If you want to think like a billionaire, you might want to stop scrolling on TikTok and pick up a book. For venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, it’s not just a habit—it’s how he makes sense of the world—and it continually reshapes his thinking about business.
“I’ve always been like this, I’m reading basically every spare minute that I have,” Andreessen told the How I Write podcast in 2023.
The billionaire previously carved out two hours of reading time on most weekdays, according to a detailed version of his weekly schedule, published in 2020. However, with the business world only becoming more pressurized, he’s ramped up his knowledge intake—something made possible by “the single biggest technological leap” in his life: AirPods.
Andreessen now spends two to three hours a day glued to audiobooks—typically alternating between history, biography, and material in new subject areas like artificial intelligence. Collectively, his practice amounts to nearly an entire 24-hour day dedicated to learning, each week.
Research suggests that listeners retain roughly the same amount of information from audiobooks as they do from reading text, making Andreessen’s shift in format less a compromise than an optimization.
