Category Report
Which books are shaping founder thinking this month, as mentioned across top entrepreneurship podcasts.
Biggest mover: Molly's Game: From Hollywood's Elite to Wall Street's Billionaire Boys Club, My High-Stakes Adventure in the World of Underground Poker by Molly Bloom #7, rising 77 places.
1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History--and How It Shattered a Nation by Andrew Ross Sorkin was the top newcomer at #2. In total 44 books had their debut mentions.
Habits and Hustle drove the most book chatter, with 22% of this months book mentions.
Entrepreneurship conversations in October 2025 are unusually anchored in history and philosophy, with founders looking backward for guidance on today’s volatile markets and leadership dilemmas. Biographies of industrial titans like Rockefeller, Dyson, and Ford are invoked for their depictions of extreme persistence, long feedback cycles, and unconventional thinking about risk and expertise—offered as counterweights to a quick-win startup culture. The prominence of Andrew Ross Sorkin’s new book on the 1929 crash, alongside renewed attention to “Too Big to Fail,” suggests heightened anxiety about bubbles, financial contagion, and how policy and markets intersect with entrepreneurial opportunity. At the same time, titles like “Meditations,” “The 48 Laws of Power,” “The Motive,” and Aristotle’s ethics highlight a parallel focus on inner discipline, power dynamics, and the emotional burden of leadership, as founders seek tools to navigate hard conversations, status games, and values-driven relationships.
Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr.
Ron Chernow
2
mentions
1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History--and How It Shattered a Nation
Andrew Ross Sorkin
2
mentions
Meditations
Marcus Aurelius
2
mentions
The 48 Laws of Power
Robert Greene, Joost Elffers
2
mentions
Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System---and Themselves
Andrew Ross Sorkin
2
mentions
The Motive: Why So Many Leaders Abdicate Their Most Important Responsibilities
Patrick M. Lencioni
1
mentions
Molly's Game: From Hollywood's Elite to Wall Street's Billionaire Boys Club, My High-Stakes Adventure in the World of Underground Poker
Molly Bloom
1
mentions
Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics
Aristotle, Robert C. Bartlett, Susan D. Collins
1
mentions
Against the Odds: An Autobiography
James Dyson
1
mentions
My Life and Work: Autobiography of Henry Ford
Henry Ford
1
mentions
Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. to #1.
Significant outlier with 1.9x as many mentions as the average book.
1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in Wall Street History--and How It Shattered a Nation to #2.
Highest ranking new entry to the chart.
Up 77 places from #84 last month.
Unreasonable Hospitality: The Remarkable Power of Giving People More Than They Expect to #90.
Down from #1 last month
Unreasonable Hospitality: The Remarkable Power of Giving People More Than They Expect to #90.
No mentions after ranking #1 last month.
Made in Japan to #94.
No mentions after ranking #2 last month.
The shows that surfaced the most book mentions this month.
Mentions recorded per 30-day window (past 8 months)
How many of the mentions were for the top 10 books.
The entrepreneurship podcasts included in this report are curated by MavenSignal to represent the voices founders and operators trust most for playbooks, launches, and long-term strategy.
We ingest public RSS feeds, analyze each episode, extract book mentions with AI, and validate with humans. The resulting data is normalized and deduplicated, building the canonical signal for the MavenSignal platform. Every insight and ranking is drawn from that verified layer.
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