This week, I chatted with a CEO who has a software solution that’s been on the market for a few years. The product is both powerful and complex. It does a lot of things, which is both a gift and a curse. Earlier this year, he was struggling to get traction. This week, though, he shared that things are trending up rapidly; they’ve landed over 10 new customers, each paying roughly $25k a year.

So, what changed? Two things:

• The messaging changed from describing what the product does to describing the problems it solves.
• The company identified several problems that their core customers face and that their solution addresses. Instead of cramming them all on one site, they created a stand-alone site for each problem. Prospective customers with a particular problem can learn more about how this software solves that problem, and they can sign up and try it for free.

All this happened in a two- or three-month period. They didn’t build more stuff; they just focused on the customer’s problems and made it crystal clear, via better messaging, how they solve each of them. Perspective customers now have an oh, that’s for me moment when they visit the site and are converting to paying customers.

Having a great product that solves a problem is critical, but so is the messaging you use to tell the world about what you’ve built.

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 77 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 thirteenth weekend, and I added two more books:

• Unique Ability by Catherine Nomura, Julia Waller, and Shannon Waller
• Hatching Twitter by Nick Bilton

That’s the latest update on my weekend goal. I hope that sharing these books will be of value.

A few months ago, I was listening to The Slow Hunch podcast, on which the founders of the venture capital firm Union Square Ventures (USV) were interviewed. Fred Wilson and Brad Burnham are the founding partners; they shared stories of founding the firm and notable investments such as Twitter, Etsy, Cloudflare, and Coinbase.

Burnham mentioned a framework they used to develop their initial investment strategy. Where he and Wilson thought they were in the period’s technology cycle played a big role in their strategy. It led them to focus on investing in the application layer of the internet because, they realized, the infrastructure phase was behind them. They got this framework from a book Burnham had read. It had a profound impact on him and positioned USV to become one of the top investment firms by identifying the right founders and companies given their understanding of the technology cycle. You can listen to the sections of the interview where Brad talks about the book and how they used it here and here.

This piqued my interest and led to my booking that book, Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital, by the Venezuelan economist Carlota Perez. The book is a blend of a history and a framework. It describes a way of thinking about cycles created by new technology and financial capital and analyzes the five major technology revolutions over the last 250 years and their implications for society: the industrial revolution; steam and railways; steel, electricity, and heavy engineering; oil, cars, and mass production; and information technology and telecommunications.

The core premise of this book is that the combination of new technology and financial capital applied to it creates a technology revolution that leads to speculative bubbles.

According to Perez, each technology cycle lasts roughly 50 years and follows a consistent evolution through three phases:

• Installation. New technology is created, and infrastructure is created to support it.
• Turning point. Speculators’ unrealistic expectations related to the new technology cause a recession or financial crisis.
• Deployment. New technology is distributed widely across society and is accepted, with new rules and regulations being implemented to avoid future crashes.

The book dives deep into the economic and societal impact of each phase, which I found very useful.

Anyone interested in understanding how long technology cycles work, how capital and new technology complement each other, or how speculative technology bubbles work should consider giving Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital a read. It’s dense and full of lots of material that will make you stop and think, so it isn’t a casual read. But Perez’s framing is especially helpful to me as I think about the current AI wave and where we likely are in the long AI cycle.

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: 77
• Total blog posts published: 504

This week’s metrics:

• Books read: 1
• Blog posts published: 7

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

• Read Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital, a historical recount of the relationship between financial bubbles and new technologies. Venezuelan economist Carlota Perez describes a cycle driven by the relationship between the two that can be traced back over one hundred years.
• Added two more books that I read in 2019, these an inside perspective on angel investing and a biography about the opioid crisis and one of America’s biggest pain clinics, 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 before 2024 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 eighty-two 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 this week

What I learned:

• Many AI entrepreneurs leverage models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and others. They access them via API and build solutions on top of them. Some students at top engineering schools are building their own models from scratch and completely avoiding using OpenAI and other well-known providers of LLMs.
• Speed is one of the biggest advantages entrepreneurs can have. The faster they can move, the more experiments they can run. The more experiments they run, the more they learn and the closer they get to an ideal solution. Reading is pretty slow, but books contain solutions to many problems entrepreneurs face. Helping entrepreneurs quickly sift through books to find the right piece of information at the exact time they need it is tremendously valuable to them.  

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

One of my favorite maxims is from the autobiography of John H. Johnson, founder of Johnson Publishing Company, which published JET and Ebony magazines. Early in Johnson’s career, he worked for Harry H. Pace, CEO of Supreme Liberty Life Insurance. John was upset that Pace had negotiated a settlement with a man who owed the company money and, when Pace tried to collect it from him, was disrespectful to him.

In that moment, Pace told Johnson something he’d never forget:

If you want to succeed in business, young man, you’ve got to learn how to work with people that you don’t like. And you’ve got to learn how to compromise. After you compromise, you have to forget the past and go on to the future. For in business, you have no permanent enemies or permanent friends—only permanent interests.

This quote is powerful. It stuck with me. I took a screenshot of it, and I look at it periodically to remind me to stay focused on my interests and to work with people and compromise to work towards them—even people who aren’t my favorites. I’ve also shared that screenshot with friends when they’re working with people they don’t care for.

To get anything material accomplished in business, you can’t do it all yourself. You must work with people. Some of them you won’t like. But you must figure out how to work with them anyway, compromise, and keep progressing toward what matters to you.

Books are connected to other books, but it’s not easy to see the connections unless you read an entire book. That makes how books are networked, or connected, invisible. The primary way I discover books is seeing them mentioned in another book. I’m constantly making mental connections of ideas, periods, events, or people mentioned in several books. This blog shows the connections between books, but it hasn’t been easy to understand how many connections a book has . . . until now.

Starting today, when you view the Library page, you’ll notice that next to each book is the number of other books in my library with a connection to it. It’s an easy way to quantify a book’s network. If the quantity of connected books is interesting, you can easily see each connection by clicking “Learn more” to see the book’s profile.

I’m excited about this. I haven’t seen anything like it on other blogs. It’s helped me think more deeply about book connections. I hope that understanding how networked a book in my library is will help people find books they find useful.

If you want to see for yourself, check it out:

A friend is starting a new company. He’s got a great vision and a great idea, but it’s been hard to get funding. He didn’t let that stop him, though. He got creative and found ways to get the computers and other things he needed.

He didn’t have any money, but he had hustle. He found a surplus organization that has stockpiles of computers and other technology assets. He worked with the staff to figure out what he needed to do for his new company to qualify to receive surplus assets. And they eventually approved him to get computers, monitors, and other expensive assets. Now, with zero dollars raised, he has the resources he needs to get his company off the ground.

My friend’s journey highlighted to me the difference between resources and resourcefulness:

• Resources – a stock or supply of money, materials, staff, and other assets that can be drawn on by a person or organization to function effectively
• Resourcefulness – the ability to find quick and clever ways to overcome difficulties

Many early-stage founders focus on getting money so they can buy the resources they need to get their company off the ground. But in reality, what they need is a resourceful mindset. Entrepreneurs who are resourceful find clever ways to get the resources they need to get their company off the ground, even when they don’t have any money. They don’t take no for an answer. They think outside the box. Entrepreneurs who believe they must have money to buy the resources they need are much less likely to have outsize success or overcome the inevitable cash crunch that all entrepreneurs face at some point.

My big takeaway is that lack of money makes things harder, but it shouldn’t stop you if you’re resourceful.

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 76 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 twelfth weekend, and I added two more books:

• Angel by Jason Calacanis
• American Pain by John Temple

That’s the latest update on my weekend goal. I hope that sharing these books will be of value.

Last week I shared a framework book, Warren Buffett’s Ground Rules, which details the principles Buffett used to run his partnership, Buffett Partnership Ltd, in his pre–Berkshire Hathaway days. When I read that book, it reminded me that few investors who are active today were also actively investing in the 1960s and 1970s, like Buffett.

Another person who meets those criteria is Howard Marks, cofounder of Oaktree Capital. Marks has written two books, one of which I read twice. So, I decided to read his other book, The Most Important Thing.

This book is a framework book that details the investing principles that Marks has learned over his many decades of investing, many of which led to the outsize success of Oaktree Capital. Each chapter is dedicated to one of the 19 principles and explains it thoroughly. My favorite was the chapter on understanding risk.

This book is a good tool for anyone interested in investing or understanding how public markets work. I enjoy Marks’s writing, and this book didn’t disappoint. I’ll definitely read it periodically as a refresher.