About

What this is

Answer with Books is a public version of something I'd been keeping privately: a shelf of books that don't just gather dust after being read, but stay on call.

The premise is simple. A good book usually contains three to six ideas worth keeping — mental models, frameworks, ways of seeing. The rest is scaffolding. So every book I read gets a distilled page: the load-bearing ideas, the frameworks worth actually using, when to reach for the book, and what happened when I applied it.

Then the books get put to work. The answers take real, practical questions — How do I know if my startup idea is any good? Why do smart teams make dumb decisions? When should I abandon my current approach? — and answer them by combining one to three books with first-hand experience. Every answer cites its sources and links back to the shelf, so you can go as deep as the question deserves.

No summaries of summaries. No books I haven't read. The test for everything published here: would a smart, busy reader bookmark this page and come back to it before a real decision?

Who I am

I'm Terry Chen — a builder studying at Northwestern University, currently working on CrowdListen, a product for understanding what audiences and crowds actually think. A lot of the books on this shelf earned their place by being useful in that work: The Mom Test for talking to users, The Wisdom of Crowds for designing aggregation, Seeing Like a State for staying honest about what dashboards delete.

More about me and my other writing lives at terrylinhaochen.github.io.

What the account is for

You can read everything here without one. A free account lets you save books and answers for later; more account features are on the way.