Startup Founder Reading List by James Park
The books, podcasts, and talks that shaped how I think about building products and companies.
6 content nodes connected by 5 relationships in this knowledge graph.
Content in this graph
- Zero to One — Peter Thiel (book) — “Thiel s contrarian framework: competition is for losers, monopoly is the goal. Every great company is unique.”
- Connected to Steve Jobs — Walter Isaacson: Thiel worked with Jobs-era PayPal. Both believed in building monopolies through unique vision.
- The Mom Test — Rob Fitzpatrick (book) — “Stop asking people if your idea is good. Ask about their life instead. The best customer research book ever written.”
- Connected to The Design of Everyday Things: Mom Test is about understanding users. Norman is about designing for them. Two sides of the same coin.
- How I Built This — Guy Raz (podcast) — “Every founder story is different but the pattern is the same: obsession, rejection, persistence, luck.”
- Connected to Zero to One — Peter Thiel: Every How I Built This episode validates Thiel s thesis — great companies are contrarian.
- Thinking in Bets — Annie Duke (book) — “Duke applies poker thinking to decisions. Outcome quality is not decision quality. This changed how I evaluate my choices.”
- Connected to The Mom Test — Rob Fitzpatrick: Both teach you to separate signal from noise — in decisions and in customer feedback.
- The Design of Everyday Things (book) — “Norman proves that bad design is not the user s fault. Affordances and signifiers — once you see them, you cannot unsee.”
- Steve Jobs — Walter Isaacson (book) — “The biography that launched a thousand startups. Jobs was impossible to work with and impossible to ignore.”
- Connected to The Design of Everyday Things: Jobs obsession with design echoes Norman s principles — but Jobs went further into emotion.