Rating: 8.0/10. Running Lean: Iterate from Plan A to a Plan That Works by Ash Maurya Guide on early stages of a startup, recommended by Hussein Fazal (CEO of Snaptravel). Many new founders assume building a startup is the same as building a product, but in reality, you are building a business model, with the…
Category: Nonfiction
The Scout Mindset by Julia Galef
Rating: 7.8/10. The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don’t by Julia Galef A lot of psychological research has shown how we’re prone to cognitive biases, although less has been written about how to overcome them. Many of these biases result from deciding on some opinion and holding onto it, even…
No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram by Sarah Frier
Rating: 7.8/10. Book about the creation and growth of Instagram, one of the largest social networks based on photo sharing. Instagram was founded by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger in 2010. Systrom had an interest in photography and wanted to appeal to users’ desire to look good, so the app provided filters that improved low-quality…
How We Learn by Stanislas Dehaene
Rating: 8.1/10. How We Learn: Why Brains Learn Better Than Any Machine… for Now by Stanislas Dehaene Book by neuroscience researcher about human learning. A lot of cognition is taken for granted until we try to train AI to do it, then it becomes apparent how difficult it actually is. AI still has a long…
The Personal MBA by Josh Kaufman
Rating: 8.0/10. Business book that teaches you the basic mental models you need to run a business. The author argues that MBA programs are overpriced and teach you outdated and over-specialized knowledge that’s irrelevant to most businesses, and building good mental models is more useful practically. The book is organized as short sections of advice…
A Short History of Quebec by John Dickinson and Brian Young
Rating: 7.3/10. Summary History of Quebec, from the first European contact in the 16th century until the present day. Before European contact, the natives were a mixture of farmers and hunter-gatherers who traded with each other. The Europeans first came to the region for cod, then the fur trade started in the 1630s. Due to…
AI Superpowers by Kai-Fu Lee
Rating: 7.9/10. Book Review: AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order by Kai-Fu Lee Book by Taiwanese CEO and venture capitalist working in China, talking about the differences in AI in China and the US, as well as the future of AI in society. Lee starts the book with the AlphaGo matches,…
Poor Economics by Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo
Rating: 8.4/10. Book Review: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty by Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo We have a lot of stereotypes about poor people, and these stereotypes influence our foreign aid and intervention policies. The problem is that these preconceptions are often inaccurate. This book, by two MIT economics…
A Death in the Rainforest by Don Kulick
Rating: 8.6/10. Book Review: A Death in the Rainforest: How a Language and a Way of Life Came to an End in Papua New Guinea by Don Kulick Book by linguistic anthropologist about his experiences documenting the Tayap language, spoken in Papua New Guinea. Tayap is a language isolate, spoken by less than a hundred…
Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
Rating: 6.7/10. Influential book by Daniel Kahneman, winner of a Nobel Prize in economics for his work on behavioral economics. The main idea of this book is we have two systems for making decisions, call them System 1 and System 2. System 1 is fast, intuitive, and effortless; System 2 is slow, logical, and takes…
What the F by Benjamin K. Bergen
Rating: 8.0/10. Book Review: What the F: What Swearing Reveals About Our Language, Our Brains, and Ourselves by Benjamin K. Bergen Book by psycholinguistics researcher Benjamin Bergen from UCSD, about the linguistics of profanity. It is unusual to do academic research on swear words like “fuck” and “nigger”, but the author compares it to studying…
Venture Deals by Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson
Rating: 7.7/10. Book Review: Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist by Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson Book written by two venture capitalist investors, meant to guide entrepreneurs through the VC funding process. After the founders have decided how much money they want to raise, gives a presentation, and the VC is…