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!

2/26/25 Update: I finally published a list of all 52 books. You can see the list here.

2/27/25 Update: I created a searchable list of all the books I’ve read, and I’ll be updating it weekly. See here.

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.

This week, I had a regularly scheduled lunch with an entrepreneur friend. I updated him on my search for a developer, but our conversation mostly focused on my blog. I shared some of the experiments I’ve done in the last year and talked about it being hard to quantify the results. And I told him it’s hard to understand reader behavior and I want to improve at email capture.

To my surprise, my friend has tons of experience in website analytics and has helped enterprise companies in this area. He gave me a few suggestions, shared the names of a few tools, and offered to show me a few things. I didn’t expect this from our lunch—what a pleasant surprise! I’m excited to learn from my friend about analytics and use that knowledge to improve this blog.

This conversation reminded me that I never know what or who someone knows. I should continue to share what I’m working on with credible people and always have a clear and specific ask for help.

Students versed in AI are concerned because entry-level software developer jobs are hard to land.

This week, I spoke with a computer science student at a top-tier school known for computer science. He’s about two years from graduation and already all in on AI. He’s creating side projects and is well versed in the latest technological developments.

He said the job market is tough for entry-level software developers (and internships). He and his friends are looking for ways to gain more practical AI experience to increase their chances of getting full-time roles after graduation.

As he talked, I couldn’t help but think of myself and early-stage entrepreneurs. I haven’t found the right developer to help with the next phase of my book project. And I know several other entrepreneurs with internal and customer problems they think AI can help solve, but they too haven’t found the right talent to help them.

I’m out of touch with the job market for entry-level software developers. But if it’s as tough as this student says, then helping entrepreneurs build AI solutions to sell or use internally is a great option for students. They would learn how to use technology to solve real problems and get to see firsthand how doing so creates value for a business. That experience could give them a leg up in recruiting or give them the know-how and confidence to start their own company to solve a problem.

This week, I caught up with a friend at a VC firm. We talked about books we’ve read recently and our reading habits, and I was excited by what he shared.

My friend unexpectedly read two books by different authors about similar topics. Normally, he’d read a book and then move on to the next one. But he’s started using ChatGPT to enhance his understanding of what he’s reading. He typed in his comprehension of and thoughts on points made in a book (he disagreed with the author) and asked ChatGPT for feedback. ChatGPT gave him feedback and pointed to another author who disagreed with the first author and could provide an alternative perspective on the topic. He read the book ChatGPT suggested and sought feedback as he read that book, too.

The result was that he read two books related to a topic he’s interested in. He was able to understand differing perspectives on the topic and debate his own perspective. All of this led to a deep understanding of the topic that he wouldn’t have gotten from the way he used to read as well as to deep conviction about his perspective on the topic.

This conversation reminded me of an Andrej Karpathy video that I wrote about a few weeks ago (see here). Karpathy also uses AI to help him read books.

I love to hear about anything that enhances people’s reading experience. I’m wondering if more people are starting to use AI to help them understand and retain what they’re reading. If so, how big could this trend get?

I’ve been thinking about my 2025 uncomfortable summer challenge (see here). I’ll definitely do something related to writing. I want to stick with my theme of reading mostly biographies and sharing what I’ve learned from them with others. A few other things I’m considering:

• Copywriting – I want what I write about books to have a fun voice and structure that capture and retain the reader’s attention. I could commit to learning more about copywriting and experimenting with my writing this summer.
• Newsletters – I’m curious to experiment with sharing content in an email newsletter format. This would force me to learn how to capture and retain subscribers.
• Social media – I want to share more of what I’m learning on X (formerly Twitter).
• Digests – Last year I created a summary—a digest—of each biography used for a blog post series. The process was haphazard. I want to refine how I create digests and what’s included in them. It’d be great to have consistently formatted digests for all books.
• Connections – Biographies detail connections among people, books, companies, etc. But it’s hard to understand that those connections exist without reading the book. It’d be cool if I could visually show the connections—maybe include a relationship map as part of each blog post series.

I’m still thinking through this challenge and what I want to do exactly, but these are my thoughts from a recent brainstorming session.

I’m excited to nail down exactly what I’ll do, and I’ll share it with you once it’s solidified.

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Last week I shared that I was behind on one of my goals (see here). I’ve been consistent in hitting my reading goal: a book a week. But I haven’t been as consistent this month in updating the books section of this site so others can see the books I’ve read.

I aimed to fix this by adding all the books I read in April to this site by this past Sunday. I’m happy to share that I’ve checked that box. Now my plan is get back on schedule and add new books as I complete them every Sunday.

If you want to see the books I added, take a look here.