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Qasar Younis: preference

8 Mar 2026 Lenny's Podcast The most successful AI company you’ve never heard of | Qasar Younis

“I'm reading the vibe coding book that came out where our whole company's reading that, which is a new book and it goes against my grain of my heuristic.”

— Qasar Younis

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Speaker
Qasar Younis
Attribution
Verified speaker
Claim type
preference
Recorded
8 Mar 2026
Publisher
Lenny's Podcast

Transcript context

…Yeah, the number one most mentioned book here. Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's partly the theatrics of also entertaining you, but also giving you new information as a listener. I think a good... The books I'm currently reading, and this is kind of a random slaw of books. I'm reading the vibe coding book that came out where our whole company's reading that, which is a new book and it goes against my grain of my heuristic. But The Emperor of All Maladies, the cancer book, fantastic book. I'm almost done with it. I think it changes the way I think. You read that and it changes the way... And I think that's the ultimate test. When a piece of material changes your existing framing on life, this is good. In the LLM use case, this is somehow related in the sense of diverse data makes your understanding of the world more rich and nuanced, and therefore it's better. But yeah, so I'm always inspired to give more wacky kind of examples rather than the obvious ones. But the obvious ones that I find really wasn't being theatrical, I think Sam Walton's book, Made in America is an unbelievable book. It's very, very good. He wrote it on his deathbed. My American Journey is also very good. Colin Powell's book. It's not on my website, but it's really good. I'm somebody who tries to connect some of these dots from us being cave people to now living in Silicon Valley working as a venture-backed AI company founder. And so books like Guns, Germs, and Steel really are top of that list of fantastic, fantastic book, or Collapse, also same author. So yeah, but my point to founders is read this stuff. You can still go to physical bookstores, read this stuff that is both old and well-regarded and you know nothing about. I often, when I'm trying to find the next book to read, I remember the way I picked up SPQR, which is the book on Roman history, I was like, "I don't actually know a lot about Roman history. I know the high level stuff." So think about all the ideas in the universe from philosophy, to history, to Jainism, to the rise of Japan as a feudal state, areas you don't really know, and then just find the best book in that space. And I think you just start filling in the blanks. And so often that's kind of like the way that I grock the ecosystem is like, what don't I know anything about? And let me find the best piece of material in that. And yeah, it doesn't work well. I like that. So Marc's philosophy is this barbell strategy of only today news like X and 10 years ago books. I love that you're like, no, just upside down to you almost, just only [inaudible 01:04:57].…

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