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I read over 111 business biographies, and these 11 will make you rich. I grew up as a 16-year-old lost, broken drug addict. By 27, I made my first million dollars. Today, I fly around on my own private jet, and I have a fleet of supercars and have a beautiful family. And none of that would have happened if I didn't read books. My life was built by books.
When kids come up to me and my McLaren or my Ferrari, and they ask me, "What do you do?" I tell them, "I read books." Specifically biographies, because that's where I'm going to learn from people that have been there before, that have built some of the most impressive companies in the world. And understand that I'm not alone, that I'm normal, like I'm just like them in many ways, maybe at different eras in time. But it helps me feel not crazy. And that's why, you know, I went through all 111 biographies that I've ever read, and I've distilled it down into the 11 that I think are the best. The ones that are really going to resonate with you where you're at, starting off as an entrepreneur, that'll really inspire you to think bigger, to feel normal, and hopefully take action.
So, the first book is *Open* by Andre Agassi. It's written so well, like the writing style. And I know what you're thinking, "He's a tennis player. What does it have to do with business?" Let me tell you, this book is about performance and mindset and growth. Most business problems are personal problems, they just show up at our work. This book taught me more about how to succeed in business than pretty much every other one on the list.
Now, here's a cool fun fact: The ghostwriter who worked with him also wrote another book on this list that I think is the best biography ever written in the history of man. Once I tell you what that one is later in this video, be sure to come back and read this one because you will not be able to put it down. What I loved about it is it talks about the importance of honesty and authenticity in both sports and in life, like being yourself, which a lot of people, they're always wearing masks, not for the most part, who they really are. Here's a guy that was groomed from birth to become a world-class champion from his dad. He's a bit demanding of a man, and he struggled on court, off court. He had won eight Grand Slams. I mean, he is the most decorated tennis player in history. So being able to get behind the scenes and understand the impact from his family, his mentors, his coaches, and personal professional development, and how all that came together for him to show how he embraced the change, the adaptability he had to learn in order to succeed. If you want to read a book that's all about pursuing excellence and never giving up on your goals, read this.
My dad, for a long time, didn't believe in me. I would have loved somebody that saw my potential and pushed me to be the best, but it was actually the opposite. But what happened is that even in that scenario, I ended up wanting to step up and prove my dad that I can do it. You know, my story is a little different where I grew up, and because I got in so much trouble as a kid, if I was just sober, he would have been happy. He didn't really believe I would do anything with my life. So even though it was the opposite, it was kind of his way of pushing me. And here's what I've learned from that experience that might help you is that either way can work. But the cool part is, is nobody else has to change for you to win. That's a big idea.
Number two is *Losing My Virginity* by Richard Branson. The biography, the original one, I read a long time ago, and I reread this one recently. For me, Richard Branson is kind of the guy. He's the billionaire every other billionaire wants to be like. I had the privilege of spending a week with him in Verbier, Switzerland, and he truly is somebody that integrates both work and life in a way that's playful, fun, and super creative. In this book, you're going to learn his crazy stories about how he embraced risk-taking and honestly became an entrepreneur at the age of 16 years old. How to focus on building a brand. Virgin is one of the top brands in the world, and a company culture rather than just making profits. Turns out if you do that, you make more profit. And really disrupt traditional industries by challenging the status quo. Every business has been doing things that way. Why? Because it's always been done that way. When you take a fresh perspective and you look at it and you say, "Why don't we try this? Why don't we do this?" This is what you're going to learn in this book is how to prioritize innovation and customer satisfaction. At the end of the day, the customer decides if they're going to spend money. And if you can find innovative ways to be competitive, that's where the opportunity lies. You started your first business, a magazine at 16 years old, and it was called *Student*. He always had a passion for creating content and publishing and creating art, essentially. And that's why he went from that to the record company to all the other companies. Virgin has over 400 businesses under the Virgin Group of businesses with two CEOs. You want to talk about scale? Read the book.
Number three is *The Hard Thing About Hard Things* by Ben Horowitz. What I love about Ben, I'm a tech guy, a software guy, he's my peeps. I mean, what's crazy is I was reading his blog for almost a decade before he ever wrote the book. And what's neat is he starts every blog post with a rap lyric. If you saw a picture of Ben Horowitz, you would laugh because this guy does not look like a rapper, and he couldn't be more. It's actually quite awesome. In his book, he goes through some crazy stories. You got to understand, sometimes we think we're having a bad day until you read a book like this and you realize that can't be real. Somebody has to create a movie around the stories in this book. And what I love is that he just teaches us through these crazy stories, leadership, and what's required to make tough decisions when you're facing essentially headwinds straight on. You know, how to embrace uncertainty and be prepared to pivot when necessary. When I was building my company, Sphere, there was a point where I was like, "I really need to choose." I had three viable businesses or business units, and I had to make the uncomfortable decision to shut one down to essentially double down on the other two because doing all three at our size at that time wasn't the right move. I got inspired by this book a couple years ago. My company unfortunately had to essentially transition over a third of the staff, which was a crazy cultural reset. Man, you just feel like the worst person in the world, and I know I did. But having read Ben's book, I don't love what I got to do right now, but it is the right decision to continue playing the game, being in the game to finally win. See, if you understood how many people you admire in business that the reason why you know who they are because they didn't give up, it would give you so much more hope for the future and staying power. That is actually the reason why most people win. It's 'cause they just have more grit.
Number four, *Forrester Trailblazer*, the Marc Benioff biography. Now, to say I'm a fan of Marc Benioff, there's only two people in the world I would actually stop doing what I'm doing to go take a job working for. One of them is Steve Jobs, and the other one is Marc Benioff. He is the not only the founder of Salesforce.com, which a lot of big companies use, and many other platforms, but he's also the guy that set SaaS in motion. When people hear Software as a Service, the term SaaS, it's like a technical term. Prior to Salesforce.com, most companies installed software on their server in a data center. They did not host it in what we call the cloud and pay monthly to have logins. Like every software product you pay a subscription every month for, you should thank this guy for because he pioneered that whole movement that essentially allowed me to build a career. So I'm a big fan of his work. The book goes into deep details around how to build disruptive technology in different industries, how business models work, how to prioritize customer success and satisfaction. He actually created the concept of what many people call customer success, but prior to that was called revenue retention. His leadership style of leading with vision and purpose and passion, it inspired me on all levels from my first tech company to current day. One of my favorite parts about Mark is his philanthropic work, and it's the 1-1-1. It's 1% of your profit, 1% of your resources, and 1% of your time committed to projects and people that you care about to want to help. And I just think that idea, if every company in the world got behind the 1% idea, it would just make all these resources available. And he's just somebody that I think is worth studying. And this book gives you the inside, behind-the-scenes aspect of every part of his life.
Number five is *Founders at Work* by Jessica Livingston. Now, let me tell you why this book is special. I read it early in my tech career, and why I fell in love with it is Jessica had the opportunity to interview founders from PayPal, Gmail, 37signals, and really unpack their early days of founding and what it looked like and how it felt. She compiled all these cool stories from all these founders and put it in a book. So in many ways, it's like multiple biographies. It provides insights into building successful products and scaling startups, and honestly, other valuable lessons on leadership, hiring, and just company culture. One of the biggest pivots I remember was building this company, Clarity, and I was adamant and I had to suck it up when nobody used it the way I wanted them to do it. And I pivoted from a productivity app to a marketplace. This book's full of examples they had to be honest with the lack of traction in their product.
Number six is *Snowball* by the man, the legend, Warren Buffett, the biography. Let me be honest with you, this is a thick one. This one was tough to read, it was hard. The early days are interesting, but obviously, once he meets Charlie, that's when things get super fun. If you want to learn how to build long-term wealth and understand how to think long-term, this is the book. It's a master class in being consistent for decades, not days. He goes over continuous learning and how to have intellectual curiosity. And Warren talks about this all the time. He's like, "I skip to work, I enjoy working." Some of the highlights is Buffett's principles on frugality, his concepts on integrity, hiring leaders, and really simplicity in business. That's the coolest part. If you want to get deeper insights into Buffett's investment strategies and decision-making process, and get lessons on risk management, patience, and emotional discipline in investing, this is the book you're going to want to read.
Number seven is the book *Titan*, that is the biography on John D. Rockefeller. You know, the craziest thing about this book when you're reading it is realizing that when he was alive, there was no email, there was really no fax machines, there was no automation, there was no technology. He built this empire on the backside of creative communication, creative vision casting. It was so cool to not only hear his upbringing and where he grew up and just some of the challenges he faced, but the way he innovated even in the oil industry and really tried to create a monopoly. Whether you like that or not, I mean, it was really impressive he was able to do it. If you want to learn about cool concepts like vertical integration, which I think is awesome, you know, try to increase your margin and really how to be aggressive in competition. If you're a bit of a wallflower, and it will teach you a completely different lens on how to compete in business. So this one goes deep on the evolution of the American economy, specifically during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It's kind of neat, it's like going back in time. Now, I know some people, if you're like me, you're too Canadian and you don't want to get walked all over. This guy will teach you how to respond, how to compete aggressively, and honestly, just increase what you feel your worth, 'cause you'll never get a penny more than you think you deserve. This guy felt like he deserved all the pennies.
Number eight is *My Life and Work*, an autobiography on Henry Ford from Ford Motor Company. If you want to hear some crazy scenarios of where somebody started and the opportunities, and honestly, the opportunities to make somebody else rich, and that person couldn't see that opportunity. So Mr. Henry here decides to go do his own thing and not only competes, but absolutely revolutionizes the approach to manufacturing, including the assembly line, one of the most innovative ideas ever to come to manufacturing. I study all things manufacturing. I think it's actually a great place to look for innovation, things like the theory of constraints, production flows. It essentially did it like one car at a time. So one person would work on it, the chassis, the engine, the wheels, the doors, all of it. To his model, which is, "I'm going to have the chassis roll down the production floor, and then I'll have one person that just does wheels, one person just does electrical, one person just does engine." And because of that, then the person can specialize, and the quality goes up. The way the butchers kind of took all the meats and kind of carved the different pieces off the cows and whatnot, he just applied that to the cars. And all of a sudden, he created efficiencies and standardizations and really revolutionized mass production. In this book, you learn his absolute commitment to innovation and continuous improvement. Other things I loved about the book was his views on labor relations and the introductions to the $5 workday, where he just decided, "I don't want to be cheap. I will pay people the most so that I get the best talent." Henry Ford built the innovation to make sure that that always worked. And I think that is really cool. It's how I managed my life. It really shaped how I build software, how I build companies, how I build people. And I think if you want to go to the beginning of the beginning, the Model T and Henry Ford is just a great place to stop.
Number nine is *Steve Jobs* by Walter Isaacson. Arguably the most popular biography by most entrepreneurs because Steve was just such an iconic entrepreneur. This book is awesome. I've read pretty much every one of Walter Isaacson's biographies because he just has a way of digging in and collaborating with people in their life, or if the person's passed on, getting access to stuff that nobody else gets to. So you will learn about Steve's not only upbringing, his chip on his shoulder, his evolution between Apple to NeXT and back to Apple, but most specifically, why he had such a relentless pursuit for perfection. And anyways, why that dedication allowed him to create groundbreaking products like finding the mini hard drive that then powered the iPod that brought us digital music. I mean, a thousand songs in your pocket. To do the iPhone before the iPad and decided on that sequencing is a really fascinating concept. But you also dig into the leadership style, his ideas for never settling. What I love about is that it was very evident that he could tell when he was talking to somebody if they actually put the effort into the result they were looking for, like, did they actually show up and do the work? And he would challenge people. And the truth is, is anybody that worked with Steve ended up being way better had they not worked with him. They'll all admit to the same thing. If you want to dive into understanding the ability to anticipate and shape consumer behaviors through innovation, design, marketing, the story of him hiding in the bushes outside an Apple store to spy on customers to see how they interacted with the different products, and then use that information to go innovate back at his HQ. That's what made Steve special. My first Mac changed everything. I changed programming from Microsoft .NET to Ruby on Rails. I didn't want to touch Microsoft products ever again because I just couldn't believe that there was a product designed that just felt so great.
Number 10 is *Elon Musk* by our man Walter Isaacson. I have studied a handful of people more than any other person in the world. Elon's one of those people. I've watched everything he's ever done. The day the podcast with Joe Rogan came out, I told my wife, "I'm going to the gym. I'm not doing anything for three and a half hours." And I just sat there on a treadmill watching on my iPad Joe dig into the mind of Elon Musk, 'cause that was really the first long-format interview that he ever did. He's done a ton since then. And what I love about this book is that you'll learn about his ambitious goals to colonize Mars and space exploration, and why we should be a multi-planetary species. What I love is his engineering mind. When I see him tackle problems that for any normal person, they would consider risky, his only philosophy is, "As long as we're not violating the principles of physics, he's like, we can do this." From satellites to solar systems to tunnels to electric cars to rockets. And what's crazy is most people don't realize this, and Walter talks about it, is that every company he started, if you look at them, from SpaceX to Tesla to SolarCity to Boring Company to Neuralink, were all required to actually colonize Mars. So some people think that he doesn't know what he's doing. He's so far into the future that he doesn't even bother telling people anymore because he just is like, "You know what? I'll just tell them about this because I don't think their brains could connect." I mean, when he talked about creating Tesla to provide a vehicle that makes you money, instead of a vehicle that depreciates and costs you money, this is now an asset. That's crazy. He's playing chess when everybody else is playing checkers. Some of my favorite ideas that I've learned over the years from Elon is five rules of engineering. One of my favorite rules of the five is, "Don't engineer parts that are not needed." So remove parts. He has this philosophy, "If you're not adding 10% of the parts back, then you're not taking enough away." And then my other one is just on vector leadership. This crazy idea of vector being a force and a direction. All we got to do is get everybody on a team to be pointing in the same direction with a 10 out of 10 force, and that's what great culture and great leadership looks like. And I'm just like, "So simple." And explanation. So if you want to dive into the behind-the-scenes, his relationship with his dad, the access that Elon gave Walter Isaacson blew my mind. He literally said, "Come to every meeting, jump on my jet, talk to my family members, talk to my team, talk to the people I've fired, talk to the board, talk to anybody. There's nobody off-limits." And then write a book. Would you allow somebody to do that? No. That's what makes Elon, Elon. And Walter captured it perfect.
Number 11 is *Shoe Dog* by Phil Knight, the creator of Nike. Let me tell you this, if you read this biography, it will ruin you for every other one that you got to read. Did Phil Knight actually write this book? It turns out he partnered with a ghostwriter. That same ghostwriter wrote *Open* by Andre Agassi. It's one of those books where as I started to read it, I realized I need to clear my schedule 'cause I didn't want to stop. I read it in probably three days, non-stop. He was just selling other people's products, this Japanese shoe company, and then they tried to screw him over, and he's like, "Ah, what do I do?" So he ends up manufacturing his own shoes that became Nike. And then there were all these crazy things that had happened to him in the history of the business. Phil Knight earned his wealth. There's a story in here about some tax stuff that happened personally. I would have gave up. I would have looked at the math and said, "The math don't math. I'm good. Fold it up. Go do something else." And Phil Knight kept building. It is so well written, so great, so awesome. You want to learn how to build strong teams and cultures that really know how to foster relationships that I think are crucial to success, and build the persistence and resilience even when everybody else is ready to give up, you keep pushing. One of my favorite biographies. If you had to start with one, start here, then go to *Open*. Well, maybe not, 'cause then it'll ruin 'cause once you get into like *Titan* or *Snowball*, that's going to be some tough reads 'cause this one you couldn't put down. So if you want to learn how to stay true to your vision, build a brand, an iconic brand, this is the book for you.
Those are the 11 biographies that will make you rich. But if you want to learn the 15 Laws of Success, click the link, and I'll see you on the other side.