A public reading stack
Three books Sam Altman has recommended.
A book about judgment. A manifesto for startups. A history of our species.
Most recommendation pages ask you to choose from summaries. Here, you can open each cover and test the book for yourself.
Altman has also been blunt about founder advice: “you need to just jump in and do it.” Even so, in a 2015 Twitter Q&A he showed Thinking, Fast and Slow and Zero to One when asked what a young startup founder should read. In a separate Hacker News AMA, he named Sapiens among the last two books he had read and recommended both. The first two recommendations survive as a contemporaneous video transcription, so they are listed here without book-specific quotation marks. This is a selected stack, not a complete reading list, and Uncovered is not affiliated with Altman.
01
Thinking, Fast and Slow
Daniel Kahneman · 2011
Altman showed this title when asked what a young startup founder should read. 2015 Twitter Q&A transcript
A tour of two modes of thought, one fast and intuitive, the other slow and deliberate, and the biases they create in judgment and choice.
What the opening gives you
Kahneman begins at the office water cooler. His promise is practical: give readers a better vocabulary for recognizing predictable errors in other people and, eventually, in themselves.
02
Zero to One
Peter Thiel & Blake Masters · 2014
Altman showed this title when asked what a young startup founder should read. 2015 Twitter Q&A transcript
A compressed argument for building companies that create something genuinely new instead of copying what already works.
What the opening gives you
The opening starts with a contrarian interview question, rejects the easy answers, and turns the difference between repetition and invention into the book's central idea.
03
Sapiens
Yuval Noah Harari · 2014
“The last two books I read were Sapiens and The Supermen ... Highly recommend both.”
Sam Altman Hacker News AMA, 2015
A wide-angle history of Homo sapiens, from the Cognitive Revolution through agriculture, empire, science, and capitalism.
What the opening gives you
Harari opens at the Big Bang and reaches human culture in four short paragraphs. The scale of the argument is visible before the first chapter turns to our species.