Zero to One
This book has really good reviews, but I think it is mostly due to “success bias”: people have a tendency to overrate anything associated with successful people. There were very few original ideas in this book, if any. The main thesis is that we live in a time of technological stagnation and that entrepreneurs should […]
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The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing
Overview of the basic concepts of marketing. The laws are simple, but they aren’t always obvious. The emphasizes that successful marketing is more about appealing to the customer’s psychology than their rational decision making process.
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Crossing the Chasm
This book provides a great mental model for how high-tech marketing works. It presents a technology adoption bell curve divided into customer groups based on how early they will adopt a new technology. The groups correspond to innovators who try new technologies for fun, early adopters (or visionaries) who are the first to find a […]
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The Black Swan
This book is about the idea that people over-rely on the gaussian distribution and that big events happen much more often than a gaussian distribution would predict. It’s an important concept, but there wasn’t much useful information in the book.
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Manna: Two Visions of Humanity’s Future
I really like how this book addressed the issue of technological unemployment. It depicts a future in which an artificial intelligence called “Manna” is used to direct low-paid employees through headsets to optimize their performance. It would give step-by-step instructions to employees for how to cook a hamburger, take out the trash, or restock the […]
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The Communist Manifesto
The very beginning was alright. I mostly agree with some of the complaints about society that they have, e.g. that workers are exploited by capitalists and that jobs have become more dehumanizing and/or less natural for humans to do. However, I was appalled at the leap that they took from these complaints to just prognosticating […]
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The Lean Startup
This book talks about how to apply the scientific method and the principle of evolution to business development. The most valuable thing I got from the book was the ability to look at business development from this perspective. It also helped me to appreciate the risk of taking too long to release your product. A […]
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The Sea-Wolf
Although this book was a little slower and didn’t grab my attention as much as other great books typically do, it was definitely a really interesting book. The story follows a bookish man whose ferry sinks in San Francisco bay. He gets rescued by a sailing ship that is on its way across the Pacific […]
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Bigger Leaner Stronger
This book is a really good summary of the latest science on bodybuilding. It doesn’t discuss the scientific studies at all; it just gives the conclusions. I would have liked to hear more about the science, but at least all of the conclusions in the book seem to be consistent with the scientific studies that […]
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Freedom
This book had some really interesting themes, but overall it just wasn’t that entertaining. It had a great theme of self-sufficient community building and the corruption of government and power elites. But the bulk of the story was about a network of individuals who all wore augmented reality glasses that plugged them into a real-world […]
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