Kameron Kales
Jul 25, 2017 · 7 min read

One of my favorite things to do is listen to audiobooks, podcasts or YouTube talks and learn. However, I found finding quality content harder than one would expect. If you like to read, listen or watch technical and/or business challenges this list should be of use

Ron Burgundy is worthy of this list.

I initially titled this a reading list but since some of the items on my list are podcasts or lectures I decided to rename it to a content consumption list. Throughout the rest of the year I will be adding titles and information to this list to hopefully provide value to anyone curious about the following topics with a few examples listed.

  1. Technical challenges-using GraphQL, Python for NLP or deploying containers on AWS
  2. Business challenges-finding your first customers, scaling sales and relationship between product and sales
  3. Philosophical challenges-exploring Black Swans, randomness and the idea of the antifragile
  4. Other assorted topics-history, physics, and the public financial markets

I will be keeping this list updated with additional content and have only included things I have listened or read that were highly valuable to me. The few things on this list I have been recommended and not yet read were done so from people I respect and trust their recommendation :)

I dedicate most of my time reading towards technical and business challenges however, philosophy has become an interest lately. Most of the updates to this list will be technical and business related.

I intend on cycling back through once a month or so to add comments on recent reads and to make suggestions on content worth a second, or even third, look.

If there are any books, podcasts, lectures or videos you feel I would like let me know! I do keep a tab of who recommended what to help remember to ask for more a few months from now

For anything I have already finished I have denoted with a DONE at the beginning. For anything I am currently reading I also denoted this as well.


Books:

  • DONE-The Hard Things About Hard Things-Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers by Ben Horowitz
  • DONE-Extreme Ownership-How Navy Seals Lead and Win by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin
  • DONE-The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9–5, Live Anywhere and Join The New Rich by Tim Ferriss
  • DONE-Rework by Jason Fried and David Heinemeir Hanson
  • DONE-The Sales Acceleration Formula-Using Data, Technology and Inbound Selling to go from $0 to $100 Million by Mark Roberge (Recommended by John Rosar)
  • DONE-Rhythm-How To Achieve Breakthrough Execution and Accelerate Growth by Patrick Thean (Recommended by John Rosar)
  • DONE-Elon Musk-Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest For a Fantastic Future by Ashlee Vance
  • DONE-Hatching Twitter- A True Story on Money, Power, Friendship and Betrayal by Nick Bilton
  • DONE-Shoe Dog-A Memoir by The Creator of Nike by Phil Knight
  • DONE-Blink- The Power Of Thinking Without Thinking by Malcolm Gladwell
  • DONE-Confessions of An Economic Hitman by John Perkins
  • Reading Now-The Black Swan-The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Recommended by Jesse Lipson)
  • Fooled by Randomness-The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets by Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Recommended by Jesse Lipson)
  • The Bed of Procrustes-Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
  • Antifragile- Things That Gain From Disorder by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
  • Superforecasting- The Art and Science of Prediction by Phillip Tetlock and Dan Garner (Recommended by Jesse Lipson)
  • Astrophysics for People In A Hurry by Neil deGrasse Tyson (Recommended by Dalton Snow)
  • A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson (Recommended by Jon Spinney & Sean Steigerwald)
  • Algorithms to Live By-The Computer Science of Human Decisions by Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths (Recommended by Josh Hull)
  • Winning with Data- Transform Your Culture, Empower Your People and Shape The Future by Tomasz Tunguz and Frank Bien (Recommended By Ryan O’Donnell)
  • Business Adventures-Twelve Classic Tales From The World of Wall Street by John Brooks (Recommended by Ryan O’Donnell)

Podcasts:

  • DONE-The Satire Paradox-Revisionist History by Malcolm Gladwell
  • DONE-The Big Man Can’t Shoot-Revisionist History by Malcom Gladwell
  • DONE-The Police-Embedded
  • DONE-Amazon Acquires Whole Foods Hot Take by The Jason & Scot Show-E-Commerce and Retail News
  • DONE-Finding Your First Paying Customers with Wade Foster of Zapier-The Indie Hackers Podcast: How Developers are Bootstrapping, Marketing, and Growing Their Online Businesses
  • DONE-Delivering More Value and Charging More Money with Brennan Dunn of DoubleYourFreelancing.com-The Indie Hackers Podcast: How Developers are Bootstrapping, Marketing, and Growing Their Online Businesses
  • DONE-How To Overcome The Biggest Challenges to Your Online Business with Patio11-The Indie Hackers Podcast: How Developers are Bootstrapping, Marketing, and Growing Their Online Businesses
  • DONE-Traveling, Learning to Code, and Bootstrapping to $25k/mo with Tyler Tringas of StoreMapper-The Indie Hackers Podcast: How Developers are Bootstrapping, Marketing, and Growing Their Online Businesses
  • DONE-How Ryan Bednar Went From SEO Consulting to Building an SEO Product That Makes $80,000/mo-The Indie Hackers Podcast: How Developers are Bootstrapping, Marketing, and Growing Their Online Businesses
  • DONE-Jason Lemkin on Why Hire Fast Fire Fast is BS, Why He Never Invests in Quarterly MRR & Why The Key Is Successful Reinvention-The Official SaaStr Podcast
  • DONE-Why Tension Has Shifted From Sales vs Marketing to Customer Success vs Product & Why You Have To Hire For Ahead of Where You Are Now with Todd Olson, Founder & CEO of Pendo-The Official SaaStr Podcast
  • DONE-Why $1–2m ARR is Not The Hardest Phase of A SaaS Startup, Why Your Developer Talent Pipeline Is Broken & How To Approach Regrettable and Non-Regrettable Churn with Ryan Carson, Founder & CEO of Treehouse-The Official SaaStr Podcast
  • DONE-The Quiet Master of Cryptocurrency with Nick Szabo- The Tim Ferriss Show
  • DONE-Long Now: Seminars About Long-term Thinking with Nassim Nicholas Taleb: The Future Has Always Been Crazier Than We Thought
  • DONE-Long Now: Seminars About Long-term Thinking with Phillip Tetlock: Superforecasting

Youtube & Lectures:

  • DONE-Jason Fried & Scott Heiferman-Building Businesses That Last by 99u
  • DONE-How to Sell Anything to Anyone, Fredrik Eklund [Sales Machine NYC 2016] by Quotable
  • DONE-Neil Rackham, author of SPIN selling, on combining sales and marketing by INSEAD
  • DONE-How to Find Sales & Marketing Candidates: For Recruiters Webinar by Social Talent
  • DONE-The Power Of The Blockchain by Siraj Naval
  • DONE-Engaging Passive Candidates by Social Talent
  • DONE-Innovative Ways to Attract and Convert Passive Candidates by Social Talent
  • DONE-Scaling Product, Fireside with Joe Gebbia and Reid Hoffman by Y Combinator
  • DONE-CUNY City College Gary Vaynerchuk Keynote New York 2017 by Gary Vaynerchuk
  • DONE-Evening Routine with Tim Ferriss by Tim Ferriss
  • DONE-Jeff Bezos on Innovation: Why Amazon Will Succeed by Cruze MacFarland
  • DONE-VergeNC September Fireside Chat with Jason Widen by Verge
  • DONE-Jason Widen: Climate by CreativeMornings HQ
  • DONE-An Overview of Designing Microservices-March 2017 AWS Online Tech Talks by Amazon Web Services -Webinar Channel
  • DONE-How Google Thinks About Hiring, Management and Culture by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers
  • DONE-Google I/O Keynote (Google I/O 2017) by Google Developers
  • DONE-Google Founders Interview — Larry Page & Sergey Brin by Startup Cat
  • DONE-Interview: Jeff Bezos Fireside Chat by Internet Assocation
  • DONE-The Future We’re Building & Boring with Elon Musk by TED
  • DONE-Uber Technology Day: Q&A with CEO Travis Kalanick
  • DONE-How to Build A Smart SaaS Business: Burning Questions You Need Answered by SIIA
  • DONE-Product Austin: High Output Product Manager with Todd Olson by Austin Tech Live
  • DONE-Parker Conrad and Sam Blond (Zenefits): Hyperscaling Inside Sales by SaaStr
  • DONE-Zenefits CEO Parker Conrad — Secrets Behind The Fastest Growing SaaS Company by Traction Conf
  • DONE-Graphene: Making GraphQL Easier with Syrus Akbary by Apollo GraphQL
  • DONE-Zero to GraphQL in 30 Minutes — Steven Luscher by Steven Luscher
  • DONE-From Angular to React — Jack Franklin April 2017 by Frontend NE
  • DONE-SaaStr AMA: Building Your First SDR Team with Jason Lemkin by SaaStr
  • DONE-New Sales Models — David Sacks, Founder and CEO of Yammer by Khosla Ventures
  • DONE-How To Scale: Lessons From Stripe CEO Patrick Collison by Khosla Ventures
  • DONE-Leaders@AppNexus:Howard Yerman, Yext.com by AppNexus
  • DONE-Hypergrowth in the Enterprise with Parker Conrad by Khosla Ventures
  • DONE-Blitzscaling 16: Reed Hastings on Building a Streaming Empire by Greylock Partners
  • DONE-Aaron Levie (Box): The First $250m in ARR by SaaStr
  • DONE-Linus Torvalds answers questions about Linux by AI Perspectives
  • DONE-Lecture 12- Building For The Enterprise (Aaron Levie) by How To Start A Startup
  • DONE-GOTO2016 — What I Wish I Had Known Before Scaling Uber to 1000 Services with Matt Ranney by GOTO Conferences
  • DONE-Mastering Chaos- A Netflix Guide to Microservices by NewCircle Training
  • DONE-Ryan Rosario-Sentiment Classification Using Scikit-Learn by PyData
  • DONE-Learning: Support Vector Machines by MIT Open CourseWare
  • DONE-Introduction to Learning, Nearest Neighbor by MIT Open CourseWare
  • DONE-Neural Nets by MIT Open CourseWare
  • DONE-Introduction and Scope by MIT Open CourseWare
  • DONE-Dorian Pula-Pythons in A Container-Lessons Learned Dockerizing Python Microservices by PyCon 2016
  • DONE-Building an Upload Microservice Using AWS Lambda by Bodybuilding.com
  • DONE-Patrick Harrison, Modern NLP in Python by PyData
  • The Feynman Lectures on Physics (Recommended by Catie Crain)

Summary:

I put this list together to compile all of the content I have consumed over the last 6–9 months and provide a valuable resource to anyone interested in technical topics or business challenges.

Thanks for reading! :) If you enjoyed this list, hit that heart button below. Would mean a lot to me and it helps others discover the list. Thank you!

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