Why I Read Roman History More Than Startup Books

Walk into the office of almost any founder and you will find the same bookshelf. The Lean Startup. Zero to One. Good to Great. A Steve Jobs biography, something on venture capital, something on negotiation, something on productivity. I have read most of them and some are excellent.

But over the last few years I have found myself reaching for something else almost every night. Roman history. That usually surprises people, who assume I am after military strategy or political intrigue. I am not. I am looking for patterns.

This piece makes a single argument: the problems founders face today are far less original than we like to believe. Technology changes constantly. Human nature barely changes at all. I'll break down the four places founders actually look for answers, why history has survived a harder test than any of them, and the one question I now run on every framework someone tries to sell me.

Every founder is trying to answer the same question. How do I make better decisions?

Most people look in the same places. Startup books, podcasts, other founders, threads from someone who exited once. There is nothing wrong with any of them and I have learned from all of them. But they are not equally durable, and only one has been tested by anything harder than a market cycle.

Let me take each.

Startup books are valuable because they compress experience. Someone spends twenty years building a company and you get the lessons in a weekend. That is an incredible trade and I would make it every time.

The limitation is that every business is a product of its time. Markets change, capital changes, distribution changes. Advice that worked fifteen years ago may still be useful, but it almost never survives unchanged, and the reader is rarely told which parts have already expired. Most startup books teach tactics. Very few teach judgment.

There is enormous value in talking to people a few steps ahead of you. They have made mistakes you have not made yet, and they see around corners you do not know exist.

The danger is assuming their path is repeatable. Every founder carries invisible advantages and invisible constraints: timing, capital, talent, geography, and a great deal of luck nobody wants to name out loud on a podcast. Advice arrives stripped of the exact conditions that made it work. Experience is transferable. Circumstances usually are not.

Markets are honest in a way advisors cannot be. They tell you when customers do not care. They punish arrogance quickly and they do not soften the delivery. Every founder should listen, because almost no one else in your life will give you feedback that clean.

But the market tells you what is happening. It rarely tells you why people behave the way they do, and the why is the part that repeats. For that you have to look considerably further back than last quarter.

This is the one I keep returning to.

When I read about Rome I am not trying to learn how to build an empire. I am trying to understand ambition, loyalty, fear, and conviction, which are the actual raw materials of every company I have worked inside. Julius Caesar never raised venture capital. Marcus Aurelius never built software. Yet the decisions they faced, how to earn loyalty you have not paid for, when to compromise, how to lead people who can see you are uncertain, what power quietly does to a person over ten years, are decisions I recognize from my own week.

History studies people. Business just gives people a different stage.

1: Technology Evolves faster Than Human Nature

Every decade hands us new tools. The internet, then smartphones, now artificial intelligence. Each one genuinely changes how a business operates, which is exactly why the operating advice has to be rewritten every few years.

None of them change why people trust, follow, envy, compete, cooperate, or betray one another. The medium evolves and the species does not. That is why a line written two thousand years ago can outlast a framework published two years ago.

2: Time is The Most Demanding Editor

Most business advice has not been tested for very long. A book from 2011 has survived one macro environment and a decade of cheap money. History has survived all of them.

Bad ideas disappear. Weak leaders are forgotten. Whatever is still being read after two thousand years is still being read because it kept describing people accurately through every technology and every regime that came after it. Nothing in publishing edits as ruthlessly as time does.

3: Business Is Too Small A Place To Look For Answers About People

Founders look for answers inside business, which is a strange place to look, because business is one of the newest containers we have ever poured human behavior into.

Leadership existed before companies. Strategy existed before startups. Competition existed before capitalism. The people who built cities, armies, and institutions were solving recognizable versions of the same problems with far worse tools and considerably higher stakes. Different tools. Same species.

I have found myself asking a different question over the last few months.

If someone removed every logo from the internet, every review, every advertisement, and every marketing claim, what would still make a patient choose your company?

Most businesses would answer with price.

Some would answer with convenience.

A few would answer with technology.

I think the best healthcare companies would answer with something much harder to build.

Trust.

Because when the branding disappears, trust is all that's left.

I want to be careful not to over claim. History will not tell you what to price, which channel to test, or when to raise. It is genuinely bad at tactics, and anyone suggesting Marcus Aurelius has a view on your CAC is selling something. There are weeks the startup book is the more useful object on the shelf, and I still reach for it.

But the longer I build, the less interested I am in finding new answers and the more interested I am in rediscovering old ones. Technology will keep changing at a breathtaking pace. Artificial intelligence will reshape entire industries. New platforms will arrive and new business models will follow them.

People will not. They will still want meaning. They will still reward integrity. They will still follow conviction, make emotional decisions, and justify them afterward with logic. Every company is a group of people trying to build something that outlasts them, which is the oldest project there is.

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See you Mondays, Maximilian