This week, I took some time to list out the books I read that led to my starting Draft.dev earlier this year.

As a startup founder, you get pulled in a million different directions from the moment you start your company. It can be overwhelming to have to learn so many new skills at once: raising funds, hiring a team, managing people.

Learning these skills gradually while working at startups, reading books, and meeting other entrepreneurs made the process of starting my own company a lot less daunting.

Hopefully, some of these books help you on your journey too.

Personally, I think Google has done a great job improving search over the past two decades, but we are reaching a point where Google's interests are colliding with offering honest search results to users.

Lots of good nuggets here including this: "If you need 30 emails back-and-forth to sell a $30/month product, the problem isn’t your emails."

"Knowing and then deciding what to write is often more valuable than writing everything, but knowing what matters is more of an art than a science."

Computer science is an amazing field of study, formalizing as a college discipline in the 60s and evolving through the decades since to become part of daily life around the world. And, for some of us, its also turned into a passion.

"In the quoted example, Lambda School is normalizing an idea about newly-acquired programming talent, treating people (who are already disadvantaged) as commodities."

People hear “you should network more,” and think that means they should go out and meet new people.

That’s not how it works.

Relationships take months or years to cultivate. You have to *stay in touch* with more people, not meet more people.

One of the most liberating things about running my own business is opting out of Slack. Chat apps are good for unimportant chatter, but not good for prioritizing, planning, or storing important decisions.

"Good managers should consciously reduce biases in any performance review. This starts by being aware of these, calibrating reviews, and sharing with peers or your own managers, asking for their feedback if they see you being biased in certain directions."