The Almanack of Naval Ravikant

The Latchkey Kid Who Became Silicon Valley's Philosopher

Picture a nine-year-old who lands in Queens from Delhi in nineteen eighty-five, carrying his father's pharmacy degree that nobody in America will recognize. Dad ends up working in a hardware store. Mom raises two boys alone. The kid eats dinner from a microwave, lets himself into the apartment after school with a key on a string, and spends his afternoons in the public library because the neighborhood isn't safe enough to wander.

That kid is Naval Ravikant, and his line about that childhood is this: "My only real friends were books. Books make for great friends, because the best thinkers of the last few thousand years tell you their nuggets of wisdom."

By fifteen he was running an illegal Indian-food catering operation. By twenty-one he had a Dartmouth degree in computer science and economics. By twenty-five he was the founding CEO of Epinions. He built Vast dot com, launched AngelList, was an early investor in Twitter, Uber, Postmates, Yammer, OpenDNS — somewhere north of two hundred companies in total — and was named Angel Investor of the Year in twenty eighteen. He also got publicly branded "radioactive mud" in two thousand five after suing the people he had built Epinions with, then spent years rebuilding his reputation through what looked from the outside like obsessive thinking out loud on Twitter.

This is the man whose accumulated tweets, podcast clips and essays Eric Jorgenson stitched together into The Almanack of Naval Ravikant in twenty twenty. Tim Ferriss wrote the foreword. Jack Butcher drew the illustrations. Naval makes nothing from the book — the PDF is free on his website — and yet over a million copies have moved. The reason is simple. Most personal-development books promise tactics. This one is a worldview.