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Balaji Srinivasan

Balaji Srinivasan Recommended Books

Balaji Srinivasan has recommended 73 books. Browse the complete reading list with quotes and sources below.

Balaji Srinivasan is a serial entrepreneur, angel investor, and essayist.

(Read more on Wikipedia)

Online Presence

73 Books Recommended

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"We've all read Grove." - Balaji Srinivasan (Source)

Also recommended by

7 people
  • Steve Jobs recommended this book
  • Marc Andreessen recommended this book
  • Charlie Munger recommended this book
  • Ben Horowitz recommended this book
  • Bill Gates recommended this book
  • Vinod Khosla recommended this book
  • +1

    More recommendations

"A history of the Chinese tech ecosystem." - Balaji Srinivasan (Source)

Also recommended by

8 people
  • Yuval Noah Harari recommended this book
  • Arianna Huffington recommended this book
  • Chris Anderson recommended this book
  • Marc Benioff recommended this book
  • Peter Diamandis recommended this book
  • Satya Nadella recommended this book
  • +2

    More recommendations

    • Tim O’Reilly
      "If you care about the future being brought to us by AI, this is the one indispensable book of 2018." - Tim O’Reilly
    • Ryan Shea
      Ryan Shea recommended this book on his website.
"The desert island book. So good." - Balaji Srinivasan (Source)

Also recommended by

1 person

The Feynman Lectures on Physics (3 books)

"If you take all the people who could understand the Feynman Lectures, they could probably appreciate Hamlet. But not conversely." - Balaji Srinivasan (Source)

Also recommended by

2 people
"[Brian Armstrong] and I used parts of this at Coinbase." - Balaji Srinivasan (Source)

Also recommended by

3 people
"Useful as an alternate perspective on the era." - Balaji Srinivasan (Source)

Also recommended by

1 person
"[The author] is very smart and it’s worth reading anything she writes on open source." - Balaji Srinivasan (Source)

Also recommended by

1 person

The Internet of Money (3 books)

"One of the best books on Bitcoin for a broad audience." - Balaji Srinivasan (Source)

Also recommended by

1 person
  • Raoul Pal recommended this series
"Was written in a few days by N people, one chapter each, and then published on Amazon." - Balaji Srinivasan (Source)

Also recommended by

1 person
  • Anthony Pompliano recommended this book
"A good read for crypto people." - Balaji Srinivasan (Source)

UFO Hunters

by William J. Birnes
Balaji Srinivasan mentioned this book on Twitter. (Source)

The Gulag Archipelago (3 books)

"What the Soviet Union was actually like." - Balaji Srinivasan (Source)

Also recommended by

3 people
Balaji Srinivasan mentioned this book on Twitter. (Source)
Balaji Srinivasan recommended this book on Twitter. (Source)
Balaji Srinivasan recommended this book on Twitter. (Source)

Also recommended by

1 person
  • Jonathan Eisen recommended this book
Balaji Srinivasan recommended this book on Twitter. (Source)

Also recommended by

1 person
  • Jonathan Eisen recommended this book
Balaji Srinivasan recommended this book on Twitter. (Source)
Balaji Srinivasan recommended this book on Twitter. (Source)

Also recommended by

1 person
"I love [this] book!" - Balaji Srinivasan (Source)
"Blockbuster tried to buy Hollywood Video, but the FTC called this off on antitrust (!) grounds. By 2010 Blockbuster was bankrupt and Netflix was soaring." - Balaji Srinivasan (Source)

Frisco Kid

by Jack London
Balaji Srinivasan mentioned this book on Twitter. (Source)
"Short and well worth reading. Presages much of today's train crash on social media." - Balaji Srinivasan (Source)

Also recommended by

1 person
"An accessible explanation of how blockchains allow us to establish certain kinds of truths even in adversarial environments." - Balaji Srinivasan (Source)
"A lot of fun. Not exactly art, but novel approach with a lot of visual inspiration." - Balaji Srinivasan (Source)
"The American century is ending. The Asian century is beginning." - Balaji Srinivasan (Source)
"Gold from the Americas did flood Europe in the 1500s, which helped cause inflation." - Balaji Srinivasan (Source)

Also recommended by

1 person
"[The author's] thesis is that America is increasingly becoming a virtual society, focused on make-believe above all. I have to agree." - Balaji Srinivasan (Source)

Also recommended by

1 person
  • Marc Andreessen recommended this book

End the Fed

by Ron Paul
"[The author] was to Bitcoin what Andrew Yang is to startup societies." - Balaji Srinivasan (Source)

Also recommended by

1 person
"There’s a sense in which the term 'real name' is a misnomer. A better term is a state name — a name which makes you legible to the state." - Balaji Srinivasan (Source)

Also recommended by

1 person
Balaji Srinivasan recommended this book on Twitter. (Source)

Also recommended by

2 people
"Don't judge this self-published book by its cover, just read it." - Balaji Srinivasan (Source)
"The US military has a perfect record in its war games with China. China has won every round." - Balaji Srinivasan (Source)
"I put it up there with the top five books I recommend." - Balaji Srinivasan (Source)

Also recommended by

2 people
"One may have to set aside ego to read it." - Balaji Srinivasan (Source)

Also recommended by

1 person
"Makes the case that Xi could be felled by his internal enemies (possible!) and that this will lead to democratization (IMO implausible)." - Balaji Srinivasan (Source)
"Useful for anyone trying to bootstrap a new community or network, which is virtually every founder these days." - Balaji Srinivasan (Source)
"Decent book — by a central banker! — on the lack of legitimacy of central banking and the regulatory state writ large." - Balaji Srinivasan (Source)
"In terms of just packing a punch per page I really enjoyed this back in the day." - Balaji Srinivasan (Source)

Also recommended by

1 person
Balaji Srinivasan recommended this book in "The Almanack of Balaji Srinivasan." (Source)

Also recommended by

2 people
"Teaches you how to test things that are bigger than just a simple function." - Balaji Srinivasan (Source)

High Output Management

by Andrew S. Grove
Balaji Srinivasan recommended this book in "The Almanack of Balaji Srinivasan." (Source)

Also recommended by

13 people
  • Mark Zuckerberg recommended this book
  • Marc Andreessen recommended this book
  • Tobi Lütke recommended this book
  • Larry Ellison recommended this book
  • Ben Horowitz recommended this book
  • Keith Rabois recommended this book
  • +7

    More recommendations

    • Drew Houston
      "The best book on management ever written." - Drew Houston
    • Brian Chesky
      "Chesky, CEO of AirBnB, treats 'High Output Management' as his primary reference book on management." - Business Insider
    • Brian Armstrong
      "Surprisingly, I found I was already using many of the management ideas in this book (1:1, OKRs, etc) which is a testament to just how influential this book is." - Brian Armstrong
    • Ron Conway
      "User-friendly guide to the art and science of management." - Ron Conway
    • Sahil Lavingia
      Sahil Lavingia recommended this book on Notion.
    • Justin Kan
      Justin Kan recommended this book on Twitter.
    • John Doerr
      John Doerr recommended this book at the end of "Measure What Matters."
"How tech founders always had to fight against the establishment, just like the present day." - Balaji Srinivasan (Source)

Also recommended by

2 people
"If you want to find startup ideas here’s the book." - Balaji Srinivasan (Source)

Also recommended by

6 people
  • Naval Ravikant recommended this book
  • Peter Thiel recommended this book
  • Brian Armstrong recommended this book
  • Ryan Shea recommended this book
  • Patrick O'Shaughnessy recommended this book
  • Sahil Lavingia recommended this book
"People get really amped about a technology, then you try to actually do it, you find it’s actually hard, most people get demoralized and they quit." - Balaji Srinivasan (Source)

Also recommended by

1 person
"Tackles the problem of modern distraction by empowering us to break the bad habits at the root of the issue." - Balaji Srinivasan (Source)

Also recommended by

2 people
"The brief argument is: our true history is written in our genes." - Balaji Srinivasan (Source)

Also recommended by

4 people
"The Prince was written by Machiavelli for the Haves on how to hold power. Rules for Radicals is written for the Have-Nots on how to take it away." - Balaji Srinivasan (Source)

Also recommended by

1 person
  • Ryan Holiday recommended this book
"How today’s America resembles the Dutch and British empires of the past in terms of its monetary overextension." - Balaji Srinivasan (Source)

Also recommended by

8 people
  • Arianna Huffington recommended this book
  • Jamie Dimon recommended this book
  • Mark Cuban recommended this book
  • Lex Fridman recommended this book
  • David Friedberg recommended this book
  • Changpeng Zhao recommended this book
  • +2

    More recommendations

"How a cyclic theory of history forecasts a serious American conflict in the 2020s (written in the mid-1990s)." - Balaji Srinivasan (Source)

Also recommended by

1 person
  • Tony Robbins recommended this book
"Reminds us that the tech era is very new, only really about 10 years old, and only began in earnest with iPhone adoption." - Balaji Srinivasan (Source)

Also recommended by

1 person
"A broad survey of Western historical anomalies, with a focus on the 19th and 20th centuries." - Balaji Srinivasan (Source)
"How quantitative methods can identify recurrent cycles." - Balaji Srinivasan (Source)
"It’s amazing how many people have studied accounting or something, but you just give them Schaums and ask them to do the first 10 problems in accounting, they struggle." - Balaji Srinivasan (Source)
"Requires more energy to read, but it keeps you sharp." - Balaji Srinivasan (Source)
Balaji Srinivasan recommended this book in "The Almanack of Balaji Srinivasan." (Source)

Visual Complex Analysis

by Tristan Needham
"I’ve always liked compendium." - Balaji Srinivasan (Source)
"Fun book proposes plotting all complex functions as colored contour plots. Kind of an obvious idea, but it's carried through systematically here." - Balaji Srinivasan (Source)
Balaji Srinivasan recommended this book in "The Almanack of Balaji Srinivasan." (Source)
"Talks about how the invention of fire allowed humans as species to outsource our metabolism to the fire and allocate more of our scarce calories to the brain." - Balaji Srinivasan (Source)
"Most people don't really hear bad things about the FDA. This book taught me why." - Balaji Srinivasan (Source)
"Anyone working on NFT collections should understand the history of the Freemasons. Many of their rituals could be usefully updated for the digital era." - Balaji Srinivasan (Source)
"All about enforcement discretion." - Balaji Srinivasan (Source)
"How the Soviet Union actually worked." - Balaji Srinivasan (Source)
"How different groups of capitalists funded the communist revolution." - Balaji Srinivasan (Source)
"How different groups of capitalists funded the fascist revolution." - Balaji Srinivasan (Source)

Edited by

Richard Reis

Software engineer whose passion for tracking book recommendations from podcasts inspired the creation of MRB.

Anurag Ramdasan

Lead investor at 3one4 Capital whose startup expertise and love for books helped shape MRB and its growth.

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