Perch

The best writing on the Internet, in one reading app. Follow for daily nuggets of wisdom about reading and writing.

[vikas sabbi @vikassabbi]

this kinda became my new daily routine now

- 15 min chess every morning on @chesscom
- 20 pages reading on @perchdotapp

it feels really really good

[Perch @perchdotapp]

@rcwhiteley 💯

[Perch @perchdotapp]

“Books are the closest thing you’ll ever come to finding cheat codes for real life. You can access the entire learnings of someone else’s career in a few hours.”

[Startup Archive @StartupArchive_]

Tobi Lutke: Books are a cheat code for life

Shopify founder Tobi Lutke explains why he reads so many books:

“If you don’t read books, you live a lifetime. If you read books, you live 1,000 lifetimes.”

David Senra reads a quote of Tobi’s back to him:

“Books are the closest thing you’ll ever come to finding cheat codes for real life. You can access the entire learnings of someone else’s career in a few hours.”

Tobi comments:

“I really think we need to shout this point from a rooftop. The one weird trick seems to be: read books. It kind of doesn’t matter [what you read], just make a habit of reading books and ideally change genre every three books or so. That alone will give you a range that you can draw on for basically everything you will ever do.”

However for business books, there is an important caveat:

“When I went from programmer to business and had to learn business really quick, I got really dismayed with the quality of business books pretty quickly. Frankly, business books are largely written by the people who have time — not the people who actually build companies. So you read between the lines as well. If the person who started the company or the person writing the book is a salesperson, every problem can be solved with sales. If the person is a marketer, every problem can be solved with marketing. At least that I can takeaway as a trap to not fall into. I was determined to not be the engineering-type founder who was going to see everything as an engineering problem.”

Video source: @davidsenra (2026)

[Startup Archive @StartupArchive_]

Tobi Lutke: Books are a cheat code for life

Shopify founder Tobi Lutke explains why he reads so many books:

“If you don’t read books, you live a lifetime. If you read books, you live 1,000 lifetimes.”

David Senra reads a quote of Tobi’s back to him:

“Books are the closest thing you’ll ever come to finding cheat codes for real life. You can access the entire learnings of someone else’s career in a few hours.”

Tobi comments:

“I really think we need to shout this point from a rooftop. The one weird trick seems to be: read books. It kind of doesn’t matter [what you read], just make a habit of reading books and ideally change genre every three books or so. That alone will give you a range that you can draw on for basically everything you will ever do.”

However for business books, there is an important caveat:

“When I went from programmer to business and had to learn business really quick, I got really dismayed with the quality of business books pretty quickly. Frankly, business books are largely written by the people who have time — not the people who actually build companies. So you read between the lines as well. If the person who started the company or the person writing the book is a salesperson, every problem can be solved with sales. If the person is a marketer, every problem can be solved with marketing. At least that I can takeaway as a trap to not fall into. I was determined to not be the engineering-type founder who was going to see everything as an engineering problem.”

Video source: @davidsenra (2026)

[Perch @perchdotapp]

@nic_munoz This is awesome - great video!

[Perch @perchdotapp]

Elon Musk on how he learned how to build a rocket company: “I read a lot of books”

Elon is asked how he acquired the expertise to be the CTO of a rocket ship company. He replies:

“Well, I do have a physics background. That’s been a helpful foundation. Then I read a lot of books and talked to a lot of smart people.”

“You’re self taught?” the interviewer asks.

“Yes, I don’t have an aerospace degree,” Elon responds.

“How did you go about acquiring the knowledge?” the interviewer asks again.

Elon replies:

“Like I said, I read a lot of books, talked to a lot of people, and have a great team.”

[Perch @perchdotapp]

Charlie Munger: “There’s nothing like reading”

Legendary investor Charlie Munger comments on the impact that reading has had on his life:

“I don’t think you can take every bookish little boy and turn him into a billionaire by patting him on the head and saying, ‘Read all you want Johnny.’ If it were that easy, there’d be more billionaires. But it enormously helped me.”

Charlie continues:

“You can take in so much and you can take it in on your own time schedule . . . It’s just God’s gift. If you’re into self-education, there’s nothing like reading. And of course people who do a lot of it have an enormous advantage.”

[Perch @perchdotapp]

Jeff Bezos on the importance of long-form reading

“The general rule here is that we humans do more of anything that is made easier. So if the friction level gets reduced, we do more of that thing.”

This is why Jeff believes the Kindle is so important:

“I can tell you that the people who buy a Kindle read 4x as many books in the 12 months after they’ve bought the Kindle than they did in the 12 months prior to buying the Kindle. And the reason is we’re reducing the friction of reading”

He continues:

“I’m really excited about long-form reading because I think we humans learn different things from long-form than we can learn from short-form. When you read a novel or a biography, you actually do get to live another life, and you learn things that are unlearnable in any kind of short form — whether it be a movie or a TV show or a blog post or a song. You learn different things.”

[Perch @perchdotapp]

@SeanLeeOnline Never thought of it that way - interesting way to put it!

[Perch @perchdotapp]

Warren Buffett: “The best investment you can make is in yourself”

“By far the best investment you can make is in yourself. For example, communication skills. I tell the students that. They’re going to graduate schools in business and are learning all these complicated formulas, if they just learned to communicate better — both in writing and in person — they increase their value at least 50%. If you can’t communicate with somebody, it’s like winking at a girl in the dark. Nothing happens.”

Warren continues:

“You have to be able to get forth your ideas, and that’s relatively easy. I did it myself with the Dale Carnegie course . . . It’s hugely important. And if you invest in yourself, nobody can take it away from you.”

[Perch @perchdotapp]

@Ezkie_Music 💯

[Perch @perchdotapp]

Naval Ravikant: “Pride is the enemy of learning”

“When I look at my friends and colleagues, the ones who are still stuck in the past and have grown the least are the ones who were the proudest because they feel they already had the answers and don’t want to correct themselves publicly . . . Pride prevents you from saying, ‘I’m wrong.’”

Naval continues:

“It could be as simple as trading stocks and you don’t admit you were wrong, so you hang on to a lousy trade. It could be that you made a decision to marry someone or move somewhere or enter a profession and it doesn’t work out; then you don’t admit you were wrong so you get stuck in it. It’s mostly about getting trapped in a local maxima as opposed to going back down and climbing the mountain again. The great artists always have the this ability to start over, whether it’s Paul Simon or Madonna or U2. Even the great entrepreneurs, they’re just always willing to start over.”

source: @ChrisWillx (2025)

[Perch @perchdotapp]

Sam Altman on how Paul Graham’s essays inspired him to get into startups

“I think like many other people, my introduction to the startup world and excitement about it came from reading PG’s essays. He’s an unbelievable writer . . . I think a whole generation of us copied PG in all of these ways. Although he was never like, ‘Let me teach you a class on how to write,' I and others clearly took a lot of inspiration because he just does it in a style that resonates so much. Like if you go read an average business book versus a PG essay, it’s like they’re both business writing, but other than that, they’re different species. He says interesting stuff. He says it clearly. He doesn’t waste your time. Nothing feels fake.”

source: @david_perell

[Perch @perchdotapp]

Elon Musk’s advice for young people: “Read a lot of books”

“I’d encourage people to read a lot of books. Basically try to ingest as much information as you can and develop good general knowledge so you at least have a rough lay of the land of the knowledge landscape. Try to learn a little bit about a lot of things. How would you know what you’re really interested in if you’re not doing a broad peripheral exploration of the knowledge landscape? . . . Then try to find an overlap of your talents and what you’re interested in.”

[Perch @perchdotapp]

Jeff Bezos: “We humans co-evolve with our tools”

“We change our tools and then our tools change us,” Jeff explains. “And in the Internet Era, almost all of the tools for reading have been reducing the friction of short-form reading. The Internet is perfect for delivering three paragraphs to your smartphone, but the Kindle is trying to reduce friction for reading a whole book.”

Jeff continues:

“If you want to do more of something, make the friction less. If you want to do less of something, make the friction more. If there’s a particular snack that you like a lot and it’s making you fat, put it on the top shelf where it’s harder to find and you’ll eat less of it. Don’t leave it on your kitchen counter.”

[Perch @perchdotapp]

@Fintech03 Did not know that! Incredible find

[Perch @perchdotapp]

28 year old Steve Jobs predicts the future of books

“When I was going to school, I had a few great teachers and a lot of mediocre teachers,” Steve begins. “And the thing that probably kept me out of jail was books because I could go read what Aristotle wrote or what Plato wrote and I didn’t have an intermediary in the way.”

He continues:

“A book was a phenomenal thing. It got right from the source to the destination without anything in the middle. But the problem was that you can’t ask Aristotle a question. And I think as we look towards the next 50-100 years — if we really can come up with these machines that can capture an underlying spirit or an underlying set of principles or an underlying way of looking at the world, then when the next Aristotle comes around — maybe if he or she carries around one of these machines with them his or her whole life and types in all this stuff, then maybe someday after the person’s dead and gone, we can ask the machine, ‘Hey, what would Aristotle have said?” And maybe we won’t get the right answer, but maybe we will. And that’s really exciting to me. And that’s one of the reasons I’m doing what I’m doing.”

[Perch @perchdotapp]

@steve_cook https://t.co/fmIlSAo6ao