In 2024, I challenged myself to accelerate my learning by reading a book (usually a biography) a week. To date, I’ve done it for 70 consecutive weeks. I wanted to share what I was reading and also keep track for myself, which was difficult (see here), so I created a Library section on this site. I added to it all the books I’ve read since my book-a-week habit began in March 2024, and I’ve committed to adding my latest read to the Library every Sunday (see the latest here).

That left the books I’d read before 2024 unshared and untracked. I set a goal to add my old reading to the Library over time. It began with a Memorial Day Challenge to add five books (see here) and continued with my challenging myself to add two books every weekend until my backlog is gone. This past weekend was a holiday weekend and my sixth weekend. I decided to push myself a bit and added four more books:

• How to Read a Book by Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren
• Devil Take the Hindmost by Edward Chancellor
• Security Analysis, Seventh Edition by Benjamin Graham and David L. Dodd
• Hedge Fund Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager

That’s the update on my July 4th goal.

In May, I read A Short History of Financial Euphoria, which described famous financial bubbles from the 1600s’ tulip mania to the 1980s’ junk-bond frenzy and savings-and-loan crisis. One of the companies mentioned was Investors Overseas Services (IOS), a multibillion-dollar fund of funds built in the 1960s by Bernie Cornfeld. I’ve read about IOS and Cornfeld in other books and was always curious, so I read a biography about Cornfeld, The Bernie Cornfeld Story, written by an early IOS employee.

The biography provides an insider’s perspective on Cornfeld’s life, his personality, and how he built IOS. It details what allowed Cornfeld to rise from social worker in the United States to international financier in Switzerland, as well as his battles with the SEC and how his empire crumbled after IOS’s IPO in 1969.

Cornfeld’s story was pretty wild. It’s interesting to learn how he and IOS rode the bull market of the 1950s and 1960s to insane heights but then were crushed when the market began to reverse in the early 1970s.

I still want to learn more about Cornfeld and will look for more books on him and his associates.

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: 70
• Total blog posts published: 455

This week’s metrics:

• Books read: 1
• Blog posts published: 7

What I completed this week (link to last week’s commitments):

• Read The Bernie Cornfeld Story, a biography about entrepreneur Bernie Cornfeld, who built Investors Overseas Services into a multibillion-dollar offshore fund-of-funds empire in the 1960s
• Added two more books that I read in 2023, these from Thomas Phelps and Chris Mayer, to the library on this site—see more here

What I’ll do next week:

• Read a biography, autobiography, or framework book
• Add four more books that I read in 2023 to the library on this site—see more here

Asks:

• Seeking technical lead or cofounder – I’m looking for a senior full-stack developer skilled in AI retrieval. If you know one who’d have an interest in working on the software project related to books, please introduce us!

Week two hundred seventy-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:

• No material struggles last week

What I learned:

• I conducted demos to show the proof of concept (POC) that my engineer friend helped me build for potential engineering candidates. These meetings helped take the evaluation process to another level because the candidates could ask deep technical questions that showcased their thinking. Having my engineer friend on these calls was key so he could answer those questions and evaluate their thinking.
• Taking the POC to MVP will likely be a multistep process: (1) retrieval; i.e., reliably getting the information and chunks into the LLM; (2) model selection and parameter tuning; and (3) prompt engineering to achieve the desired minimum output quality threshold.

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

I like to use holidays to unwind, but I’ve also established a habit of setting myself a challenge for each holiday. I enjoy a challenge, and it adds something different to the holiday. I don’t always knock these out of the park. Sometimes I succeed, and sometimes I fail (I chronically overestimate what I can accomplish). Either way, it’s fun to push myself toward a goal that I care about (even if others couldn’t care less). I always learn something during the process.

The Library on this site accurately shows every book I’ve read in 2024 and 2025, but not before that. I’ve been adding books that I read before 2024, but that’s a longer-term weekend project. I usually add two books per weekend.

I want to ramp that up a bit this holiday weekend. I’m aiming to add four books to the Library by Tuesday.

That’s the challenge. Very simple. Wish me luck!

Happy July 4th!

I hope everyone had a great holiday!

I’ve been seeing more IPO announcements recently. I had a gut feeling that IPO activity has increased materially, but I hadn’t looked at the data to confirm. In fact, I haven’t looked at the data since my last update in March 2025 (see here), so today I did. Here are the updated IPO stats through July 2, 2025:

• 2025: 175

Here’s the 2025 breakdown by month:

• January: 28
• February: 28
• March: 19
• April: 32
• May: 34
• June: 25
• July: 9 (so far)

For comparison, here are previous years’ IPO stats:

• 2024: 225
• 2023: 154
• 2022: 181
• 2021: 1,035
• 2020: 480
• 2019: 232

IPO activity picked up after March. At this rate, we’ll exceed 2019, which was pre-COVID and pre-ZIRP. We’re on track to have the most IPOs since interest rates rose rapidly in 2022.

We still have six months left in the year, and anything can happen. If the Q2 taught me anything, it’s that curveballs can come at any time (e.g., April tariffs). But I suspect lots of technology CEOs and their VC investors are watching the IPO stats and strongly considering going public while the window is open and public market investors are receptive to buying shares in technology companies.

If you want to see the IPO stats—recent or historical—try here (where I get my IPO data).

In 2024, I challenged myself to accelerate my learning by reading a book (usually a biography) a week. To date, I’ve done it for 69 consecutive weeks. I wanted to share what I was reading and also keep track for myself, which was difficult (see here), so I created a Library section on this site. I added to it all the books I’ve read since my book-a-week habit began in March 2024, and I’ve committed to adding my latest read to the Library every Sunday (see the latest here).

That left the books I’d read before 2024 unshared and untracked. I set a goal to add my old reading to the Library over time. It began with a Memorial Day Challenge to add five books (see here) and continued with my challenging myself to add two books every weekend until my backlog is gone. This past weekend was my fifth weekend, and I added two more books:

• 100 to 1 in the Stock Market by Thomas Phelps
• 100 Baggers by Christopher Mayer

That’s the latest update on my weekend goal. I hope that sharing these books will add value to others.

I’m a first-generation entrepreneur committed to learning as much about entrepreneurship as I can. The best way I’ve found to do that is to study entrepreneurs. So, every week, I read a book I’ve read about or heard about from an entrepreneur; they’re mostly biographies. I post my latest read every Sunday in the Library on this site.

In May, I watched an interview with Gary Hoover, founder of Hoover’s Inc., which went public in 1999 and was sold to Dun & Bradstreet for $117 million; BOOKSTOP, which was sold to Barnes & Nobles; and the American Business History Center. In that interview, Hoover discussed his personal library of 70,000 books and his approach to learning through reading. And he wrote a book on this topic, The Lifetime Learner’s Guide to Reading and Learning. I’m always looking for ways to improve my approach to learning, so I bought a copy.

The book is a practical framework for learning through reading. It reminds me of Mortimer Adler’s book How to Read a Book, except it’s for people who read to solve problems and generate ideas (e.g., entrepreneurs and investors). Here are my favorite sections of this book:

• Hoover’s list of the top 160 books you should know about
• How information flow (sharing what you learn) enhances your learning
• How you can compound what you learn on the internet with books
• How the key to success is seeing or understanding something others don’t, which often requires looking where others don’t look
• The five ways we learn
• How to leverage network thinking
• How breakthrough innovations come from combining two well-known ideas that no one considered putting together—connecting the seemingly unconnected is the secret of the genius

I enjoyed other sections of this book too, so this isn’t a comprehensive list.

Anyone interested in multidisciplinary learning or how to read and learn more effectively should consider this book. It’s a great complement to How to Read a Book.

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: 69
• Total blog posts published: 448

This week’s metrics:

• Books read: 1
• Blog posts published: 7

What I completed this week (link to last week’s commitments):

• Read The Lifetime Learner’s Guide to Reading and Learning, a framework by entrepreneur Gary Hoover, who founded Hoovers, Bookstop, and American Business History Center.
• Added two more books that I read in 2023, these from Terry Smith and Adam Seessel, to the library on this site—see more here

What I’ll do next week:

• Read a biography, autobiography, or framework book
• Add two more books that I read in 2023 to the library on this site—see more here
• Create a digest of one biography, autobiography, or framework book

Asks:

• Seeking technical lead or cofounder – I’m looking for a senior full-stack developer skilled in AI retrieval. If you know one who’d have an interest in working on the software project related to books, please introduce us!

Week two hundred seventy-four was another week of learning. Looking forward to next week!