David Sacks

Author, Entrepreneur, Investor, Podcaster

David Sacks is an entrepreneur and investor who was PayPal's founding COO, founded Yammer and co-founded Craft Ventures. He co-hosts the All-In podcast, co-wrote The Diversity Myth with Peter Thiel and was named White House AI and crypto czar in 2025.

David Sacks's 28 Book Recommendations

• A Fighting Chance
• Thank You for Smoking
• Behind the Cloud
• Destined For War
• Sapiens: “Yuval Harari's SAPIENS had a big impact on how I approach VC. The theme of the book is that humans obsess over narratives.”
• Gates of Fire: “Showing the book GATES OF FIRE, Troy Gowdy on Fox News just compared Ukraine to the Spartans at Thermopylae... He may want to read the ending of that book. Everyone dies.”
• Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Nineties: “If you want to complete your education, I highly recommend MODERN TIMES by Paul Johnson.”
• Founding Sales: The Early Stage Go-to-Market Handbook: “Sales excellence is the missing piece for a huge number of product and tech founders. This book by @kazanjy demystifies it... Highly recommend.”
• The First Man in Rome: “Fall of the Roman Republic is one of my favorite historical periods. Highly recommend this series if you like (highly accurate) historical fiction.”
• A Republic, Not an Empire: Reclaiming America's Destiny: “Prescient:”
• 1984: “As I've said many times before, the biggest risk of AI isn't James Cameron's The Terminator, it's George Orwell's 1984.”
• Atlas Shrugged: “I thought Atlas Shrugged would become passe after the Berlin Wall fell, but sadly it's more relevant than ever.”
• Civilization: The West and the Rest: “The big picture books are: Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations, @nfergus' Civilization: the West and the Rest, Graham Allison's Thucydides Trap”
• San Fransicko: Why Progressives Ruin Cities: “So under book of the year, I have a very recent choice, which is San Fransicko by Michael Shellenberger. It just came out, but it's already, I think, very influential.”
• Nexus: “NEXUS by @ramez is well on its way to being the next epic sci-fi series. A vivid gripping persuasive dramatization of Singularity concepts.”
• The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill: Alone, 1932-1940: “Denounced as a wing nut, Churchill went around Britain speaking to half-empty rooms about the Hitler menace. Read "The Last Lion: Alone".”
• Animal Farm: “If Orwell were writing Animal Farm today, "crime is falling" would be one of the commandments written on the barn door.”
• The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order: “The big picture books are: Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations, @nfergus' Civilization: the West and the Rest, Graham Allison's Thucydides Trap”
• Free Speech for Me--But Not for Thee: How the American Left and Right Relentlessly Censor Each Other: “I do very much see myself in that mold of somebody like Hentoff. He wrote a book called Free Speech for Me, But Not for Thee.”
• The Emerging Democratic Majority: “My favorite political commentator, one of them, is Ruy Teixeira, who's a Democrat. He wrote The Emerging Democratic Majority.”
• The End of History and the Last Man: “In the 1990s... the most celebrated book was The End of History by Francis Fukuyama, and what he basically said is that we're at the end of history because liberal democracy has won.”
• The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914: “There's a famous history of World War One called The Sleepwalkers, because that's basically what it felt like: they just sleepwalked their way to World War One.”
• The Vision of the Anointed: “It's right out of The Vision of the Anointed, which was a book Thomas Sowell wrote 30 years ago, where intellectuals throughout history have thought that if they're maximally empowered then they can…”
• The Gray Lady Winked: “A new book... called The Gray Lady Winked, the author Ashley Rindsberg details decades of misinformation and agenda-driven journalism published by the Times.”
• The Founders: “One project I will give a little plug to is Jimmy Soni's book The Founders, which is the story of PayPal and the entrepreneurs who shaped Silicon Valley.”
• An Inconvenient Minority: The Attack on Asian American Excellence and the Fight for Meritocracy: “There's a book written recently about Asian Americans in the United States called An Inconvenient Minority. Why is it inconvenient? Because Asian Americans have done spectacularly well.”
• Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco: “Barbarians at the Gate... it was a TV movie with James Garner. It was good... The book is excellent. The book is next level.”
• Zero to One: “That's what Peter's whole book, Zero to One, is about: there's two kinds of companies.”