2022 Year in Review

This year I read 60 books, or more than one a week! They ranged from the 832-page biography of John D. Rockefeller to Ender’s Game, one of the best science fiction books of all time.

Some of the books got a ByteLeg write-up, such as:

• Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us - Seth Godin
• The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail - Clayton M. Christensen
• Ender’s Game – Orson Scott Card
• The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron - Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind
• Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World with OKRs - John Doerr
• User Friendly: How the hidden rules of design are changing the way we live, work, and play - Cliff Kuang with Robert Fabricant

Having read so many books, I thought it would be fun to do a reflection and rank what I’ve read.

The ByteLeg 2022 reading list, ranked!

For the non-image version / a list of the specific titles in each tier, open the following drop downs:

Instead of creating a “top 5” list, I thought it would be fun to highlight my favorite books in certain categories. Clicking on the image will take you to the Amazon page!

Investing/Venture Capital:

The Power Law is an incredible read. If you are interesting in learning about the history of Venture Capital, how high-growth tech companies get financed, or the nuanced terms that go into a term sheet, this is the book for you. I learned more from this book that I did in a Venture Capital bootcamp hosted by my MBA. Understanding the history of venture capital, why things are the way that they are, is critical to understanding the tech world. If you’re interested in understanding tech, this book is critical.

Sci Fi:

Unfortunately I didn’t read as much Sci-fi this year as I would have liked, something I’ll definitely need to change in 2023. While I reread Ender’s Game and wrote about it for ByteLeg, it’s my 10^th or 11^th time reading it, so I feel like it’s unfair to pick it as a “highlight” of this year. Instead I’m highlighting the Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson. This book follows two set of characters – one fighting the Nazi’s in World War 2, the other a libertarian computer hacker group in the 1990s.

What’s incredible about this book is the true technical expertise that is woven into the story. There are entire pages of long, drawn out math equations explaining exactly how a fake cypher would work. This book oozes 90s hacker vibes without falling into the fast-typing, “we’re in” tropes of movies like Swordfish:

This book is a favorite of Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and the PayPal mafia. This book defined what “cypherpunk” meant. If you’re into crypto, this is a book you should read.

Business Strategy

In a tough three-way race between the Innovator’s Dilemma, the Hard Thing About Hard Things, and Radical Candor, I have to give it to the OG strategy book, The Innovator’s Dilemma. While the Hard Thing About Hard Things created the frameworks for understanding today's Silicon Valley, the Innovator’s Dilemma remains the essential tech strategy book. The Innovator’s Dilemma focuses on systemic reasons that new entrants are always able to disrupt legacy businesses – the things that make a business successful are ultimately the things that make it collapse.

In bullets:

• Innovator’s Dilemma – why is the tech market structured how it is? Why does disruption and tech innovation continue?
• Hard Thing About Hard Things – Strategies for navigating and framing an industry in which disruption and innovation are occurring. As a business, how should you actually approach the paradigm outlined in the Innovator’s Dilemma? What should you prioritize?
• Radical Candor – How to be a good boss, manager and ensure that you organization is operating at 100% efficiency in pursuit of the steps outlined in the Hard thing About Hard Things.

These books blend together, addressing different layers of the fundamental challenges outlines in the Innovator’s Dilemma. 25 years later, the Innovator’s Dilemma is still king!

Biography

What do you know about the period between the Civil War and the Great Depression? I’d guess it’s not much. In history books we tend to teach a lot about Lincoln and the Civil War, skip 50 years, and then start talking about the Roaring Twenties and the Great Depression. If you know anything about the late 1800's, you it as the era of the “Robber Baron’s,” but what does that actually mean?

Titan is the biography of John D. Rockefeller, the founder of Standard Oil, the world’s largest oil company (later split into basically all of today's oil companies). Rockefeller was the richest American, possibly ever. For example, at his death in 1937, Rockefeller owned roughly 5% of ALL wealth in the United States. Today, people are upset that Bezos and Elon own roughly 0.5% of the United State Wealth – Rockefeller was 10x wealthier!

Rockefeller was both a cut-throat businessman and a devout Christian, giving away more of his fortune than any person in history. The contrast between Rockefeller’s two sides - brutality in business and excessive philanthropic giving - is both inspiring and scary. Rockefeller is arguably the greatest businessman to ever live. If you’re interested in business, Titan is a masterclass in negotiating, operating leverage, and the creation of profit moats.

Politics

For anyone interested in understanding the Trump’s takeover of the Republican party, I highly recommend The Right. Beginning in the 1920s and concluding in 2020, The Right traces 100 years of the ideas driving the “right.” From opposition to FDR in the 1930s to Cold War hawkishness in the 1980s to democracy promotion and globalization in the 1990s and 2000s, the Right traces the ideological history of both America and the Republican party. The growth of populism or isolationism isn’t new, but is a longstanding thread of the American right which is coming back to the fore. The Right is a great book if you want to understand today’s Republican party!

Finance Honorable Mention

As part of my MBA, this fall I took Finance 1 which focused on bond pricing and all the basic ins and outs of what happens on Wall Street. During this class, I reread Michael Lewis's The Big Short and wow - it is an incredible book. After taking Finance 1, the amount of information that I got out of this book increased 10x. Everyone should read this book if they want to understand the way the world works. At the very least, everyone should go watch the Big Short movie.

That's a wrap for ByteLeg in 2022! As always, if you made it this far, you should subscribe for free below! I have plans for 2023 that I think you'll enjoy. If you have any feedback, I'm always happy to hear it. Reach me at Michael@byteleg.com.

-Michael