Founder stories, with the messy parts left in
Business biography is the most enjoyable category and the most dangerous. Enjoyable because you get the specific, awkward, non-generalisable detail that advice books smooth away. Dangerous because the entire genre is selected on survival — you are reading about the ones it worked out for.
Read them for the texture rather than the method. What they are genuinely good at conveying is how long the unglamorous middle lasts, how close most successful businesses came to not existing, and how much of what later gets described as strategy was a decision made quickly with bad information.
The best ones are honest about money, conflict and luck. Be wary of the authorised ones, which tend to reverse-engineer a tidy narrative from the outcome, and of any founder story where nobody falls out with anybody.
Useful when you need proof that the current mess is normal. Not a substitute for the shelves that tell you what to do about it.
