Five Books That Changed How I Invest

Kahneman lays out the two systems behind how we decide: the fast, intuitive one, and the slow, analytical one. What stayed with me was how exposed all of us are to our own biases. We anchor to first impressions. We hunt for evidence that confirms what we already believe.

It changed how I run diligence. When I get excited about a company now, I deliberately go looking for reasons to pass, because I know my brain is already busy building the case for the answer I've landed on. The excitement is my signal to slow down.

This one changed the questions I ask. Its argument is simple: much of the world's data has been collected from men and built around them, so a huge number of products quietly fail the people they were never designed for.

As an investor, that reframed what an opportunity looks like. Who is this product actually for? Whose problem is really being solved? What got overlooked because nobody thought to measure it? Some of the biggest opportunities come from a group whose needs have been underestimated for years. Women's health is full of them, built on incomplete data, underserved for decades, and now one of the areas I find most compelling to back.

My husband gave me this in my thirties and I was faintly annoyed reading it, because I wished I'd read it a decade earlier.

The lesson wasn't property or stocks. It was the difference between working for money and building assets that work for you. Own things. Own equity. Build what compounds over time. That idea sat underneath my decision to become an angel investor and then a VC, and it's still how I look at a startup: what it could compound into over ten years, not what it earns today.

People invest in people, and this book taught me to take that seriously.

It changed how I sit with founders. The best conversations aren't interrogations, they're a way to understand how someone thinks and how they earn trust. It also named something I now see constantly: the strongest founders tend to be exceptional communicators. Not the loudest in the room, but the ones who recruit talent, win customers, and get people to believe in something that doesn't exist yet. Startups are a people business, and it's a big part of why I spend so much of my time on the founder.

If I could hand one book to every founder and investor, it would be this.

Successful companies look inevitable once they've made it. Knight's story of building Nike is a reminder that they aren't. It's full of cash crises, near-bankruptcies, and moments the whole thing could have folded. What it reinforced for me is how much resilience matters, and how hard it is to read in a first meeting. The founders who make it are the ones who keep going through the setbacks that would stop most people. These days I spend less time looking for a perfect plan and more time looking for the grit to survive an imperfect one.