Marc Andreessen's 25 Book Recommendations, and the Lines Readers Actually Underline

The list came from a16z. The underlines came from readers.

At the end of July, a16z published a list of 25 books recommended by Marc Andreessen, in no particular order. Lists like that travel fast. Within days you can find the same 25 titles copied across a dozen newsletters.

So we went looking for the part nobody copies: what readers actually stopped to underline inside those books.

Glasp readers have imported their Kindle highlights from 15 of the 25. For each one we can show the single line that the most readers marked, independently, without knowing what anyone else marked. We call it Reader Consensus, and it is the closest thing we have to a room full of strangers nodding at the same sentence.

Read the consensus lines in sequence and Andreessen's list stops looking like a pile of business books. It looks like a curriculum on one problem:

How to act when you cannot know how it turns out.

Annie Duke names it outright. Eric Ries builds a whole method on it. Nassim Taleb asks who pays when the bet goes wrong. Kahneman explains why your mind quietly swaps the hard question for an easy one. And when the uncertainty is not about markets but about your own life, the Stoics and the Adlerians take over.

Here are the 15, ordered by how many Glasp readers have highlighted them. The number in brackets is where the book appears on a16z's original list, which is in no particular order.

1. Thinking, Fast and Slow [#2]

Daniel Kahneman, the psychologist who won a Nobel Prize in economics for showing that the rational actor was never there.

"Intelligence is not only the ability to reason; it is also the ability to find relevant material in memory and to deploy attention when needed."

Reader Consensus: 15 of 54 highlighters (28%). The most-read book on Andreessen's list among Glasp readers by a wide margin, and the most contested: three other lines sit one vote behind this one, including the famous "A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition."

📖 Read on Amazon · Highlights on Glasp

2. 12 Rules for Life [#9]

Jordan B. Peterson, the clinical psychologist whose antidote to chaos became one of the most argued-about books of the decade.

"To stand up straight with your shoulders back is to accept the terrible responsibility of life, with eyes wide open. It means deciding to voluntarily transform the chaos of potential into the realities of habitable order."

Reader Consensus: 10 of 36 highlighters (28%).

🌐 Top highlights in other languages: Português (9)

📖 Read on Amazon · Highlights on Glasp

3. The Lean Startup [#7]

Eric Ries, whose build-measure-learn loop gave a generation of founders a vocabulary for learning faster than they fail.

"A startup is a human institution designed to create a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty."

Reader Consensus: 10 of 35 highlighters (29%). Note what readers chose: not a tactic, but the definition. The phrase that does the work is "extreme uncertainty."

🌐 Top highlights in other languages: Español (8)

📖 Read on Amazon · Highlights on Glasp

4. Thinking in Bets [#3]

Annie Duke, former World Series of Poker champion turned decision scientist, on the difference between a bad decision and a bad result.

"Thinking in bets starts with recognizing that there are exactly two things that determine how our lives turn out: the quality of our decisions and luck. Learning to recognize the difference between the two is what thinking in bets is all about."

Reader Consensus: 14 of 29 highlighters (48%), one of the highest agreement rates on this list. Nearly half of everyone who highlighted this book stopped at the same paragraph, and it is the thesis of the entire list.

📖 Read on Amazon · Highlights on Glasp

5. The Courage to Be Disliked [#6]

Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga, who turned Alfred Adler's psychology into a dialogue between a philosopher and a young man.

"A healthy feeling of inferiority is not something that comes from comparing oneself to others; it comes from one's comparison with one's ideal self."

Reader Consensus: 9 of 16 highlighters (56%), the highest agreement of any book on this list.

There is something else here. The Japanese original, 嫌われる勇気, has 67 highlighters on Glasp, more than four times the English edition. Andreessen recommended a book that Japanese readers have been underlining far more heavily than English ones. And the line they converge on is its neighbor in the argument: that all you can do is choose the best path you believe in, because how other people judge that choice is their task, not yours.

🌐 Top highlights in other languages: 日本語 (67) · Português (9)

📖 Read on Amazon · Highlights on Glasp

6. High Output Management [#8]

Andrew S. Grove, the Intel CEO who wrote the management book that Silicon Valley never replaced.

"A manager's output = the output of his organization + the output of the neighboring organizations under his influence."

Reader Consensus: 6 of 16 highlighters (38%), in a four-way tie. All four tied lines are definitions: what a manager's output is, what leverage is, where to catch a defect. Readers of this book are not collecting inspiration. They are collecting formulas.

📖 Read on Amazon · Highlights on Glasp

7. A Guide to the Good Life [#23]

William B. Irvine, philosopher, on how to run the Stoic operating system in a modern life.

"One key to happiness, then, is to forestall the adaptation process: We need to take steps to prevent ourselves from taking for granted, once we get them, the things we worked so hard to get."

Reader Consensus: 7 of 14 highlighters (50%). Exactly half.

📖 Read on Amazon · Highlights on Glasp

8. Antifragile [#4]

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, on the things that do not merely survive disorder but feed on it.

"At no point in history have so many non-risk-takers, that is, those with no personal exposure, exerted so much control. The chief ethical rule is the following: Thou shalt not have antifragility at the expense of the fragility of others."

Reader Consensus: 5 of 13 highlighters (38%). Readers skipped past the definition of antifragility, which sits one vote behind, and marked the ethics instead. Skin in the game, before Taleb wrote the book called that.

📖 Read on Amazon · Highlights on Glasp

9. The Inevitable [#11]

Kevin Kelly, founding editor of Wired, on the twelve technological forces that will shape the next thirty years.

"Endless Newbie is the new default for everyone, no matter your age or experience."

Reader Consensus: 5 of 13 highlighters (38%). Written in 2016 about a future that arrived early.

📖 Read on Amazon · Highlights on Glasp

10. The Rational Optimist [#10]

Matt Ridley, arguing that exchange and specialization, not intelligence, are what made us prosperous.

"This is what prosperity is: the increase in the amount of goods or services you can earn with the same amount of work."

Reader Consensus: 4 of 7 highlighters (57%), the highest agreement rate on this list, though on the smallest group of readers.

📖 Read on Amazon · Highlights on Glasp

📉 The thin end of the list

Five more books from Andreessen's 25 exist on Glasp but with only a handful of readers each, too few for a consensus to mean anything:

• The Sovereign Individual [#20], 6 highlighters, no line marked by more than two

• Only the Paranoid Survive [#5], Grove's second appearance on the list

• A Higher Loyalty [#22]

• The Start-up of You [#24]

• When the Wolves Bite [#25]

And ten of the 25 have no Glasp footprint at all: How to Castrate a Bull, Last Call, The Way We Never Were, And the Money Kept Rolling In (and Out), The Maverick and His Machine, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, The Myth of America's Decline, Infamous Scribblers, Life, the Movie, and How to Live.

That split is the interesting part. The half of the list everyone has read is the half you would expect: Kahneman, Ries, Grove, Taleb. The half nobody on Glasp has highlighted is mostly history and media criticism, the deep cuts, the books you only reach after someone you trust points at them.

Which is presumably why he listed them.

❤️ Before you go

Every line above exists because someone stopped reading long enough to mark it. That is the whole idea: when you highlight on Glasp, you are not just saving a sentence for yourself. You are leaving it for the next reader.

If any of these 25 are on your Kindle, import your highlights and add your own underline to the count. Several of these consensus lines are one vote from changing.

See you in the margins,

The Glasp Team