7 Books To Spark Innovation: A Reading List Inspired By Jensen Huang
Jensen Huang is a tech titan. He co-founded NVIDIA back in 1993 and has been its CEO ever since. NVIDIA designs GPUs and has dominated the worlds of video gaming, computing, and now AI.
Huang was named one of TIME’s 100 most influential people of 2024, and the world’s best CEO by the likes of Fortune and The Economist. He’s worth $121 billion — yes, billion — and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg even described him as, “Taylor Swift, but for tech.”
The Secret Behind Huang’s Huge Success? It Might Be Found in Nonfiction Books
Huang is reported to have read almost every business book, startup story, and founder biography out there. He does this to get inspiration to keep pushing his own company forward and to stay motivated through tough times.
Want to do the same, but don’t have the time to read this widely? Your secret can be Blinkist.
The Blinkist app shares key ideas from nonfiction books in about 15 minutes. There are 7,500 titles across 27 categories, meaning you can read as widely as Huang — in a fraction of the time.
If you’re not sure where to start, we’ve rounded up seven books inspired by Huang that’ll teach you about technology, innovation, leadership, and AI — and maybe even help spark the next big tech idea.
Here’s the reading list.
1. The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton M. Christensen
The Innovator’s Dilemma
- 14 min reading time
- audio version available
Innovation may as well be Huang’s middle name. And that’s exactly what this book focuses on.
Written by Harvard Business School professor, Clayton M. Christensen, The Innovator’s Dilemma covers how companies can disrupt their fields and still fail spectacularly — and what you can do to stop that from happening.
The book is said to have inspired big tech players like Steve Jobs and Andy Gove, former CEO of Intel.
2. The Lean Startup by Eric Ries
The Lean Startup
- 18 min reading time
- audio version available
If you want to found a startup — or just get inspired by those who have — The Lean Startup can help. It’s written by social network IMVU co-founder Eric Ries.
The book shares how startups can experiment and innovate quickly to get ahead, and thrive using methods like developing a minimal viable product (MVP) to test ideas and get real-world customer feedback.
3. Snow Crash by Neil Stephenson
Snow Crash
- 25 min reading time
- audio version available
Huang has said he’s never read a science-fiction novel — ever. But that doesn’t mean you don’t have to. There’s plenty sci-fi books can teach us about technology, innovation, and AI.
Take Snow Crash for example. The 1992 novel by Neil Stephenson tells the story of a pizza delivery driver who has the save the world from a computer virus. Everyone in this world lives in the metaverse — which, by the way, is a term coined by Stephenson!
“The world is full of things more powerful than us. But if you know how to catch a ride, you can go places.”
4. Good to Great by Jim Collins
Good to Great
- 17 min reading time
- audio version available
Ever wondered why some companies are wildly successful and others are just…meh? Jim Collins did. Over five years, he studied companies that went from average to incredible and isolated what they did to make it happen. Good to Great shares everything he found.
“Greatness is not a function of circumstance. Greatness, it turns out, is largely a matter of conscious choice, and discipline.”
5. The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz
The Hard Thing About Hard Things
- 22 min reading time
- audio version available
If, like Huang, you want to read nonfiction to stay motivated through tough times in business, this book should be top of your list. Leading venture capitalist and former CEO of Opsware, Ben Horowitz, shares advice for CEOs, entrepreneurs, and leaders in The Hard Thing About Hard Things.
As you might guess from the title, there’s a lot of advice on how to do hard things in business — like letting people go, handling investors, and selling your company.
6. Zero to One by Peter Thiel
Zero to One
- 26 min reading time
- audio version available
PayPal co-founder and venture capitalist Peter Thiel was the first big investor in Facebook back in the day. In his book Zero to One, he partners with another venture capitalist, Blake Masters, to share advice for wannabe startup founders and entrepreneurs.
Huang would approve of the key themes — the book is all about disrupting the status quo and finding out-of-the-box ideas to get ahead.
“The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. And the next Mark Zuckerberg won’t create a social network. If you are copying these guys, you aren’t learning from them.”
7. Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell
Outliers
- 16 min reading time
- audio version available
There are people, like Huang himself, who are so successful it’s hard to imagine how they got to where they are. Malcolm Gladwell reveals the secrets in his book Outliers.
Outliers shares how people at the top of their field — in business, sport, music, and more — became so successful. Some of it you can implement yourself.
Want to read all of these Huang-inspired books? On Blinkist, it’ll take you under 2.5 hours — or about 20 minutes a day to get through them all in a week. Here’s how the app works.
Get Inspired in 15 Minutes
Reading a whole book for inspiration is great, but sometimes you need inspiration right now — not in the weeks it can take to get through a book cover to cover. And reading widely enough to get all the inspiration you need to be successful is time-consuming.
Blinkist shares inspiring insights from nonfiction books in as little as 15 minutes.
The app has 7,500 titles in its library across 27 categories, including entrepreneurship, leadership, technology, and memoirs. Plus, the team adds 70 new books a month, so you’ll never run out of inspiration and motivation.
Learn from Successful Innovators On the Go
Blinkist’s explainers are available in audio form, so you can listen and learn on the go. Discover productivity hacks, investing techniques, and startup advice while commuting, at the gym, or walking the dog.
Beyond Jensen Huang, you can learn from books that have inspired other disruptive leaders like Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, and Sheryl Sandberg, former COO of Meta.
“Time is everything. It’s all we really have. Blinkist is useful because reading is powerful. It helps me to learn every day.”
31 Million People Are Getting Inspired on Blinkist
More than 31 million users are using Blinkist to get inspired, get ahead, and get knowledgeable about everything that’s important to them.
They’re not just learning, though, they’re using what they learn to improve their lives — 91% of users say they’ve created better habits and 87% say they’ve made positive changes since they started using Blinkist.
One of the World’s Best Apps for Learning
Talking of leaders, Blinkist has become a leader in the education space. It’s won awards from Google and the United Nations, and it’s been praised by everyone from The New York Times to Forbes.
Plus, users have given the app 94,000 5-star ratings on app stores.
“Blinkist is my new favorite app. It’s especially helpful if you’re working in a startup and you’re wearing lots of different hats. It allows you to pick up knowledge in lots of different areas at speed.”
Want to read like Huang in less time? Download Blinkist to access the key ideas in all of these books — and thousands more.
