05/14/2026
Most tech books fade out by the next chapter.
A few rewire how you build. These 16 stayed with me.
› Founder mindset and strategy
- The Hard Thing About Hard Things: the only honest founder book about layoffs and 3am decisions.
- Zero to One: stops you chasing trends, asks what only you can build.
- Thinking in Systems: teaches you where to push so one move changes everything.
- The Mom Test: customer interviews that actually tell the truth.
› Software craft and systems
- A Philosophy of Software Design: reframes complexity as the real enemy of every codebase.
- The Pragmatic Programmer: a developer’s oath, sharper on every reread.
- Designing Data-Intensive Applications: demystifies the entire modern data stack.
- Accelerate: proves elite engineering teams are disciplined, not lucky.
› AI, the future of intelligence
- Empire of AI: the geopolitical backstory behind OpenAI and the new superpowers.
- Why Machines Learn: the math behind ML, told with real intuition.
- Superagency: the founder’s playbook for building leverage in the AI era.
- A Brief History of Intelligence: reframes what intelligence actually is.
› AI ethics and society
- Unmasking AI: exposes facial recognition bias and what to do about it.
- Weapons of Math Destruction: the book every AI founder owes their users.
- The Alignment Problem: AI safety written for builders, not philosophers.
- Atlas of AI: names the minerals, labor, and data behind every model.
Save it. Send it to a builder who needs it.
Which one changed how you build?
Tech