DonorsChoose Leader Swears By Business Blogs and Instapaper App

Charles Best, founder of the education organization, on what he reads

Blogs he reads “religiously”:

His three favorites are written by Internet venture capitalists or entrepreneurs:

• AVC, which stands for “A Venture Capitalist,” by Fred Wilson, a principal of Union Square Ventures and a DonorsChoose board member.
• Both Sides of the Table, by Mark Suster, a partner at GRP Partners venture capital firm.
• cdixon.org, by Chris Dixon, co-founder and chief executive of Hunch, a company that develops software to figure out what people will like based on their past decisions.

Why he reads business blogs: “Figuring out how to bring millions of citizen philanthropists to our site to some degree is rocket science for us, and we need to pull business-world expertise to crack that nut.”

Education blog he likes most: Whitney Tilson’s School Reform Blog, which he says is “a great roundup of education news stories on both sides of the debate.” Mr. Tilson is a hedge-fund investor who says he was inspired to create the blog after seeing what the documentary “An Inconvenient Truth” did to transform thinking about climate change.

Favorite Twitter feeds:

• Henry Blodget, a financial analyst
• Stephen Colbert, the comedian who has run online contests to help DonorsChoose
• Anil Dash, a technology entrepreneur
• Scott Heffernan, Meetup founder and chief executive

Books he read recently: A Confederacy of Dunces, by John Kennedy Toole, and The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, by Robert Caro, which he read because Mr. Dash recommended it on his Twitter feed.

Book he would recommend to his colleagues: Teach Like a Champion: 49 Techniques That Put Students on the Path to College, by Doug Lemov. He says he likes the book’s advice on child rearing and its real-world perspective on teaching.

On his summer reading list: Fascinate: Your 7 Triggers to Persuasion and Captivation, by Sally Hogshead, and Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, by Chip and Dan Heath.

Favorite reading app: Instapaper, which makes it easy to save anything online in one place and share it with others.

Weekly indulgence: Every Saturday, Mr. Best takes his two young children to visit his parents, and then he sits down to read the print edition of The New York Times.