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I've read around 40 books every year for the last few years. 2020 sure hit different and I only read 15 books. For a few reasons (not all bad) I really struggled to finish very many books:
(1) Quarantine found me spending a lot more time with my family which reduced the time I spent reading, but increased my overall quality of life.
(2) This year was a big Berkshire Hathaway year. I spent a lot of time reading every Berkshire Hathaway annual letter and Poor Charlie's Almanack. Big undertakings and took up a fair bit of my early morning reading time (though well worth the effort).
(3) I discovered Roam Research this year. This was a net positive for my reading experience, but it also increased the time I spent with each book and made me much more selective of what I read.
As I've become more and more thoughtful about what I'm reading and putting into my brain I've noticed a few themes this year.
Presidents & Prophets: Last year I read biographies of John Quincy Adams (which became one of my all-time favorite "quake books" (see John Quincy Adams: Militant Spirit), Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln. I also read biographies of Howard Hunter and Gordon B. Hinckley, who were both recently president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and men who I believe are modern day prophets. I continued this theme this by reading biographies of Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, and John Taylor; the first three presidents of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.
Non-Linear Software Strategies: Over the course of my career I've continued to specialize around software investing. We're in the very early innings of an explosion in distribution strategies that are much more organically driven. Models like product-led growth (Product Led Growth: The End User Era ), open source (Working in Public ), and collaborative publishing methods (How to Take Smart Notes .)
Visionary City Builders: One of my Portfolio Ideas has revolved around City Building ever since I took an urban design and development class at Cambridge called The New City. Since then I have been fascinated by the inner-workings of how cities get built. This year I spent time with some of those thinkers throughout time who have dedicated a fair amount of their intellectual power to understand what cities should be (Leonardo Da Vinci, Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling, Walt Disney and the Promise of Progress City).
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I love diving into the lives of people like Da Vinci because of the practical lessons rather than the inaccessible attributes. A lot of biographies focus so much on the successes people are known for. Isaacson has a knack for zeroing in on how they got there. "His genius was of the type we can understand, even take lessons from. It was based on skills we can aspire to improve in ourselves, such as curiosity and intense observation."
A consistent theme this year is one of healthy self-criticism. "One mark of a great mind is the willingness to change it. That willingness to surrender preconceptions was key to his creativity." No quote has better summarized this for me than of Charles Darwin who "spent much of his long life thinking in reverse as he tried to disprove his own hardest-won and best-loved ideas."
As recently as 2-3 years ago I remember investors talking about the "consumerization of the enterprise" as a largely failed experiment. What they focused on was the user experience of enterprise software. What they were less focused on has now become one of the leading distribution strategies in software. The UI may continue to lag best-in-class consumer apps but the power of the end-user is becoming incredibly powerful.
"I'm increasingly convinced that product-led growth may become the new GTM standard for building a large SaaS business. If you look at the latest companies that made into the $1B ARR Club, you'll notice they are all are self-serve first." (Sudheendra Chilappagari)