About the library
What history's greatest founders read — and the books written about them. Curated for founders, by a founder.
Reading is how founders train taste. The books they recommend, reread, and hand to their teams say more about how they think than any interview. But that knowledge is scattered across podcasts, show notes, memoirs, and decade-old tweets. This library collects it in one place.
Every founder page carries two shelves: Read about them — the biographies and memoirs that best capture how they built — andWhat they read — the founder's own book recommendations and documented reading.
The point of the library is trust, so every entry on a What they readshelf must carry either the founder's own words about the book (a quote) or a documented account of how they engaged with it, plus a source URL that resolves. No listicle provenance: if we can't trace a recommendation to a primary or verifiable source, it doesn't get shelved.
Cover images are downloaded from Open Library and served from this site, we never hot-link. Books whose edition has no available cover show a typographic placeholder instead. Buy links point at the ISBN on file; where multiple printings of the same work exist, the registry keeps one entry.