Category: reading list

reading list

Highlights from my Reading List – Week 32

Rahul R

Articles

  1. Why You Should Start a Blog Right Now – Alexey Guzey
    A solid pitch for why you need to have an online presence. 
  2. Happy Ambition: Striving for Success, Avoiding Status Cocaine, and Prioritizing Happiness – Ben Casnocha
    How to balance ambition and satisfaction? Should we? 
  3. Polymath or Dilettante? – Sharon Lin
    Sharon on the negative connotations associated with dilettantism.
  4. Small Teams of Scientists Have Fresher Ideas – The Atlantic
    What are small groups good at? What are large groups good at? 
  5. How to decentralize social media, a brief sketch – Larry Sanger
    How do we go about making social media decentralized?
reading list

Highlights from my Reading List – Week 31

Rahul R

Articles

  1. Overcoming Your Demons – Morgan Housel
    Morgan on the painful process of overcoming your greatest fears.   
  2. Lambda’s Loop: A Growth Case Study – Lloyd Alexander
    Part 2 in the Lambda School case study. This one covers the various feedback loops that enable Lambda to get better over time as it scales. 
  3. Early Reflections On Silicon Valley – Sar Haribhakti
    Sar chronicles his thoughts on the move to SV. Insightful commentary as always. 
  4. The Secret Power of ‘Read It Later’ Apps – Tiago Forte
    Tiago on why you should use Pocket or Instapaper for your reading habit.  
  5. Naval Ravikant’s Guide To Choosing Your First Job In Tech 
    Identifying potential peers, performing well and letting compounding work for you. 
  6. Open Letter From New York State Budget Director Robert Mujica Regarding Amazon
    A hard hitting memo on the Amazon debacle that highlights how vested interests and politicization of issues can lead to disastrous outcomes for a community. 
  7. The Secret to Amazon’s Success – Internal APIs
    Decentralizing the information flow between teams made it easier for Amazon to scale fast. 
  8. Amazon’s “two-pizza teams”: The ultimate divisional organization – Jason Crawford
    How Amazon thinks of teams and why it helps them stay nimble. 

    Two-pizza teams are so named because they’re small: 6 to 10 people; you can feed them with two pizzas. The most important aspect of a 2PT isn’t its size, though, but its fitness function. A fitness function is a single key business metric that the senior executive team (the “S-team”) agrees on with the team lead. It’s the equivalent of the P&L for a division: a single metric to provide focus and accountability. 

  9. Keith Rabois – This Week in Startups with Jason Calacanis – Part 1 
    Keith Rabois on success, failure, and building a team. 
reading list

Highlights from my Reading List – Week 30

Rahul R

Articles

  1. Loyalty is the Greatest Good: Or, How to Recruit for Your Startup – Rahul Desai
    Great resource on understanding the recruitment perspective.
  2. Writing Docs at Amazon – Scott
    The Do’s and Don’t of writing a good memo, inspired from Amazon’s culture.
  3. A Letter to Steven Pinker About Global Poverty – Jason Hickel
    This critique raises some important points on global poverty measurements that aren’t being addressed. 
  4. Evernote and the Brain: Designing Creativity Workflows – Tiago Forte
    This is a gem of an article on knowledge management, creativity and building a second brain. 
  5. Lessons from Keith Rabois Essay 2: How to Interview an Executive – Delian Asparouhov 
    The article talks about far more important things than just interviewing execs.
reading list

Highlights from my Reading List – Week 29

Rahul R

Articles

  1. Markets To Build In (2019) – Daniel Gross
    Where to look for when building new products. 
  2. Lessons From Keith Rabois Essay 1: How to become a Venture Capitalist – Delian Asparouhov
    First in a series of essays from Delian.
  3. Can Lambda School Become a $100M Business? A Growth Case Study – Lloyd Alexander
    An excellent breakdown of Lambda’s potential. 
  4. Why Teams? – Yaneer Bar-Yam
    Why do we need teams? A perspective from complexity. 
  5. The Joe Rogan Experience – Sleep Expert and Neuroscientist Dr. Matthew Walker
    Key takeaways from Why We Sleep.