- Anything about venture investment or finance related to fundraising, company valuation, liquidation preferences, etc. Your investors will tell you everything you need to know.
- Management. There's really nothing here you need to know about. Hire fast, fire fast, have a ping-pong table and catered lunches. It's that simple.
- Product development and project management. You are a visionary and everything you are doing is novel and innovative, so don't waste your time on these subjects.
- Computer science. Really, it's nothing like it was 20 years ago when the only language was FORTRAN or whatever. Everything you need to know about building software you can learn from attending a talk or two at a conference, provided it doesn't interfere with networking. Just make sure you only go to node.js-related talks because everything else is old, outdated, and useless. Also, don't even bother worrying about databases. MongoDB is the only thing you need.
- Marketing. This is especially useless since product is everything. Just build your product, put it online, make the app live in the app store, and go back to iterating on your product. They will come.
You can get any knowledge you need related to any of this by just building a business. Since you are clearly going to be the next Steve Jobs, you don't have time to waste reading useless things.
- Computer science. Your only job here is just to make sure that you have a cofounder who is a ninja. You need to get deep on this, make sure they're the real thing. If you need to, consult with faculty: http://www.u-tokyo.ac.jp/en/people/historiographical-institu... Only a real ninja will make you a millionaire.
It did take me a moment to catch the sarcasm.
Paul Graham is an obvious exception. He writes semi infrequently (1-2 essays a month as of recently), goes to great lengths to have them edited by people with diverse viewpoints and based on his position and experience has a great perspective to give useful lessons. There are other good writers, but not many, and pg is probably the best due to his unique perspective. And in my opinion, HN voters seem to vote up "entertainment" stories more than useful ones. So you can't assume if something is on the top of HN, it is useful in any way.
Otherwise you risk reading stuff you can't act on, and forget by the time you need it.
Instead bookmarking and categorizing using a tool like delicious/diigo gives peace of mind that nothing will be lost and when I need it, it'll be there.
What I've done a lot of recently is play the audio of articles (using Apple text-to-speech) while exercising, stuck in traffic, etc. Allows me to "read" a ton while not taking any time away from normal work time.
I almost never read articles sitting in front of my computer anymore.
Sources like the Economist, HBR and Foreign Policy are useful. Reading quality analysis is never wasted time. Even if you disagree with it, it forces you to think about why you hold a position.
As Micael (the author) says "So nowadays I don't read books and articles about entrepreneurship because I think I need the knowledge to succeed, but merely for inspiration or because I sometimes feel curious about some company or person."
This paragraph really resonates with me "The knowledge you need to have for your startup to succeed is in general not written in books or articles. The knowledge you need will be so specific to your particular company, with your particular employees, in your particular industry, in this particular time, with your particular product, with your particular goal and vision – that you need to generate that knowledge yourself by trying stuff out and iterating."
In particular, what I think I have gained most from reading is developing my ability to search for good problems and solutions in the idea space, while in the past I was just adept at developing technical solutions without thinking enough about what else I could be doing. It took a while to change the mind set from "I want to build cool technology and hope it can make money somehow" to "I want to build something useful that people are willing to pay for, that is perhaps also interesting technology wise".
How valuable any given bit is, whether it comes from experience or reading, is entirely subjective based on the entirety of the blended data set, my state of mind, the needs of my core project at any given moment in time and my desired outcome.
Plus, as Amanda Palmer said, "We can only connect the dots that we collect," so if books allow us to collect more or better dots faster, sometimes faster than experience, why not add them to the mix?
The takeaways are the takeaways, including how fast one can learn and adapt.
The especially salient point is that book learning and planning are all well and good, the reality of trying something in the real world is a practical teacher.