This is something I wondered about too, and always do when looking at recommendations, particularly by single individuals. What I like about this list in parti

This is something I wondered about too, and always do when looking at recommendations, particularly by single individuals. What I like about this list in particular is that it clearly admits that reading these books by far does not guarantee anything. After all, they're recommendations. However, having read almost all of these books before and during my own entrepreneurial journey, I positively noticed the absence of many fluffy "self-help" types that usually get recommended for new founders (the Napoleon Hill kinds of monstrosities). This suggests that filtering who's recommendations to follow was a good idea. That suggests that no matter how much survivorship bias is in the books themselves, the act of recommending them indicates that the founder who read the book AND built a successful business found SOMETHING valuable in the work that they deem worth reading.