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).

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.