These books are all either written by ghost authors, or journalists given such privileged access to the source material, that they feel a debt to the subjects. I read them, but do so with a bullshit-filter on. They become far more useful with a critical eye.<p>For example, in "The Founders - story of PayPal" the author fawns over how great one of the Founders at PayPal was at SQL. The Founder would often jump in and fix issues alongside the admins, build dbs for features and front-end forms to populate them. The founder reduces headcount at the end of a feature build-out to reduce running costs, as maintenance wasn't important on these features. Later in the book, the company almost goes bankrupt due to the high fraud rates on the platform, specifically, they struggled with SQL-injection issues. The author doesn't manage to make the connection between these three events, but a modestly-technical reader with a critical eye can see that the company was haemorrhaging money because a Founder over-indexed on their own competency. Later, the same founder orders a ground-up rewrite of PayPal in .Net, at the dismay of his entire technical team. This almost bankrupts the company a second time, and wastes an entire fundraising round's money.<p>The book is presented as a kind of victory-lap, honouring the effort, grit, nous, and determination of the Founding Team. But with the right eye, the book is a case-study in how PayPal was nearly destroyed dozens of times by the competency of its Founding Team.<p>You can read every business book with this filter, and you get much more out of them for it.