The Death Library.
14 books that pair with the archive.
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Books about valuations that outran the product, and what was left when the music stopped.
Bad Blood
John Carreyrou · 2018The Theranos book. The template every healthtech postmortem on this site is haunted by.
Super Pumped
Mike Isaac · 2019Uber's first decade, written from the inside. A reference for what 'move fast' costs when nobody is willing to say no.
The Cult of We
Eliot Brown and Maureen Farrell · 2021WeWork on the way down. Adam Neumann is not in our archive, but the pattern (narrative valuation, founder mythology, late capital piling in) is in half of it.
Number Go Up
Zeke Faux · 2023Faux on the crypto crash. AI is not crypto, but the second half of the AI hype cycle will rhyme with this book.
Reporting and theory on the labs whose products end up in this archive.
The Coming Wave
Mustafa Suleyman · 2023Suleyman, co-founder of DeepMind and Inflection, on what AI does to the state. Worth reading because the people building the products in this archive read it.
Genius Makers
Cade Metz · 2021Cade Metz on how a handful of researchers turned into the labs that now run the field. Background for most of the modern entries here.
The Alignment Problem
Brian Christian · 2020Brian Christian on what we mean when we say a model is wrong. The book to read before writing anything about safety.
Empire of AI
Karen Hao · 2025Karen Hao on OpenAI from the inside. The most reported account of how the largest lab in the field works.
The standard texts on failure. Older than AI, still applicable.
The Innovator's Dilemma
Clayton Christensen · 1997Christensen, still the cleanest theory of why incumbent companies miss the thing that kills them. We cite it often.
Why Startups Fail
Tom Eisenmann · 2021Eisenmann on the six patterns of failure across hundreds of startups. The closest thing to a unified field theory for this archive.
The Hard Thing About Hard Things
Ben Horowitz · 2014Horowitz on running a company when everything is on fire. Less analytical than the others on this shelf, more useful if you are inside one.
The Lean Startup
Eric Ries · 2011Ries on testing assumptions before spending the money. Half the entries in our archive skipped this step.
The self-driving years, paired with the autonomous-vehicle entries in the archive.