Category Report
Which books are shaping investor thinking this year, as mentioned across leading finance and investing podcasts.
Biggest mover: The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail by Clayton M. Christensen #4, rising 42 places.
What You Do Is Who You Are: How to Create Your Business Culture by Ben Horowitz, Henry Louis Gates Jr. was the top newcomer at #3. In total 197 books had their debut mentions.
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC) drove the most book chatter, with 26% of this years book mentions.
Across 2025’s most discussed books, two concerns dominate: how to build durable advantage in an AI-shifted economy and how leaders actually behave under pressure. Hamilton Helmer’s 7 Powers stands out as the clear outlier, repeatedly used as a shared language for “moats” and strategic defensibility in everything from fintech to AI chips, suggesting that investors and operators are unusually focused on structural power, not just growth. Alongside it, Ben Horowitz’s The Hard Thing About Hard Things and What You Do Is Who You Are anchor a second theme: the gritty realities of CEO decision-making and culture as performance, not slogans. Classic strategy and investing texts such as The Innovator’s Dilemma, The Intelligent Investor, and Moneyball, together with Morgan Housel’s work, point to a renewed appetite for timeless principles—behavior, risk, and incentives—while the Elon Musk biography is mined for an extreme, hands-on operating model in a period of rapid technological change.
7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy
Hamilton Helmer
15
mentions
The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers-Straight Talk on the Challenges of Entrepreneurship
Ben Horowitz
7
mentions
What You Do Is Who You Are: How to Create Your Business Culture
Ben Horowitz, Henry Louis Gates Jr.
5
mentions
The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail
Clayton M. Christensen
4
mentions
The Psychology of Money: Timeless lessons on wealth, greed, and happiness
Morgan Housel
4
mentions
The Intelligent Investor: The Timeless Guide to Value Investing and Financial Wisdom for a Volatile Market
Benjamin Graham, Jason Zweig
4
mentions
Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
Peter Thiel, Blake Masters
3
mentions
Elon Musk
Walter Isaacson
3
mentions
Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes
Morgan Housel
3
mentions
Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game
Michael Lewis
3
mentions
7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy to #1.
Significant outlier with 11.5x as many mentions as the average book.
What You Do Is Who You Are: How to Create Your Business Culture to #3.
Highest ranking new entry to the chart.
The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail to #4.
Up 42 places from #46 last year.
7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy to #1.
Down from #1 last year
Wool: A Heart-Pounding Thriller of Survival and Betrayal in a Dystopian World of Darkness to #225.
No mentions after ranking #2 last year.
Chocolate Wars: The 150-Year Rivalry Between the World's Greatest Chocolate Makers to #226.
No mentions after ranking #3 last year.
The shows that surfaced the most book mentions this year.
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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