2013 · 4 Seasons · Comedy Central · Comedy
Nathan for You is a one-of-a-kind comedy achievement that transforms small business consulting into absurdist performance art, anchored by Nathan Fielder's total commitment to increasingly unhinged premises.
2016 · Phil Knight · 400 pages · Non-Fiction
Shoe Dog is the best business memoir published in the last decade, and it succeeds because Phil Knight writes about building Nike with the kind of raw honesty and emotional vulnerability that most founders avoid. The book covers the years from 1962 to Nike's IPO in 1980, and Knight's account of the near-constant financial crises, legal battles, and moments of genuine desperation that defined those years makes the company's eventual success feel earned rather than inevitable. The writing is surprisingly literary for a CEO memoir, the characters are vivid, and the pacing moves with a momentum that carries you through 400 pages without resistance. Knight's treatment of his personal relationships is less developed than the business narrative, and the book ends right when Nike becomes a global brand. Those gaps don't diminish a memoir that is both a great business story and a great piece of writing.
2011 · Walter Isaacson · 656 pages · Nonfiction / Biography
Steve Jobs is the authorized biography that its subject, dying and uncharacteristically unable to control the product, never read, built from forty-plus interviews with Jobs and hundreds with the people he inspired, wounded, and abandoned. Walter Isaacson delivers the definitive account of the Apple founder's two acts, the brutal visionary who was fired by his own company and the returned exile who built the most valuable company on earth, and refuses to sand down the cruelty, the reality distortion, or the parking in handicapped spaces. Tech insiders fault Isaacson's grasp of the actual work, and the structure lists chronologically through product launches. As a portrait of a personality, it remains unmatched.
2009 · ABC · Reality / Business
Shark Tank made venture capital a spectator sport, entrepreneurs walking a carpeted gauntlet to pitch five self-made investors who negotiate with their own money and their whole personalities. The format's genius is playable math, valuations and royalty deals legible enough that the couch negotiates along, and its best pitches, disasters and million-dollar lightning alike, became a business education America actually completed. The drama edits inflate, the deals often dissolve after the cameras, and the sharks' theater can drown the finance. As a machine for making commerce watchable, though, it has no real rival, and everyone knows their favorite shark.
2012 · Charles Duhigg · 400 pages · Nonfiction
Charles Duhigg's exploration of how habits work in individuals, organizations, and societies is an engaging piece of popular science writing that delivers a memorable central framework. The habit loop of cue, routine, and reward is intuitive and useful, and the stories Duhigg uses to illustrate it are among the best in the genre. The book is stronger as journalism than as self-help, and readers looking for a practical how-to guide may find the actionable content thinner than expected. But as an explanation of why habits matter and how they operate, it remains one of the clearest accounts available.
2011 · Eric Ries · 336 pages · Non-Fiction
The Lean Startup introduced the build-measure-learn loop and the minimum viable product to a generation of entrepreneurs, and those frameworks have become so embedded in startup culture that it's easy to forget how fresh they felt in 2011. Eric Ries draws on his own experience founding IMVU and on Toyota's lean manufacturing principles to argue that startups should treat their ideas as hypotheses and test them as quickly and cheaply as possible. The core concepts are powerful and practical. The book's execution is less consistent, with repetitive examples and a writing style that circles back to the same ideas more than a 336-page book warrants. It remains essential reading for anyone starting a company, but it's a book whose ideas are better than its prose.
2022 · 2 Seasons · Showtime · Drama
Super Pumped delivers a watchable if uneven portrayal of tech industry excess, with Joseph Gordon-Levitt's committed performance as Travis Kalanick providing enough momentum to carry viewers through the series' more chaotic creative choices. The first season covering Uber's rise and internal turmoil is the stronger half, while Season 2's pivot to Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg struggles to justify its existence as a separate story under the same umbrella.