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How to read fiction to build a startup

Eliot Peper on 19 stories that reframe the power and consequences of technology

Eliot Peper 5 years

“The book itself is a curious artefact, not showy in its technology but complex and extremely efficient: a really neat little device, compact, often very pleasant to look at and handle, that can last decades, even centuries. It doesn’t have to be plugged in, activated, or performed by a machine; all it needs is light, a human eye, and a human mind. It is not one of a kind, and it is not ephemeral. It lasts. It is reliable. If a book told you something when you were 15, it will tell it to you again when you’re 50, though you may understand it so differently that it seems you’re reading a whole new book.”—Ursula K. Le Guin

Every year, Bill Gates goes off-grid, leaves friends and family behind, and spends two weeks holed up in a cabin reading books. His annual reading list rivals Oprah’s Book Club as a publishing kingmaker. Not to be outdone, Mark Zuckerberg shared a reading recommendation every two weeks for a year, dubbing 2015 his “Year of Books.” Susan Wojcicki, CEO of YouTube, joined the board of Room to Read when she realized how books like The Evolution of Calpurnia Tate were inspiring girls to pursue careers in science and technology. Many a biotech entrepreneur treasures a dog-eared copy of Daniel Suarez’s Change Agent, which extrapolates the future of CRISPR. Noah Yuval Harari’s sweeping account of world history, Sapiens, is de rigueur for Silicon Valley nightstands.

This obsession with literature isn’t limited to founders. Investors are just as avid bookworms. “Reading was my first love,” says AngelList’s Naval Ravikant. “There is always a book to capture the imagination.” Ravikant reads dozens of books at a time, dipping in and out of each one nonlinearly. When asked about his preternatural instincts, Lux Capital’s Josh Wolfe advised investors to “read voraciously and connect dots.” Foundry Group’s Brad Feld has reviewed 1,197 books on Goodreads and especially loves science fiction novels that “make the step function leaps in imagination that represent the coming dislocation from our current reality.”

This begs a fascinating question: Why do the people building the future spend so much of their scarcest resource — time — reading books?

Image by NiseriN via Getty Images. Reading time approximately 14 minutes.

Don’t Predict, Reframe

Do innovators read in order to mine literature for ideas? The Kindle was built to the specs of a science fictional children’s storybook featured in Neal Stephenson’s novel The Diamond Age, in fact, the Kindle project team was originally codenamed “Fiona” after the novel’s protagonist. Jeff Bezos later hired Stephenson as the first employee at his space startup Blue Origin. But this literary prototyping is the exception that proves the rule. To understand the extent of the feedback loop between books and technology, it’s necessary to attack the subject from a less direct angle.

David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas is full of indirect angles that all manage to reveal deeper truths. It’s a mind-bending novel that follows six different characters through an intricate web of interconnected stories spanning three centuries. The book is a feat of pure M.C. Escher-esque imagination, featuring a structure as creative and compelling as its content. Mitchell takes the reader on a journey ranging from the 19th century South Pacific to a far-future Korean corpocracy and challenges the reader to rethink the very idea of civilization along the way. “Power, time, gravity, love,” writes Mitchell. “The forces that really kick ass are all invisible.”

The technological incarnations of these invisible forces are precisely what Kevin Kelly seeks to catalog in The Inevitable. Kelly is an enthusiastic observer of the impact of technology on the human condition. He was a co-founder of Wired, and the insights explored in his book are deep, provocative, and wide-ranging. In his own words, “When answers become cheap, good questions become more difficult and therefore more valuable.” The Inevitable raises many important questions that will shape the next few decades, not least of which concern the impacts of AI:

“Over the past 60 years, as mechanical processes have replicated behaviors and talents we thought were unique to humans, we’ve had to change our minds about what sets us apart. As we invent more species of AI, we will be forced to surrender more of what is supposedly unique about humans. Each step of surrender—we are not the only mind that can play chess, fly a plane, make music, or invent a mathematical law—will be painful and sad. We’ll spend the next three decades—indeed, perhaps the next century—in a permanent identity crisis, continually asking ourselves what humans are good for. If we aren’t unique toolmakers, or artists, or moral ethicists, then what, if anything, makes us special? In the grandest irony of all, the greatest benefit of an everyday, utilitarian AI will not be increased productivity or an economics of abundance or a new way of doing science—although all those will happen. The greatest benefit of the arrival of artificial intelligence is that AIs will help define humanity. We need AIs to tell us who we are.”

It is precisely this kind of an AI-influenced world that Richard Powers describes so powerfully in his extraordinary novel The Overstory:

“Signals swarm through Mimi’s phone. Suppressed updates and smart alerts chime at her. Notifications to flick away. Viral memes and clickable comment wars, millions of unread posts demanding to be ranked. Everyone around her in the park is likewise busy, tapping and swiping, each with a universe in his palm. A massive, crowd-sourced urgency unfolds in Like-Land, and the learners, watching over these humans’ shoulders, noting each time a person clicks, begin to see what it might be: people, vanishing en masse into a replicated paradise.”

Taking this a step further, Virginia Heffernan points out in Magic and Loss that living in a digitally mediated reality impacts our inner lives at least as much as the world we inhabit:

“The Internet suggests immortality—comes just shy of promising it—with its magic. With its readability and persistence of data. With its suggestion of universal connectedness. With its disembodied imagines and sounds. And then, just as suddenly, it stirs grief: the deep feeling that digitization has cost us something very profound. That connectedness is illusory; that we’re all more alone than ever.”

And it is the questionable assumptions underlying such a future that Nick Harkaway enumerates in his existential speculative thriller Gnomon:

“Imagine how safe it would feel to know that no one could ever commit a crime of violence and go unnoticed, ever again. Imagine what it would mean to us to know—know for certain—that the plane or the bus we’re travelling on is properly maintained, that the teacher who looks after our children doesn’t have ugly secrets. All it would cost is our privacy, and to be honest who really cares about that? What secrets would you need to keep from a mathematical construct without a heart? From a card index? Why would it matter? And there couldn’t be any abuse of the system, because the system would be built not to allow it. It’s the pathway we’re taking now, that we’ve been on for a while.” 

Machine learning pioneer, former President of Google China, and leading Chinese venture capitalist Kai-Fu Lee loves reading science fiction in this vein — books that extrapolate AI futures — like Hao Jingfang’s Hugo Award-winning Folding Beijing. Lee’s own book, AI Superpowers, provides a thought-provoking overview of the burgeoning feedback loop between machine learning and geopolitics. As AI becomes more and more powerful, it becomes an instrument of power, and this book outlines what that means for the 21st century world stage:

“Many techno-optimists and historians would argue that productivity gains from new technology almost always produce benefits throughout the economy, creating more jobs and prosperity than before. But not all inventions are created equal. Some changes replace one kind of labor (the calculator), and some disrupt a whole industry (the cotton gin). Then there are technological changes on a grander scale. These don’t merely affect one task or one industry but drive changes across hundreds of them. In the past three centuries, we’ve only really seen three such inventions: the steam engine, electrification, and information technology.”

So what’s different this time? Lee points out that “AI is inherently monopolistic: A company with more data and better algorithms will gain ever more users and data. This self-reinforcing cycle will lead to winner-take-all markets, with one company making massive profits while its rivals languish.” This tendency toward centralization has profound implications for the restructuring of world order:

“The AI revolution will be of the magnitude of the Industrial Revolution—but probably larger and definitely faster. Where the steam engine only took over physical labor, AI can perform both intellectual and physical labor. And where the Industrial Revolution took centuries to spread beyond Europe and the U.S., AI applications are already being adopted simultaneously all across the world.”

Cloud Atlas, The Inevitable, The Overstory, Gnomon, Folding Beijing, and AI Superpowers might appear to predict the future, but in fact they do something far more interesting and useful: reframe the present. They invite us to look at the world from new angles and through fresh eyes. And cultivating “beginner’s mind” is the problem for anyone hoping to build or bet on the future.

Noticing > Ideating

Image by Gulfiya Mukhamatdinova via Getty Images

Y Combinator founder Paul Graham’s beloved essays could easily constitute a book of their own. In “How To Get Startup Ideas”, he corrects a common misunderstanding about how great internet companies are born:

“If you look at the way successful founders have had their ideas, it’s generally the result of some external stimulus hitting a prepared mind. Bill Gates and Paul Allen hear about the Altair and think ‘I bet we could write a Basic interpreter for it.’ Drew Houston realizes he’s forgotten his USB stick and thinks ‘I really need to make my files live online.’ Lots of people heard about the Altair. Lots forgot USB sticks. The reason those stimuli caused those founders to start companies was that their experiences had prepared them to notice the opportunities they represented.

The verb you want to be using with respect to startup ideas is not ‘think up’ but ‘notice.’ At Y Combinator we call ideas that grow naturally out of the founders’ own experiences ‘organic’ startup ideas. The most successful startups almost all begin this way.”

Graham is calling on aspiring founders to notice Mitchell’s kickass invisible forces. He is reiterating William Gibson’s famous line, “The future is already here—it’s just not very evenly distributed,” and encouraging entrepreneurs to seek out those liminal pockets of tomorrow instead of brainstorming plausible fantasies. Gibson himself takes this idea a step further in his novel Pattern Recognition:

“We have no idea, now, of who or what the inhabitants of our future might be. In that sense, we have no future. Not in the sense that our grandparents had a future, or thought they did. Fully imagined cultural futures were the luxury of another day, one in which ‘now’ was of some greater duration. For us, of course, things can change so abruptly, so violently, so profoundly, that futures like our grandparents’ have insufficient ‘now’ to stand on. We have no future because our present is too volatile. We have only risk management. The spinning of the given moment’s scenarios. Pattern recognition.”

Unfortunately for us, this is far harder than it sounds. A big fan of Gibson, Harkaway describes the human inclination to take the status quo for granted in Gnomon:

“The seeds of it are all around you, but you’re desperate to avoid noticing them. You live in the foundation stones of a city of boundless spires, but you turn your face to the dust.

Did you know that in 2014 two rats shared one mind over a wire three thousand miles long? Have you heard that a man in Japan can read your dreams from your head with a machine? No. You sit reading news that has nothing new in it, telling yourself that because you hold in your hand some glossy skeuomorphic lozenge you are technologically au fait, and that because you know where in the endless repetition of tribal politics and fairydust economics your world is, or have consumed many of those books published in pale cream jackets by university presses, you are somehow informed about what is important.

You are not. Meaning is being made in the saccades and the interstitial spaces you ignore. When the miracles begin, you will declare that the world has taken a great leap forward, and—wearing the amazed expression of a pantomime clown—you will quote Proust as tomorrow’s children make jokes that derive their humour from puns invoking senses you do not have. You will wear your bewilderment first as modish nostalgia and then as politically charged performance art, and finally as a proud, doomed ethical position whose idiot gravity you cannot escape. You will go to your grave protesting that everyone else has misunderstood. Oh, bravo, bravo.”

Just as technological innovations are incremental and relational — machine learning wouldn’t exist without the internet, which wouldn’t exist without the transistor — literature is best described as a single extended conversation. Authors read and react to each other’s ideas, contributing to a shared cultural investigation into the meaning of life. One author in particular made a significant impact on both Harkaway and Gibson, as well as many of the most influential computer scientists and venture capital investors in Silicon Valley: Jorge Luis Borges.

Borges’s Ficciones collection of short stories is humbling, challenging, and inspiring all at once. Each tale contains enough story to be a novel, but distills it to just a few pages. Countless grand and subtle ideas are woven seamlessly into imaginative adventures filled with knife fights, mysterious labyrinths, deadly secrets, uncanny dreams, and mind-bending philosophy. Borges wrote these stories in the late 1930s, yet the metaphors he employs contain more raw insight into how the internet is changing our lives than anything published since. 

Borges wrote that “Every man should be capable of all ideas, and I believe that in the future he will be.” That particular future has not yet arrived, and award-winning short story writer Ted Chiang, who many consider a successor to Borges, explains why:

“I’ve gone into the outside world to reobserve society. The sign language of emotion I once knew has been replaced by a matrix of interrelated equations. Lines of force twist and elongate between people, objects, institutions, ideas. The individuals are tragically like marionettes, independently animate but bound by a web they choose not to see; they could resist if they wished, but so few of them do.”

As Graham suggests, our assumptions seduce us into ignoring the hidden forces that shape our lives.

For Answers To Life’s Biggest Questions, Inquire Within

What does it mean to harness these hidden forces? How does reading illuminate them? Elon Musk’s quest to reach for the stars was inspired in part by his love for Iain M. Banks’s Culture novels, while Larry Page credits physicist Richard Feynman’s books with shaping his worldview.

Taking a journey through an imagined future can sometimes reveal as much about the nature of reality as learning scientific principles from a Nobel Prize-winner. A good example can be found in Ada Palmer’s Too Like the Lightning, a vibrant, sparkling science fiction novel that’s so damn smart it almost hurts. Palmer conjures a rich, multilayered vision of the future that feels all too plausible, inspires wonder and dread simultaneously, and wrestles with timeless philosophical questions. Take this titillating sentence for example: “Imagine, reader, in primordial days some vicious dinosaur, heavy with nightmare jaws, which chases a shimmering lizard up a slope, and the predator rejoices, already tasting the kill in its blood-starved mind, when, all at once, its slim prey spreads its feathered fins and takes to the air in a world that had not yet realized life could fly.” This is a world to get lost in, and one you won’t forget.

Palmer’s science fiction is particularly nuanced and compelling because of her day job as a Renaissance historian. “That’s why I don’t presume to predict — history is a lesson in complexity not predictability — but what I do feel I’ve learned to understand, thanks to my studies, are the mechanisms of historical change, the how of history’s dynamism rather than the what next.” Her visions of the future are so rich in complexity that they sometimes make other speculative tales feel reductionist in comparison. Here is how she describes Mitchell’s invisible forces at work:

“There are Great Forces. Economics, class, wealth gaps, prosperity, stagnation, these Great Forces make particular historical moments ripe for change, ripe for war, ripe for wealth, ripe for crisis, ripe for healing, ripe for peace. But individuals also have real agency, and our actions determine the actual consequences of these Great Forces as they reshape our world. We have to understand both, and study both, and act on the world now remembering that both are real.”

History can be a powerful guide to the future not because it repeats itself, but because, like science fiction, it forces us to take a step back and look at the bigger picture. The Lessons of History by Will and Ariel Durant packs more insight into 100 pages than most books manage in 600. The Durants are Pulitzer Prize-winning historians and this slim volume distills two lifetimes of research into human nature and the fate of nations. Like Palmer, they observe that, despite the horrors and absurdities of the present, “If the Founding Fathers of the United States could return to America, or Fox and Bentham to England, or Voltaire and Diderot to France, would they not reproach us as ingrates for our blindness to our good fortune in living today and not yesterday — not even under Pericles or Augustus?”

Progress is not inevitable. Progress is fraught with unintended consequences. Progress is complex but not unknowable. Those who aim to advance the cause of progress must heed the Durant’s advice, “The only real revolution is in the enlightenment of the mind and the improvement of character, the only real emancipation is individual, and the only real revolutionists are philosophers and saints.”

Read To Think Differently

Warren Buffet’s longtime business partner, Charlie Munger, sums it up nicely, “In my whole life, I have known no wise people (over a broad subject matter area) who didn’t read all the time—none, zero.” 

This is why preeminent founders, investors, scientists, thinkers, and technologists spend so much of their precious time reading books. Life is parochial. Every one of us is born into our own little pocket universe with a unique set of parents, friends, opportunities, threats, circumstances, and choices. To make sense of the world around us, to catch a glimpse of underlying reality, to notice those invisible forces, we must step outside ourselves. Reading is one way to do that. Books are windows into other hearts and minds. Books allow us to communicate with the dead and to imagine countless alternate dimensions. Books contain the ideas of our greatest philosophers, the insights of our most brilliant innovators, and the tales of our most inspiring storytellers.

Bill Gates devotes two weeks a year to full-time reading because the investment of time yields such profound returns. Reading is a superpower we too often take for granted and those who wish to make a dent in the universe need every superpower they can get. In the words of Neil Gaiman, “We have an obligation to imagine. It is easy to pretend that nobody can change anything, that society is huge, and the individual is less than nothing. But the truth is individuals make the future, and they do it by imagining that things can be different.”

So close this tab, pick up a book, and don’t stop reading until you’ve changed the world.

Books referenced in this essay