problem and then must learn more about it to figure out what solution to build. You can do both, too, but that happens less frequently.

If a founder has lived the problem, they are the customer. They’re building something for themselves and people like them. If founders haven’t lived the problem, they need first to understand it from the customer’s perspective. To do this effectively, ideally before they start building, founders would be well served to do customer discovery interviews. Simply put, they should interview customers to understand a problem from their perspective and, ideally, uncover unique insights about a problem. When done correctly, customer discovery saves time and resources by preventing founders from building something customers don’t want.

Customer discovery is more difficult than it sounds because founders want to tell everyone about their ideas. This process isn’t about the founders’ ideas; it’s about the customers’ problems. So, founders have to go from sell mode to listen-and-learn mode, which isn’t always easy. Ideally, the founder’s ideas shouldn’t even be mentioned during customer discovery conversations.

Luckily, there’s a great book written for founders that details a framework for conducting effective customer discovery interviews. It’s called The Mom Test. I’ve read it a few times and gotten value from it each time. Whenever I want to learn about a problem, I refresh myself on the framework. It reminds me how to ask questions in a way that leads to my gaining a better understanding of the problem, which leads to unique insights and creative ideas about how to solve the problem.

I’ve been working on new parts of my website where I can share a list of all the books I read in 2024 (more here) and, going forward, a cumulative reading list updated weekly. I thought these would be live already, but I hit a hurdle (fingers crossed in the next few days). One of the things that’s taking a ton of time is creating descriptions of the books. This pain led to a few insights.

When I purchase books, I never read descriptions. I usually buy a book because it was mentioned in another book or because someone credible mentioned it. I never thought about descriptions until this project. So, I started reading the descriptions on Amazon of books I own. I was shocked. The descriptions are horrible. There’s no consistent formatting or length. Some pump up the author, which I don’t care about.

As an entrepreneur, I want to read books that teach me things that will help me solve problems or understand concepts. The descriptions of books on Amazon don’t help me with this at all. To get around the issue, I usually read reviews for clues. But reading reviews can be hit or miss.

I played around with using AI to generate book descriptions. The results weren’t bad, but they weren’t stellar either. This is without creating enhanced prompts or system instructions. If I went that route, I probably could make them better, but still I don’t think AI-generated descriptions would be stellar, from an entrepreneur’s perspective, for various reasons.

So, what’s my takeaway from all this? Descriptions of biographies and other books that entrepreneurs would be interested in suck. There’s an opportunity to create better descriptions that would help entrepreneurs find the right books at the right time.

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.

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.

I finished rereading Junk to Gold: From Salvage to the World’s Largest Online Auto Auction, an autobiography about Willis Johnson’s journey to build Copart. Its Amazon and Goodreads reviews were extremely positive: 4.8 and 4.4 stars, respectively. (I haven’t read many books rated that highly.) I’ve read many biographies since I first read this one, and this time, I wanted to understand why the book resonated so well with readers—I wanted to deconstruct his storytelling.

I figured out why readers enjoy this book so much. It’s simple, but genius. The story is told chronologically, which is ideal and not new. (Phil Knight mastered chronological storytelling by naming each chapter in Shoe Dog after a year in his journey.) But Johnson presented his story differently.

In most chronological biographies, each chapter represents a period in the subject’s journey. The reader is left to identify the important parts of each long segment and figure out why they’re important. The reader has to think a lot.

In Johnson’s book, in each chapter, he presents several lessons he learned during that segment of his journey. He titles the lesson (e.g., “Admit Your Mistakes”) and then includes a short story to explain how he learned it and the result.

The genius of this approach is that the reader doesn’t have to think. The big takeaway (i.e., the lesson learned) is stated clearly, and reading the story reinforces the lesson. This helps readers learn more of the valuable things Johnson learned.

This method eliminated any fluff; the book is short, only 172 pages. I think Johnson’s book is so highly rated because it delivers maximum value in a few pages (relatively speaking) and doesn’t require readers to figure out what’s important or why.

I like Johnson’s approach, and I’m thinking about how to use it in my project. Snippets of lessons learned supported by short stories is a great way to communicate with entrepreneurs. It might even be a framework I can use to concisely communicate the most important info from biographies.