Small list of blogs that entrepreneurs should read (and no more!)

If you’re like me, you’ve had moments in your life where you’ve added tons of blogs to your feed reader, and then you got farther and farther behind in your reading.  Over the years, I kept trimming back, and present to you my list of must-read blogs for entrepreneurs (plus some bonus tools I use to keep the inbound information flow manageable):

• Both Sides of the Table, by Mark Suster — it’s awesome, because he has repeat success as an entrepreneur, and is now an active and accessible investor.  As an added bonus, he isn’t based in Silicon Valley, so he knows that talent can be found anywhere.  Reading his blog is very much like a daily peek into the questions in my head, and fears in my soul 🙂
• Ben’s blog, by Ben Horowitz – like Mark, Ben writes with the perspective of a seasoned (and massively successful) entrepreneur.  He’s also a fantastic writer.  He doesn’t write often, so he’s gentle on your feed reader, but when he does, it’s worth grabbing a drink and settling in.
• Essays, by Paul Graham – he’s just a genius, and similar to Ben in terms of writing quality & depth.  Also, like Ben, everything he writes is worthy of a sitdown and repeat-read.
• GapingVoid, by Hugh MacLeod – Art and Life – his back-of-business-card drawings (and larger artwork), along with minimally expanded explanations, do a great job of visually displaying the noise in my (our) heads
• AVC, by Fred Wilson – he’s the best. Great mix of broad-internet goings-on, personal stories, musical passion, entrepreneur education, and more.  For me (and many other entrepreneurs), Fred was/is the original VC blogger, and he continues to rock it.

That’s it — unsubscribe from the rest of your blogs, unless they’re close friends or something very specific for your market space.

Now, for some bonus tips, to manage the rest of your news overflow:

1. Don’t try to read your Twitter feed!  Just keep track of your @replies (and respond if relevant) and DMreplies.  Then, dive in to the feed when you want a light distraction.  But, it’s not your responsibility to read all the tweets in your stream.  That’s one of the many things that’s wonderful about Twitter, once you figure it out.
2. Twitter is an awesome way to casually spot hot stories, because if it’s relevant to you, you’ll probably see it sweep by you several times during the day.  Read it, or don’t — your life won’t end if you miss a story or two.
3. Subscribe to Summify – it monitors your social feeds, and you can set how often you’d like to have it email you a summary of the popular stuff.  I have it send me an email one time each day, with 6 stories.  It’s amazingly good at picking out the articles that got lots of tweets/retweets/likes/shares and more, from the people I care about. You can control all of the settings.  It’s awesome (and, as an extra bonus, was created in Vancouver, BC!)
4. In Seattle, I like GeekWire for my daily news summary (I prefer the daily email — I scan it quickly, click thru to those that interest me, comment, and then dive back out)