Ozan Sonmez recommends Zero to One for contrarian thinking, Good to Great for building lasting companies, and Bad Blood as a warning about Theranos. He also picks Silicon Valley and Startup for realistic startup stories, plus the Steve Jobs film for leadership lessons.
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Hey everyone, this is Ozan, your Brutally Honest Mentor. We're back again to add a few more books and movies and series to the list that I shared with you earlier. We received a lot of great suggestions and discovered a few of the gems that I have forgotten to mention before. So let's check them. There will be some books and movies and series So it's going to be a combination of both. So additional books, I think we can start very easily with Peter Thiel's Zero to One. Of course, Peter Thiel is a very interesting character. One of the books that I would recommend on top of what we did already is the book that Peter Thiel wrote. So you need to research who Peter Thiel is. He has a really interesting character. Life, and the way he's looking into business is very difficult to describe without knowing who he is. So try to figure out who he is, read a little bit about it, and then jump into the book. So of course, a classic by Jim Collins is Good to Great. You will get this book recommendation in almost any literature that you're going to see. A lot of the business tycoons of our world, the Intels, the Microsofts, the Apples, has been mentioned— has the founders of these companies have mentioned Jim Collins' book Good to Great and the research that he does many, many times. So he has been dissecting with data the traits and strategies of great companies. And that actually switched from being good companies to influential great companies. So it's a must-read for any founder looking to find advice and looking to find kind of hidden gems into how the people of those companies, how the founders of those companies built them. So it's going to be very important. One very recent that I also have watched the series of is the book Bad Blood by John Carreyrou. So it's a truly gripping book that talks about Theranos biomedical company and its founder Elizabeth Holmes. So Elizabeth Holmes drops out of Stanford to build a very innovative, almost impossible biomedical company. She falls into a traps of greed, hubris, and has to build smokescreens and deception to keep on doing what she kept doing in a world that's lack of transparent— that didn't have any transparency, had a lot of issues. So, I'm not going to give you spoilers, but the t-shirt I'm wearing has something to do with it. So again, Bad Blood is a great book. You can— I hope you don't associate too much with Elizabeth Holmes, and you also have to follow up what she's up to these days in a pretty confined space, as a kind of hint. So the books are great, and of course, while taking books seriously, you also have to spend time Having some fun, and what better way could you have than watching Silicon Valley? It's a hilarious and insightful series that follows a group of engineers that navigate the challenges of building a startup in Silicon Valley. I lived in the Valley for 3 years, and while I was there, the series was airing, and I have to admit, The— it's 80% accurate. So 20% is like completely outrageous, never seen in my life kind of thing, but 80% of the ridiculousness of the occasions that these startup founders go through is pretty much accurate. So the— it's a satirical look at the tech industry and also touching on the life struggles that the founders face. I've seen many startups in the Valley that had conversations around which series or which episode of the series they actually lived themselves. So it's a really interesting way to understand how things have been moving forward in the last 10 years in Silicon Valley especially. Another one that's interesting and touches upon another critical aspect of today's world, financial world, is the TV series Startup. It's a drama series that explores the world of cryptocurrency and actually the lengths at which the people go in order to achieve wealth and power. It's very intense, but it provides a unique perspective of this intersection of technology and ambition and finance. You might be a hodler, you might be a crypto enthusiast, you might be an NFT burner, or a crypto miner or somebody completely away from all these technologies, but you also have to understand the impact these technologies will have in our life. And the TV series does a good job in kind of introducing you to this world in a very thrilling way, I should say. One last piece of movie advice is the Steve Jobs movie. It hasn't been endorsed by Steve Jobs because I think the book was made after he was— he passed away. But the book that he endorsed and he partnered with in the creation of has been transferred into the screen and this biographical drama that gets a little bit closer to the personal life and the career of Steve Jobs. So it kind of takes out critical pieces and it kind of stops, doesn't show the piece where he was able to get Pixar from Star Wars, turn that into another company, etc. But regardless, it's a great movie. It's a fun-to-watch movie. It provides, I think, a nuanced portrayal of Jobs' complex personality, the factors that kind of drove him. to create one of the most influential and most significant successful companies in history also kind of gives you some moments of deliberation and thought. Remember, we keep saying this, the life of an entrepreneur is full of challenges. The best way to move forward is to watch and read as much as possible to understand the challenges that people came before you had, the risks they had, the failures they had, so you don't repeat them. Things go cyclical. The terms and conditions of building a business is very similar. It doesn't matter if it's 1980s or 2000s or 2023. You're going to be facing very similar challenges to a lot of people before you. And don't make the same mistakes they made, especially when it's documented and shared with you almost freely. Make your own mistakes. This is going to be an important kind of ethos in your startup building. Understand others' mistakes, don't repeat them. So as always, if you find these recommendations helpful, be sure to like, comment, and subscribe to our channel, The Brutally Honest Mentor. If you're kind of listening to this on our podcast, you can come back to our YouTube channel or video channels, To kind of get the links and also additional videos that we had showing you these resources. Until next time, keep learning from other people's mistakes, keep growing and making your own mistakes, and as always, may the Force be with you on your path to success. Take care. Thank you.
