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!

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!

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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: I had trouble getting started on synthesizing another book.

What I learned:

• ·Going back to synthesize a book I’ve read after I’ve begun reading another one is hard. Might make sense to synthesize as I read.

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

The forecast is calling for bad weather to hit most of the country this weekend. An ice storm is expected in Atlanta. I hate feeling trapped, but I’m going to try to use this time to catch up. Specifically, I want to write a post about what I learned from synthesizing The Art of Execution.

Wish me luck!

Today I had a conversation with a friend and entrepreneur about how he works. He described his system, which relies heavily on an AI assistant that he chats with daily. He graciously showed me what he built and how it all works.

I won’t get into all the specifics, but a few things stuck with me:

• MCP – He’s using model context protocol (MCP) to connect all his various tools to Claude’s AI assistant so the assistant has proper context around what’s important to him.
• Database – He stores everything—contacts, goals, etc.—in a Notion database, which Claude accesses via MCP.
• 10 items max – In any given day, Claude gives him no more than 10 action items to focus on getting done.
• Specialization – He built a different AI assistant for each part of his life (work, personal, etc.). Each acts according to specific instructions and accesses the appropriate data in a Notion database.
• Update permissions – He gives Claude update permissions so it can update his calendar, his Notion database, and other systems it has access to.

I was impressed with his setup. He’s leveraging AI to manage various aspects of his life and help him pinpoint what to focus on every day.

Today I read a blog post (see here) that had caught my eye. It was supposed to be about how to create a personal customer relationship management (CRM) system. Like a lot of people, I struggle to maintain relationships, so I gave it a read. The article turned out to be more than I expected. It’s a great read for anyone trying to understand how to use AI to help with manual tasks and how AI can connect with various tools you already use.

It presents a high-level overview of how you can use AI to talk to the tools you commonly use (Slack, Calendar, Gmail, Google Sheets, Notion, etc.) using the model context protocol (MCP). It describes how MCP works, who created it (Anthorpic), and how the average person can easily download and use it. MCP is powerful because most manual tasks involve shifting between systems. MCP connects all those systems to an AI assistant like Claude, empowering the AI to see the same data you do and execute on it just as you would. You can have an AI assistant complete tasks that would have taken you tons of time or energy, or you can have it do 90% of the work so you have to do only 10%.

The author then takes it a step further and shows you, pretty much step by step, how to use MCP to connect to Gmail and Calendar. It then provides example prompts for instructing AI to do tasks that you’d normally have to manage manually in a CRM. For instance, the author has AI prepare a list of names, using specified criteria, of people he needs to follow up with. He also has AI analyze his calendar for the past week and summarize all his meetings so he can report to his cofounder on Monday what he’d done that week.

I found this post helpful and will be sharing it. Not everyone needs a personal CRM, but the post does a great job of showing how anyone can use MCP and AI assistants to become more efficient and also explaining how to set it up.