Bezos. Musk. Zuckerberg.
All men who cite the books they’ve read as fundamental to their success.
Crib from their reading lists, and you’ll learn a thing or two.
Which is exactly what you get in BookAuthority, a new site that offers book recommendations on leadership, productivity and entrepreneurship from 150 of the brightest, smartest and richest people in tech/startup culture.
Why create essentially a book club for startup culture? As the site notes, “Bill Gates reads about 50 books every year, Mark Cuban reads three hours every day, Mark Zuckerberg resolved to read 24 books in a year, and Warren Buffett spends 80% of his day reading.”
It should go without saying that if all the smart guys are doing it, you probably should be too.
How it works: Sign up via Facebook Connect (which helps build your reading profile), select your topic of interest (startup, project management, success, productivity, etc.) and get your reading list. You can also search by expert to see what books, say, influenced Warren Buffett or Eric Schmidt.
The site also allows you to make your own recommendations, mark books you want to read and track your reading habits.
As for the curation, CEO Lior Grossman suggests that about half of the recommendations arrive through online research into each leader’s reading habits, and half by direct contact.
A few things we learned from BA’s launch:
The key to happiness: Arrives via last century, in 1902’s As a Man Thinketh, an early example of the power of positive thinking (recommended by Tony Robbins and Tim Ferriss).
Your best financial case study: Business Adventures, featuring 12 real-life tales that shaped Wall Street, gets a nod from Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and Michael Dell.
If you want to be a leader: The Hard Thing About Hard Things, an advice guide for startups from entrepreneur Ben Horowitz, nabs 99 industry leader recommendations and a near-perfect score (4.99 out of 5).
Silicon Valley still knows nothing about women. Very few of the industry leaders here are not men. That said, Sheryl Sandberg from Facebook is high on The Lean Startup, while Mattermark CEO Danielle Morrill sides with the stress-free productivity guide Getting Things Done.
Peter Thiel recommends himself. Shocker. That said, his bestseller on innovation, Zero to One, also gets a nod from Elon Musk, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and vlogger Casey Neistat.
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