Marc Andreessen's Reading List
Every book that influenced the Netscape founder and a16z co-founder
Hi all — today’s reading list that we’ve curated comes from Marc Andreessen.
He was the founder of Netscape (the first mainstream web browser), and today he’s the co-founder of a16z, a venture capital firm managing $30B+ in assets.
Marc is also one of the most influential thinkers in Silicon Valley — and he credits much of his worldview and success to voracious reading.
Books are the greatest way to download decades of someone else’s experience straight into your brain. They compress a lifetime of thinking, failure, and hard-won insight into a few hundred pages — and for the price of lunch, you get access to someone’s best ideas.
Despite that being the case, most of us don’t actually have the time to sit down and read every book we wish we could. (I wish we did!).
So, before sharing this list, I’d like to share a hack that might be useful to you:
If you want to learn the key ideas from the books in this list — without adding more to your “to-read” pile — I recommend checking out Bookmail.
Bookmail turns long, dense books into a series of bite-sized email lessons you can absorb in a few minutes a day. They already built a full Marc Andreessen Collection, so you can start with exactly the books he recommends. Click here to get started.
Without further ado, let’s get into the list.
(Grouped by the core mental models he returns to again and again; each description is one crisp sentence.)
Source: titles drawn from the public a16z Library cataloged by Zack Kanter. Medium
🧠 Human Nature & Decision-Making
The Denial of Death — Ernest Becker — How fear of mortality covertly shapes culture, ambition, and everyday behavior.
Thinking, Fast and Slow — Daniel Kahneman — The two systems of thought that drive our choices and the biases that trip us up.
Influence — Robert Cialdini — The psychology of persuasion and how to defend against it.
The Blank Slate — Steven Pinker — Why human nature isn’t infinitely malleable, and what that means for society.
Antifragile — Nassim Nicholas Taleb — Why certain people and systems gain from disorder, volatility, and shocks.
The Black Swan — Nassim Nicholas Taleb — Rare, high-impact events dominate reality — and our models miss them.
Superforecasting — Philip Tetlock & Dan Gardner — How disciplined probabilistic thinking makes better predictions.
The Righteous Mind — Jonathan Haidt — Moral intuitions, not logic, bind and blind us into tribes.
Predictably Irrational — Dan Ariely — The systematic ways our choices deviate from rationality.
Thinking in Bets — Annie Duke — Decision-making under uncertainty using odds, options, and feedback loops.
🏛 Power, Strategy & Civilization
The Sovereign Individual — Davidson & Rees-Mogg — How technology reorders power away from nation-states toward individuals.
The Lessons of History — Will & Ariel Durant — A 100-page synthesis of 5,000 years of recurring civilizational patterns.
The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers — Paul Kennedy — Empires expand, overreach, and decline for economic reasons more than military ones.
The Prince — Niccolò Machiavelli — Cold-eyed statecraft for acquiring and holding power.
On War — Carl von Clausewitz — War as the continuation of politics, and the primacy of friction and fog.
The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire — Edward N. Luttwak — How Rome balanced military force, diplomacy, and economics at scale.
The Dictator’s Handbook — Bueno de Mesquita & Smith — Leaders survive by rewarding a winning coalition, not “the people.”
Why Nations Fail — Acemoglu & Robinson — Inclusive institutions create prosperity; extractive ones doom it.
The Road to Serfdom — F. A. Hayek — Central planning erodes freedom through creeping authoritarianism.
The Cold War: A New History — John Lewis Gaddis — A crisp narrative of the superpower struggle and its lessons.
🚀 Technology & Progress
The Innovator’s Dilemma — Clayton Christensen — Great companies get disrupted by serving current customers too well.
The Innovator’s Solution — Christensen & Raynor — A practical playbook for building disruptive businesses on purpose.
The Mythical Man-Month — Frederick P. Brooks Jr. — Adding people to a late software project makes it later.
Hackers & Painters — Paul Graham — Essays on making, startups, and the hacker worldview.
Coders at Work — Peter Seibel — Candid interviews with legendary programmers on craft and creation.
Where Wizards Stay Up Late — Hafner & Lyon — The scrappy origin story of the ARPANET and the internet.
The Dream Machine — M. Mitchell Waldrop — J. C. R. Licklider’s vision that birthed personal computing.
Skunk Works — Ben R. Rich — How Lockheed built the SR-71 and stealth tech with tiny, elite teams.
The Making of the Atomic Bomb — Richard Rhodes — A definitive tale of invention, politics, and the dawn of a new era.
Structures — J. E. Gordon — An accessible tour of how and why things don’t fall down.
💼 Entrepreneurship & Leadership
High Output Management — Andrew S. Grove — The operator’s manual for building and scaling teams.
Only the Paranoid Survive — Andrew S. Grove — Navigating strategic inflection points when the ground shifts.
The Hard Thing About Hard Things — Ben Horowitz — The truth about leading when everything is on fire.
Zero to One — Peter Thiel (with Blake Masters) — Create new categories; don’t fight for scraps in old ones.
Crossing the Chasm — Geoffrey A. Moore — How to take innovations from early adopters to the mainstream.
The Lean Startup — Eric Ries — Build-measure-learn loops for de-risking products early.
Good to Great — Jim Collins — What separates enduring companies from the rest.
Founders at Work — Jessica Livingston — Raw founder interviews on product, persistence, and luck.
Managing Oneself — Peter F. Drucker — Know your strengths and design your life around them.
Creative Selection — Ken Kocienda — Inside Apple’s product development rituals and taste culture.
💹 Economics, Markets & Finance
Basic Economics — Thomas Sowell — A plain-English tour of incentives, prices, and trade-offs.
The Wealth of Nations — Adam Smith — Specialization, markets, and the invisible hand explained.
Capitalism and Freedom — Milton Friedman — Economic liberty underpins political liberty.
Free to Choose — Milton & Rose Friedman — Policy lessons from markets that actually work.
The General Theory — John Maynard Keynes — Demand management and the macro playbook for crises.
The Ascent of Money — Niall Ferguson — How finance shaped human history and vice versa.
Against the Gods — Peter L. Bernstein — The rise of risk, probability, and modern finance.
Security Analysis — Graham & Dodd — The original tome on valuing businesses with discipline.
The Intelligent Investor — Benjamin Graham — Value investing and the margin of safety mindset.
Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits — Philip A. Fisher — Scuttlebutt research and the case for growth investing.
🧭 Management, Organizations & Execution
The Goal — Eliyahu M. Goldratt — Throughput, bottlenecks, and systems thinking via a business novel.
Peopleware — DeMarco & Lister — The hardest part of software is people, not code.
Team of Teams — Gen. Stanley McChrystal — How to turn silos into a networked, adaptable organization.
Extreme Ownership — Jocko Willink & Leif Babin — Leaders own outcomes, good and bad.
Creativity, Inc. — Ed Catmull — Building a culture that repeatedly ships originals.
The Fifth Discipline — Peter Senge — Learning organizations and the power of systems thinking.
Work Rules! — Laszlo Bock — Data-driven practices for hiring and culture from Google’s HR.
Thinking in Systems — Donella Meadows — Stocks, flows, delays, and leverage points for change.
The Art of Strategy — Dixit & Nalebuff — Practical game theory for business moves and countermoves.
The Score Takes Care of Itself — Bill Walsh — Standards and routines that produce excellence.
🏗️ Engineering, Product & Software Craft
The Art of Computer Programming — Donald E. Knuth — The deep foundations of algorithms and analysis.
Introduction to Algorithms — Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest & Stein — The standard reference on algorithmic design.
Clean Code — Robert C. Martin — Writing readable, maintainable software as a discipline.
The Pragmatic Programmer — Hunt & Thomas — Timeless habits for effective software engineers.
The Practice of Programming — Kernighan & Pike — Practical wisdom on debugging, testing, and tooling.
The C Programming Language — Kernighan & Ritchie — The classic text on C and systems-level thinking.
Design Patterns — Gamma, Helm, Johnson & Vlissides — Reusable solutions to recurring software problems.
The Design of Everyday Things — Don Norman — Human-centered design principles that reduce user error.
Continuous Delivery — Jez Humble & David Farley — Automating the path from code to production safely.
The Cathedral & the Bazaar — Eric S. Raymond — How open-source thrives through distributed collaboration.
🧪 Science, Philosophy & Worldview
Gödel, Escher, Bach — Douglas Hofstadter — Consciousness, recursion, and strange loops that generate minds.
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions — Thomas S. Kuhn — Paradigms shift when anomalies overwhelm the old model.
The Selfish Gene — Richard Dawkins — Evolution seen from the gene’s eye view.
The Blind Watchmaker — Richard Dawkins — How natural selection builds complexity without design.
The Beginning of Infinity — David Deutsch — Optimism rooted in explanatory knowledge and error correction.
The Fabric of Reality — David Deutsch — A unifying worldview across physics, computation, and epistemology.
Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! — Richard P. Feynman — Curiosity, pranks, and the joy of discovery.
The Demon-Haunted World — Carl Sagan — Science as a candle in the dark against superstition.
Atlas Shrugged — Ayn Rand — A novel-philosophy arguing for radical individualism and productive heroes.
The Fountainhead — Ayn Rand — Integrity, creation, and the costs of independence.
🏙️ Cities, Society & Institutions
Triumph of the City — Edward Glaeser — Why cities supercharge innovation, wealth, and culture.
The Death and Life of Great American Cities — Jane Jacobs — Bottom-up urban order beats top-down planning.
Seeing Like a State — James C. Scott — High-modernist schemes fail by ignoring local knowledge.
The True Believer — Eric Hoffer — The anatomy of mass movements and fanaticism.
Bowling Alone — Robert D. Putnam — The collapse of social capital and why it matters.
The Idea Factory — Jon Gertner — How Bell Labs systematically invented the future.
The Power Broker — Robert A. Caro — Robert Moses and the dark arts of power and infrastructure.
The Path Between the Seas — David McCullough — The audacious creation of the Panama Canal.
The Prize — Daniel Yergin — Oil’s outsized role in geopolitics and economic development.
The Better Angels of Our Nature — Steven Pinker — Why violence has declined over the long run.
💰 Markets, Money & Financial History
Reminiscences of a Stock Operator — Edwin Lefèvre — Speculation lessons from a legendary trader’s life.
Liar’s Poker — Michael Lewis — Salomon Brothers, excess, and the culture that shaped modern Wall Street.
Flash Boys — Michael Lewis — High-frequency trading and the battle over market plumbing.
The Big Short — Michael Lewis — How mispriced risk led to the 2008 collapse — and who saw it coming.
A Random Walk Down Wall Street — Burton G. Malkiel — Efficient markets and the case for low-cost indexing.
Fooled by Randomness — Nassim Nicholas Taleb — Mistaking luck for skill is the investor’s original sin.
The House of Morgan — Ron Chernow — The saga of America’s most influential banking dynasty.
When Genius Failed — Roger Lowenstein — LTCM’s rise and fall as a cautionary tale of leverage.
Manias, Panics, and Crashes — Kindleberger & Aliber — The recurring cycle of boom and bust through history.
Against the Gods — Peter L. Bernstein — How mastering probability unlocked modern finance.
🏙️ Closing Thoughts:
The thing I love about a list like this is that every book is basically a shortcut — a way to borrow someone else’s decades of thinking, risk-taking, and experience. You don’t have to live through the dot-com boom, or build a browser from scratch, or manage a billion-dollar fund… you can read the book of someone who did.
A few of my personal favorites from this list:
The Hard Thing About Hard Things — brutally honest, zero-fluff lessons on leadership under pressure
High Output Management — the most useful book on building and scaling teams ever written
The Sovereign Individual — a book that feels more prophetic every year
But here’s the honest part: as much as I want to read every book on Marc’s list, I don’t always have the time (or the energy) to go cover-to-cover on all of them.
That’s why recently I’ve been using Bookmail as a way to “taste” a book before I commit to the whole thing.
You just add a book to your reading list, and they send you a sequence of bite-sized email lessons that break down the key ideas, frameworks, stories, and mental models — in 5 minutes a day.
It’s become one of my favorite ways to actually absorb books instead of just stacking them in a digital “To Read” pile.
Sometimes I finish the Bookmail breakdown and feel like I got 80% of the value already. Other times I go, “Okay, now I really do want to read the full thing.”
If you want to try it, there’s already a Marc Andreessen Collection inside Bookmail, so you can start with the same books in this list and learn them on autopilot.
Highly recommend giving it a look — it’s one of my new favourite tools :)
Until next time,
The Investment Librarian :)