There is a particular kind of founder who refuses to read business books. They have a phrase for it. "I want to figure it out from first principles." This sounds rigorous. It is usually just expensive.
First principles thinking is a real and useful discipline. Elon Musk talking about rocket fuel costs is first principles. A scientist deriving a result from underlying physics is first principles. What most founders mean when they say it is something different. They mean: I do not want to be influenced. They want their ideas to be theirs, untouched, unborrowed, original. They want to discover gravity by jumping off a building.
This is a religious position dressed up as an intellectual one.
The honest version of first principles thinking is this: you take the best framework someone else built, you understand why it works at a structural level, and then you decide whether the structure applies to your situation. You are not avoiding the framework. You are avoiding imitating the framework. The difference is whether you understand the load-bearing parts.
I steal frameworks constantly. From Thiel on monopolies. From Naval on leverage. From Christensen on disruption. From Burns on cognitive distortions, which I think is the most useful business book ever written even though it is technically about depression. The frameworks are not mine. The application is mine. That is where the work is.
The mistake founders make is they confuse two different things. There is plagiarism of conclusion, which is copying what someone else decided. And there is adoption of method, which is learning how they thought. The first is lazy. The second is how every smart person in history got smarter.
Newton said he stood on the shoulders of giants. He was not being humble. He was being accurate. Calculus did not come from a cave. It came from Newton reading everything Wallis and Barrow had written and then asking what was missing.
The founders who refuse to read because they want to be original are not protecting their originality. They are protecting their ignorance. Originality does not come from a clean slate. It comes from a slate so densely written that the patterns nobody else saw start to become obvious.
Read more. Steal frameworks. Understand them down to the load-bearing parts. Then apply them to a problem they were not built for, and call the result yours. That is honest. That is also how every original thing has ever been made.