Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind
“Yuval Harari's Sapiens had a big impact on how I approach VC.”
Why it is worth your time
Sapiens is Yuval Noah Harari's history of our species, first published in Hebrew in 2011 and in English in 2014. Harari, a historian at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, covers the cognitive, agricultural and scientific revolutions and argues that humans dominate because they cooperate at scale around shared fictions: money, nations, religions and companies. Sacks posted in Aug 2021 that the book shaped how he approaches venture capital. The link is the idea of shared fictions. A startup is a story that investors, employees and customers agree to believe before the numbers exist, and Sacks has spent his career building and funding such stories at PayPal, Yammer and Craft Ventures. It suits readers who want a single wide-angle account of human history. The caveats are that the Guardian's Galen Strawson faulted its carelessness, exaggeration and sensationalism, and the final chapters on genetic engineering and the future of the species are speculation.
