Category Report
Which books are shaping founder thinking this year, as mentioned across top entrepreneurship podcasts.
Biggest mover: Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers by Geoffrey A. Moore #9, rising 257 places.
Entrepreneurs on Fire drove the most book chatter, with 15% of this years book mentions.
Across 2025, the most-discussed books cluster around a few enduring concerns: how to build durable companies in an era of AI-driven disruption, how to cultivate founder resilience, and how to systematically create and defend advantage. Classic innovation texts like The Innovator’s Dilemma, Zero to One, The Lean Startup, and Crossing the Chasm frame AI and software as disruptive waves that incumbents routinely mishandle, while founders and investors use their language (“moats,” “power curves,” “core vs. context”) to reason about strategy and timing. Biographical narratives such as Sam Walton: Made in America and James Dyson’s Against the Odds are repeatedly used to illustrate operational discipline, extreme persistence, and control over one’s company. Meanwhile, Think and Grow Rich, The 4-Hour Workweek, 7 Powers, and The 48 Laws of Power underscore a parallel focus on mindset, lifestyle design, and codified strategic power—suggesting that today’s audience is seeking both philosophical grounding and highly structured playbooks for competing in volatile markets.
The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail
Clayton M. Christensen
17
mentions
Sam Walton: Made in America
Sam Walton
17
mentions
Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future
Peter Thiel, Blake Masters
17
mentions
The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses
Eric Ries
14
mentions
Think and Grow Rich
Napoleon Hill
11
mentions
Against the Odds: An Autobiography
James Dyson
11
mentions
7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy
Hamilton Helmer
10
mentions
The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich
Timothy Ferriss
10
mentions
Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers
Geoffrey A. Moore
10
mentions
The 48 Laws of Power
Robert Greene, Joost Elffers
9
mentions
The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail to #1.
Significant outlier with 10.9x as many mentions as the average book.
Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers to #9.
Up 257 places from #266 last year.
The Innovator's Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail to #1.
Up 238 places from #239 last year.
The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich to #8.
Down from #1 last year
The Comfort Crisis: Embrace Discomfort To Reclaim Your Wild, Happy, Healthy Self to #1054.
No mentions after ranking #5 last year.
The 2-Hour Cocktail Party: How to Build Big Relationships with Small Gatherings to #1090.
No mentions after ranking #10 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 podcasts included in this report are curated by MavenSignal to represent the trusted voices in this category.
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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