I’m committed to reading a book a week to learn and improve. Usually it’s a biography or autobiography because I get the most from reading about entrepreneurs’ journeys. I’m also committed to sharing what I’m reading in the library section of this site. Each week, after I read a book, I share it in my Learning Library, as it’s called now. My goal is to post a new book every Sunday.

This week, I shared a biography I read about Charlie Munger. Several books have been written about the life of his business partner, Warren Buffet, but I wanted to learn about Charlie’s journey, too—specifically, how he came by his multidisciplinary way of thinking and solving problems.

Damn Right! was just what I was looking for. Not only did it offer great insights into Charlie’s early career and tragedy, it also included great context about his businesses before Berkshire (including his hedge fund), his personal life, his quirky personality, and his commitment to multidisciplinary learning.

If you’re interested in learning more about Charlie Munger, consider reading Damn Right! by Janet Lowe.

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: 61
• Total blog posts published: 392

This week’s metrics:

• Books read: 1
• Blog posts published: 7

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

• Read Damn Right!, a biography about Charlie Munger  
• Finalized details of the 2025 Summer Uncomfortable Challenge
• Added this site to the Google Tag Manager platform

What I’ll do next week:

• Read a biography, autobiography, or framework book
• Create an opportunity solution tree for this project
• Order books needed for the 2025 Summer Uncomfortable Challenge
• Tag specific actions on each page of this site to start collecting data in Google Tag Manager

Asks:

• If you know any senior full-stack developers interested in working on the software for my current project, please introduce us!

Week two hundred sixty-six 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:

• For weeks, I’ve been looking for a developer to replace my friend. I’ve chatted with several developers but haven’t found the right person. This is frustrating because it’s slowing things down more than I anticipated.

What I learned:

• Ben Thompson’s Great Unbundling essay (see here) describes how technology and unbundling have impacted various media forms. This great piece articulates clearly how and why the media industry has changed. Notably, it doesn’t mention books. This essay got me thinking.
• An avid reader who shares his book reading and learning from books on X (formerly Twitter) is doing the same manual note-taking and highlighting that I do.
• Quotes and maxims are valuable and resonate with people. The person mentioned above keeps a file of quotes from the books he’s read. I’m stealing his idea.
• Cold outreach via X works well when you have a body of work to share that complements what others are doing. It establishes your credibility.
• The issue with sharing information from books is that they’re full of unstructured text. Tools like Reducto focus on the unstructured text problem. Investors are getting behind these companies (see here). These tools might be useful because we might not have to build extraction tools from scratch.
• I played around with Google Tag Manager for the first time. I’m aiming to start tracking information that’s more granular on this blog.

Those are my struggles and learnings from the week.

This week, I connected on X (formerly Twitter) with an investor who’s an avid reader. He does a great job of sharing what he’s reading and what he’s learning from the books he reads. From what I can tell, he’s a fan of biographies and investing books, as I am.

When I interact with avid readers who also share their learnings publicly, I get excited and curious to learn about their process. I’ve struggled with managing and later finding highlights in books I’ve read (see here). I’m trying to solve this problem for myself or at least reduce the pain. I asked this investor and learned that he’s doing a lot of what I’m doing: manual highlighting and making notes in physical books.

One thing he does stuck with me: He extracts quotes from books and stores them in a file, sorted by quote type. Retrieving a quote when he needs it is significantly faster than if he had to find it in one of many physical books.

Even though I send friends quotes from books all the time (by sending pics of the page with the quote highlighted), I don’t keep all the useful quotes I’ve read in a single place.

I’m glad this investor took the time to share his process with me. His approach to storing quotes is something I’ll replicate going forward.

One of my friends told me today about an interesting start-up. It’s called Reducto, and it’s a service that turns “unstructured documents into useful insights.” The team just raised $24 million from several venture capital firms to fund its growth.

During my testing for my book project, I learned that it’s hard to feed large amounts of unstructured text to large language models, and finding insights was challenging. The responses were inconsistent or useless.

I’m curious to play with Reducto’s free playground to see how its platform addresses this problem.

This week, I met an early-stage entrepreneur. We discussed his fundraising strategy and pitch deck. He began by telling me about his background. As I listened, I could tell he’s bright and has a deep understanding of the problem he’s looking to solve and the market—but that wasn’t being conveyed in his deck.

His pitch deck jumped straight to the problem slide.

During our conversation, he established credibility before telling me about the problem. His work experience and a failed start-up gave me a glimpse of his drive and intelligence. He then told me how he discovered this problem and described all his research around it. At that point, I was hooked and engaged in his pitch.

His deck didn’t establish credibility and didn’t have a humanizing aspect (except a team slide at the end). So, the pitch didn’t resonate with me and likely wouldn’t with anyone else.

Early-stage entrepreneurs are selling themselves and their vision. Their decks should reflect this. It’s easier for someone to engage with a pitch when they sense that the person who created the pitch is worth listening to.

Think of an early-stage pitch as a conversation on paper. When you meet someone for the first time, you don’t jump straight to what you want from them. You introduce yourself and give some background info so they can get comfortable with you and become receptive to what you’re about to ask or tell them. The beginning of an early-stage pitch deck should resemble the beginning of an introductory conversation—it should establish credibility to help the reader be receptive to your pitch.

Reading Netflixed, I learned about an entrepreneur I’d never heard of. His name was Andre Blay. He was the man who created the market for VHS tapes and a multibillion-dollar industry, VHS rentals. That industry birthed tens of thousands of video rental entrepreneurs and led to the creation of Blockbuster Video. And he did all that in a few short years.

I want to learn more about him and how his vision led to a multibillion-dollar industry. He wrote a memoir that’s nearly impossible to find at a reasonable price, but I’m determined to get a copy. When I do, I’ll share what I learn.

I’ve been happy with this site’s new library section, which lists the books I’ve read in the last year (see here). I’m constantly referencing it and have gotten positive feedback on it. It was intended to help readers, but I constantly use it to find posts I’ve written that are connected to specific books.

This weekend, I looked at a stack of books I’ve read and realized that a material number of them aren’t listed on this site because I read them before 2024. I also realized that I don’t have a central place that captures all the books I’ve read over the last five or ten years, and that’s something I very much want.

So, this weekend I decided that I’m going to add all the books I’ve read to this site. It’s a long-term project, but it’s something I want to and will do.

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: 60
• Total blog posts published: 385

This week’s metrics:

• Books read: 1
• Blog posts published: 7

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

• Read Netflixed: The Epic Battle for America’s Eyeballs, a biography about Netflix’s history from its origin through 2011

What I’ll do next week:

• Read a biography, autobiography, or framework book
• Create an opportunity solution tree for this project
• Finalize details of the 2025 Summer Uncomfortable Challenge

Asks:

• If you know any senior full-stack developers interested in working on the software for my current project, please introduce us!

Week two hundred sixty-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 struggles this week

What I learned:

• Web analytics can help me test different copy on my blog in a data-driven way and help me increase email captures.
• Before true website optimization can be done, site visits need to grow to a statistically relevant number.
• College students in AI-related majors can’t easily find jobs or internships. A developer to help me with the next leg of the journey to build my software could be among them.

Those are my struggles and learnings from the week.