Dave Jilk and Brad Feld – The Entrepreneur’s Weekly Nietzsche: Book Review & Audio Summary

Book Info

• Book name: The Entrepreneur’s Weekly Nietzsche: A Book for Disruptors
• Author: Dave Jilk, Brad Feld
• Genre: Business & Economics, Self-Help & Personal Development
• Published Year: 2021
• Language: English

Audio Summary

Synopsis

What could a 19th-century philosopher possibly teach modern entrepreneurs? More than you’d think. Dave Jilk and Brad Feld’s “The Entrepreneur’s Weekly Nietzsche” makes an unexpected case: Friedrich Nietzsche’s writings on disruption, human nature, and challenging established norms are remarkably relevant to today’s startup world. Despite Nietzsche’s disdain for commerce, his insights on deviation, progress, and the psychology of change offer powerful lessons for anyone trying to shake up tired industries. This book translates Nietzsche’s philosophical wisdom into practical guidance for innovators, demonstrating why understanding human nature and embracing your “deviating nature” might be your greatest competitive advantage.

Key Takeaways

• Successful entrepreneurship requires a “deviating nature”—the ability to see and do things differently than everyone else, even when it’s uncomfortable
• Understanding human psychology and motivation is essential for entrepreneurs, and Nietzsche offers surprisingly practical insights into what drives people
• True progress comes from disruption and challenging established ways of thinking, not from incremental improvements
• Growth and scaling bring their own dangers, including the risk of “group insanity” that can derail innovative thinking
• Entrepreneurs share more with philosophers than you’d expect—both are in the business of challenging the status quo and reimagining the future

My Summary

When Philosophy Meets the Startup World

I’ll admit, when I first picked up “The Entrepreneur’s Weekly Nietzsche,” I was skeptical. Friedrich Nietzsche and entrepreneurship? The guy who wrote “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” giving business advice? It sounded like one of those forced connections authors make to seem clever. But after reading what Dave Jilk and Brad Feld put together, I’m a convert. This book isn’t just clever—it’s genuinely useful.

The premise is simple but brilliant: Nietzsche spent his life disrupting established ways of thinking, challenging moral assumptions that had gone unchallenged for centuries, and advocating for radical reevaluation of values. Sound familiar? That’s exactly what entrepreneurs do, just in the business world instead of the philosophical one.

What makes this book work is that Jilk and Feld aren’t forcing the connection. They’ve genuinely found applicable wisdom in Nietzsche’s writings, and they present it in bite-sized weekly reflections that you can actually use. As someone who’s read my share of business books that promise revolutionary insights but deliver warmed-over platitudes, this one feels refreshingly different.

The Power of Being Weird

One of the most compelling ideas in the book comes from Nietzsche’s observation that “deviating natures are of the utmost importance wherever there is to be progress.” Let that sink in for a moment. Progress doesn’t come from people who fit in perfectly, who color inside the lines, who do things the way they’ve always been done. It comes from the weirdos, the misfits, the people who can’t help but do things differently.

This isn’t just philosophical musing—Jilk and Feld back it up with real examples. They tell the story of Luke Kanies, founder of Puppet, an IT automation company. Kanies went to conference after conference where system administrators complained about wasting time on repetitive, menial tasks. Everyone knew it was a problem. Everyone agreed something should be done. But they just kept talking about it in abstract terms.

Kanies couldn’t let it go. His “deviating nature” wouldn’t allow him to accept the status quo, even when everyone else seemed content to complain without acting. That frustration, that inability to just go along with how things were, drove him to create Puppet. His company succeeded precisely because he couldn’t be normal about the problem.

I find this idea incredibly liberating. How many of us have felt like outsiders in our industries? How many times have you thought, “Why doesn’t anyone else see how broken this is?” or “Am I crazy for thinking there’s a better way?” According to Nietzsche (via Jilk and Feld), that feeling isn’t a weakness—it’s your superpower.

Why Different Isn’t Just Good—It’s Essential

The book makes a crucial distinction here. We’re not talking about being different for the sake of being different. That’s just contrarianism, and it’s not particularly useful. What Nietzsche identified, and what successful entrepreneurs embody, is a genuine inability to accept suboptimal solutions. It’s not that they choose to be different—they can’t help it.

This matters because it addresses one of the most common pieces of advice given to entrepreneurs: “Find a gap in the market.” But how do you find gaps that others have missed? Usually, it’s because you see the world differently. You notice inefficiencies that others have learned to ignore. You’re bothered by problems that everyone else has accepted as “just the way things are.”

In my own experience reviewing business books and talking to entrepreneurs, I’ve noticed this pattern repeatedly. The most successful founders aren’t necessarily the smartest or the most experienced. They’re the ones who couldn’t stop thinking about a problem, who were genuinely frustrated by the existing solutions, who had to create something better because the status quo was personally unbearable to them.

Understanding Human Nature: Your Secret Weapon

Another major theme in the book is Nietzsche’s psychological insight. The authors argue that Nietzsche had an unusually sharp understanding of human motivation, desire, and behavior—understanding that’s directly applicable to entrepreneurship.

Think about what entrepreneurs actually need to do. You need to understand what motivates your customers. You need to figure out what they really want (which often isn’t what they say they want). You need to grasp why people stick with familiar brands even when better options exist. You need to predict what will make them change their behavior.

These are fundamentally psychological questions, and Nietzsche spent his career exploring human psychology with brutal honesty. He wasn’t interested in flattering people or telling them what they wanted to hear. He was interested in the truth about human nature, even when that truth was uncomfortable.

Beyond Surface-Level Customer Research

Most business books tell you to do customer research, conduct surveys, run focus groups. That’s all fine, but it only gets you so far. People often don’t know what they really want, or they’re not honest about their motivations, or they can’t articulate the deeper needs driving their behavior.

This is where Nietzsche’s psychological insights become valuable. He understood that humans are driven by forces they don’t fully acknowledge—the desire for status, the fear of being different, the comfort of familiar routines, the need to feel superior to others. These aren’t the things people admit in surveys, but they’re often what really drives purchasing decisions and brand loyalty.

Jilk and Feld don’t just present this as abstract philosophy. They show how understanding these deeper human motivations can inform everything from product design to marketing strategy to company culture. When you understand what really makes people tick, you can create products and services that resonate on a deeper level than your competitors who are just skimming the surface.

The Danger of Success: When Groups Go Crazy

One of the most sobering sections of the book deals with what happens as startups grow and scale. Nietzsche observed that “insanity in individuals is something rare, but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs, it’s the rule.” In other words, people acting together often make decisions that no individual would make on their own.

This has huge implications for growing companies. You might start with a small team of brilliant, innovative people who challenge each other and push boundaries. But as you scale, something changes. Group dynamics take over. Consensus becomes more important than truth. People start going along to get along. The very qualities that made your startup successful—that willingness to deviate, to question, to disrupt—get smoothed away by the pressures of group conformity.

I’ve seen this happen repeatedly. A company starts with a bold, innovative vision. They disrupt their industry and achieve rapid growth. Then they hire more people, add layers of management, implement “professional” processes. Before long, they’re just another corporate entity, indistinguishable from the established players they once challenged.

Maintaining Your Edge While Growing

So how do you scale without losing your edge? Jilk and Feld don’t offer easy answers (because there aren’t any), but they do offer a framework for thinking about the problem. The key is maintaining space for those “deviating natures” even as your organization grows. You need structures that preserve dissent, that reward people for challenging assumptions, that keep the entrepreneurial spirit alive even when you’re no longer a scrappy startup.

This might mean deliberately keeping teams small. It might mean creating processes that encourage rather than suppress disagreement. It might mean being very careful about who you hire, prioritizing people who will push back over those who will fit in smoothly.

The book suggests that entrepreneurs need to be constantly vigilant against the creeping conformity that comes with growth. Just as Nietzsche spent his career challenging established ways of thinking, entrepreneurs need to keep challenging their own organizations, questioning their own assumptions, and resisting the comfort of consensus.

Practical Applications for Your Daily Work

One thing I appreciate about this book is that it’s not just theoretical. Jilk and Feld structure it as weekly reflections, each offering a specific Nietzsche quote and its application to entrepreneurship. This format makes it easy to actually use the book, rather than just read it and forget it.

Here are some ways you can apply these ideas immediately:

Embrace your weird ideas: That business idea that seems too strange, too different, too risky? That might be exactly the one worth pursuing. Instead of trying to make your ideas more “normal” or “acceptable,” ask yourself if you’re watering them down to fit in. The most successful startups often seemed crazy at first.

Look for what frustrates you: Pay attention to the inefficiencies and problems that bother you but that everyone else seems to accept. Those frustrations are signals. They’re pointing you toward opportunities that others have stopped seeing because they’ve become normalized to the dysfunction.

Study human psychology, not just business: Read books on psychology, behavioral economics, and human motivation. Understand cognitive biases. Learn about social dynamics. This knowledge will serve you better than most business strategy books because it helps you understand the underlying forces driving your customers’ behavior.

Question your own growth: As your company scales, regularly ask whether you’re maintaining the qualities that made you successful. Are you still challenging assumptions? Are you still making room for dissent? Or are you becoming just another conventional company that happens to have started as a startup?

Create structures for deviance: Build processes that encourage people to speak up when they disagree. Reward employees who challenge the status quo. Make it safe to be weird, to have unusual ideas, to question established practices. This isn’t about being chaotic—it’s about maintaining the innovative spirit that drives progress.

What This Book Gets Right (and Where It Falls Short)

Let me be honest about what I loved and what I found lacking in “The Entrepreneur’s Weekly Nietzsche.”

The book’s greatest strength is its originality. In a sea of business books that recycle the same advice with slightly different packaging, this one genuinely offers a fresh perspective. The connection between Nietzsche and entrepreneurship isn’t forced—it’s illuminating. Jilk and Feld have clearly spent time with Nietzsche’s work, and they’ve found genuine resonances rather than superficial parallels.

I also appreciate the book’s format. The weekly structure makes it digestible and practical. You’re not wading through hundreds of pages of theory. Each reflection is concise, focused, and actionable. It’s the kind of book you can keep on your desk and return to regularly.

The real-world examples, like the Luke Kanies story, ground the philosophical concepts in concrete reality. This isn’t just abstract theorizing—these ideas have actually worked for real entrepreneurs building real companies.

Room for Improvement

That said, the book does have limitations. For one, it assumes a certain level of familiarity with both Nietzsche and entrepreneurship. If you’re completely new to either, you might find yourself wanting more context or explanation. The book works best for people who already have some foundation in both areas.

Additionally, while the book is excellent at identifying problems and offering frameworks for thinking about them, it sometimes falls short on concrete solutions. For example, the discussion of “group insanity” accurately diagnoses a major challenge facing growing companies, but the practical advice for addressing it is somewhat limited. I would have loved more case studies of companies that successfully maintained their innovative culture while scaling.

Finally, the book’s focus on disruption and deviation, while valuable, doesn’t fully address the challenges of execution. Having a deviating nature and a disruptive idea is great, but you still need to build a functional business, manage people, handle finances, and deal with all the mundane realities of running a company. The book touches on these issues but doesn’t dive deep into them.

How This Compares to Other Business Books

If you’re familiar with the business book landscape, you might be wondering how this compares to other popular titles. It’s quite different from books like “The Lean Startup” or “Zero to One,” which offer more systematic methodologies for building companies. Those books are excellent for understanding startup mechanics, but they don’t dig as deeply into the psychological and philosophical foundations of entrepreneurship.

“The Entrepreneur’s Weekly Nietzsche” has more in common with books like “The Innovator’s Dilemma” by Clayton Christensen, which explores why successful companies fail to innovate, or “Antifragile” by Nassim Taleb, which challenges conventional thinking about risk and uncertainty. Like those books, this one is more about developing a mindset than following a process.

What sets it apart is its philosophical grounding. Most business books draw on recent case studies, current research, or the author’s personal experience. This one reaches back to 19th-century philosophy and finds timeless insights that remain relevant today. That’s either going to appeal to you or it won’t, but I found it refreshing.

Questions Worth Pondering

As I finished this book, a few questions kept nagging at me—the kind of questions that don’t have easy answers but are worth sitting with:

Can you deliberately cultivate a “deviating nature,” or is it something you either have or don’t? If it can be cultivated, how do you do that without falling into mere contrarianism?

How do you balance the need for deviation and disruption with the need for stability and execution? Not every moment calls for challenging assumptions—sometimes you just need to get work done. Where’s the line?

And perhaps most importantly: As your company grows and succeeds, how do you maintain your outsider perspective when you’re increasingly becoming an insider? How do you keep questioning the status quo when you’re increasingly part of establishing it?

I don’t have definitive answers to these questions, and I don’t think Jilk and Feld claim to either. But they’re the right questions to be asking if you’re serious about building something genuinely innovative rather than just incrementally better.

Final Thoughts: Philosophy for the Practical

Look, I get that reading Nietzsche isn’t on most entrepreneurs’ to-do lists. You’ve got products to build, customers to serve, investors to update, and employees to manage. Who has time for 19th-century philosophy?

But here’s what I’ve come to believe after reading this book: the most practical thing you can do might be to step back and think deeply about the foundations of what you’re doing. Understanding human nature, embracing your different perspective, recognizing the dangers of group conformity—these aren’t abstract luxuries. They’re competitive advantages.

“The Entrepreneur’s Weekly Nietzsche” makes philosophy practical without dumbing it down. It respects both Nietzsche’s complexity and the real challenges entrepreneurs face. Whether you’re launching your first startup or scaling your fifth company, there’s wisdom here worth absorbing.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. Have you found unexpected sources of business wisdom? Do you think philosophy has a place in entrepreneurship, or is it just an interesting intellectual exercise? Drop a comment below and let’s discuss. After all, challenging each other’s thinking—that’s what both Nietzsche and successful entrepreneurs would want us to do.