Random: I read the "Autobiography of Gucci Mane" a couple months ago based on a recommendation from a HN comment (and based on liking a few of his songs). He's wildly popular in pop culture but so far nobody I've talked to in SF knows who he is. He's known as the rapper with the ice cream cone tattoo on his face, if that rings a bell.

It was a good book. The narrator is definitely "immoral", which can be disturbing, but he's basically a product of his environment. One lesson I took from it is that Alabama and Georgia (at least in the 80's and 90's) might as well be a different country.

It's also related to business since he says he always wanted to be the one pulling the strings and making the money, rather than the talent. He became both.

The economy of making and promoting niche rap -- which became mainstream pop, e.g. Migos has at least 1B views on YouTube -- is pretty interesting. Somehow the rappers know if a beat is worth $1K or $10K, or a co-appearance on a record is worth $1K or $10K. It's a very collaborative business. They obviously understand marketing.

And even though he was addicted to "lean" (cough syrup) for years and in and out of jail for various violent crimes, he (and his collaborators) still have significant practical knowledge of contracts, copyright law, and use QuickBooks!

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So there's some diverse content on HN if you look hard enough :) I'll also say that I didn't read "Sapiens" for a long time because I thought it was one of these "tech bubble/meme" books, e.g. the first place I heard of it was from Tim Ferris several years ago.

But I read it last year and it was great -- definitely worth reading, and I read Homo Deus too. I guess the whole point is that it's from someone whose background is not in tech saying a lot of things that are relevant to the industry.

If you're interested in the business aspects of the hip-hop industry, check out The Big Payback by Dan Charnas. If you grew up with hip-hop, it can be interesting to have the entrepreneurial backstory of this stuff unveiled. Can be both inspiring and disillusioning, but engaging either way.

I think we really underestimate the entrepreneurship required to be an indie rapper and break-through. Marc Benioff freely admits he stole marketing ideas from MC Hammer and his street teams when launching Salesforce.

E-40 is a marketing super genius. He's been rapping and producing since 1990. And has had so many brand extensions since the mid-90s from energy drinks to wine to tequila.

You never know where you will find inspiration!

Acknowledging the risk of an echo chamber, maybe the ubiquity of these books means that they're tools of the trade. Knowing how to build a great software product/business is a useful skill set that these books teach well.

From there, the path to success comes from being well-rounded and exposed to new ideas/their accompanying opportunities. Read "The Power of Habit" because it's an incredible book, but then also read books specific to the domains to which you're applying those skills. Working for a healthcare company? Read "How Doctors Think". Jane Jacobs for urban planning, Foucalt for history...

It's wonderful that you (and likely half of the people on HN) have read many of these books, and I think having this list is useful for people outside the industry getting a mind for how tech thinks. At the same time, exploring the pantheon of great works in other fields is a virtue that, luckily is toted by many of the books mentioned above.

This is so true. Those books are basically the college course of a startup and you need to read past these to get diversity of ideas.

Can I offer a complementary non-practical founders reading list then? :)

* Dostoevsky "Crime and punishment".

Discover how important is to take care of yourself and avoid entering the downward spiral of depression and anxiety.

* Jack London "Smoke Bellew".

Get a boost of the startup-like resourceful energy the heroes of the previous Golden-Rush at Klondike.

* Herman Hesse "Siddhartha".

Get a break from the startup grind by going on the spiritual journey of self-discovery and peaceful reflection.

* Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. "Far Rainbow".

Get to know the limits of human intelligence and capacity for overcoming the difficulties.

Hope you enjoy it!

People are what they don't read

I have no idea what that means but had to upvote because it was so unexpected.

I read it as: if you know some stuff very well already you do not read about it and conversely that you can spend too much time reading about it instead of doing it.

Interesting! I’ve interpreted it as: your blind spots define you.

(Me too, and Occam's Razor makes me think it's probably what the GGGP meant.)

A new koan?

People are both what they read and what they don't read - and in a broader sense, what they osmose [1] and don't osmose. As in, learning by osmosis.

[1] osmose: v: verb form of osmosis

If that isn't a word, it just became one, because I made it so - deal with it.

It is a word

Wow, cool, you're right. Just checked. Thanks :)

Books influence us and shape us. We are what we are because we are formed by our experiences throughout our life. Reading a good book is like living someone else’s life.

Except it's not a someone else's life, but a state of mind, most often a delusion or even a deliberate bullshit. Central books are few

what?

That was my thinking when I went through the first page of results. I pretty much read all the books listed except two and it didn’t dawn on me until I started reading more non-fiction books from Asian authors – From Third World to First by Lee Kuan Yew, many books from the Japan Library series, etc. – that I had a very narrow view of how business and personal productivity works in the grand scheme of things.

To be fair, it says these are books that helped or influenced the careers of the founders not everything they read. If they like to read Thomas Mann in their downtime, that's nice, but maybe not related to being a founder.

True, and that would be interesting to know how the other books influence them as a founder. The thing here is this list of books is what tells founders what to do as founders, so probably the biggest part of their influence.

It's easy to get more diversity, just read different stuff. There are plenty of recommendations all over the place. Hell, just go grab something from the staff picks at your book store or library if you're lost. Even if you want to read through everything on our echo chamber's lists, you can still do that, you just don't need to do it straight; just interleave some other stuff along with it.

I would suggest "The Meditations" by Marcus Aurelius. It might be a tough one to read, but the audible I listened to (there are a few of them) made it easier to consume.

Sam Walton's autobiography was the single best business book I've ever read. A nugget of gold every couple of pages.