Category: Books
My partner Seth Levine has an important new book out today titled Capital Evolution: The New American Economy.
I saw it last night at the Boulder Bookstore in the New Hardback Non-Fiction section (bottom left in the photo below) and am going to the launch event at Composition Shop in Longmont. Join us, say hello, and buy some books!
I love the tagline from the flyleaf: “The future of capitalism isn’t left or right – it’s forward.“
In our over-politicized world, Seth and his co-author, Elizabeth MacBride, do an outstanding job of defining capitalism clearly and explaining how it evolved into today’s approach. They deconstruct the contemporary arguments “for and against,” examine challenges with many existing practices, and paint a new and compelling path forward.
Seth and Elizabeth have been working on this book for over two years. I read an early draft around a year ago and gave them a lot of feedback, so it’s been a joy to see it take shape.
Unlike my largely anecdotal books, which draw on my experiences, often with sidebars from others sharing theirs, Seth and Elizabeth did deep research for this book. I fondly remember showing up at Seth’s party barn at his house one day to see the large dining table covered with hardcover books on economic theory, the history of business (and capitalism and economics), and a bunch of other stuff he was reading as part of his extensive research.
As with Seth’s other book, The New Builders, it is both extremely substantive and eminently readable. I encourage you to buy and read a copy of Capital Evolution: The New American Economy.
Give First is now available to pre-order in Audiobook format (it will be officially released on 12/2/26).
I’m the reader, so if you are an audiobook person, you’ll have to listen to me for a few hours. It was fun doing the recording (I’ve done the audio recording for two other books – Venture Deals (Jason and I alternated chapters) and Startup Life.
Give First Audiobook on Amazon
Give First Audiobook on Audible
Give First Audiobook on Apple
Other links via RBmedia
I’ve been a long-time Cory Doctorow fan. His new book Enshitification is delicious. Yup – I understand that a shit emoji doesn’t inspire deliciousness.
Now that I’m back in hibernation (and figuring out what it actually means), I’m reading and writing a lot. I’ll probably blog some (a little, a lot, who knows) while in hibernation because I work out ideas by writing and putting them out in public (even if I don’t pay much attention to the feedback or engage) is a different type of writing for me than just “writing privately” (which is mostly a thing called journaling and valuable to me, but different …)
Cory invented a new word: enshitification. Here’s what Wikipedia says as of today:
Enshittification, also known as crapification and platform decay, is a pattern in which two-sided online products and services decline in quality over time. Initially, vendors create high-quality offerings to attract users, then they degrade those offerings to better serve business customers (such as advertisers), and finally degrade their services to users and business customers to maximize short-term profits for shareholders.
Nailed it. His examples are superb. I don’t use Facebook products anymore (I guess I’m supposed to call it Meta) because of how awful they are and how awful the company is (oops – yes – I have WhatsApp on my phone because several people in my world insist on using it, but it mostly just sits dormant for me.) I am so exhausted by Amazon and its endless quest for more margin from everyone, including all the companies that it depends on to be useful. Google is “entertaining” to me as they systematically destroy so many companies that enabled them to be amazing in the quest to become an AI company. TwitterX bwahaahahaha. And I don’t even want to bother with the enshittification of so many other things in the tech world that Cory doesn’t touch on but that fit within his thesis.
Cory deconstructs, in fascinating detail, what has happened with each of these companies.
While I don’t agree with all of Cory’s politics (e.g., I was not a fan of Lina Khan and the Biden-era FTC), I love that he’s willing to take strong positions and then back them up. But, the regulatory dynamics and regulations as part of his solution for Enshitification is only a modest part of the book. And, even though I don’t agree with all of it, his arguments have a lot of validity and useful things to understand, especially around the concept of regulatory capture and how it contributes to enshitification.
If you like sci-fi, read Cory’s stuff. If you are in the tech industry and want to be forced actually to think, read Cory’s stuff. If you are far left or far right, don’t bother, since you won’t be motivated actually to learn anything. But if you aren’t part of the “far left/right” and you are willing to read, think, and consider your position on things, read Cory’s stuff.
I approached Echoes of October with trepidation. A graphic novel about violence and grief isn’t easy terrain. But it succeeds in a haunting, urgent way. The creators have chosen to explore the year leading into the October 7, 2023 massacre through the lives of four children who each lose a parent. The children are from different locales (Gaza City, Toronto, Tel Aviv, and Daliyat al‑Karmel) which enables a textured, multi‑vantage narrative.
What impressed me most is the restraint and care in which the story is told. The voices are calibrated: they carry sorrow, confusion, hope, anger, but rarely descend into melodrama. Because the characters are composite (e.g., everything that happens in the book is true, the characters are not), the authors manage to create space for truths without claiming to own them.
I love graphic novels (scifi and history) and regularly have them in my reading diet. The panels breathe. There are silences, negative space, quiet facial expressions, and moments of violent disruption. The juxtaposition of children’s everyday worlds (school, family, and play) with the encroaching shadows of conflict makes the tragedy more palpable and intense.
This is not an easy read, nor should it be. Echoes of October is demanding: it expects the reader to engage, be uncomfortable, and reckon with stories that hold no clean resolution. But in doing so, it honors the complexity of memory, the weight of loss, and the imperative of bearing witness.
I recommend it to anyone willing to engage deeply with how conflict impacts children and the possibility (however fragile) of empathy.
Reid Hoffman’s new book Superagency: What Could Possibly Go Right with Our AI Future is spectacular and a must-read for every non-technologist about how to think about this “AI thing.” If you want the short version, the recent AI & I podcast with Reid is an excellent way to get a feel for it.
Reid describes his approach as “smart risk taking” rather than blind optimism. “Everyone, generally speaking, focuses way too much on what could go wrong, and insufficiently on what could go right,” he told TechCrunch recently. This resonates with me. I’m tired of the endless AI apocalypse takes.
The book’s central idea is “superagency” – basically when technology gives us new superpowers and millions of people get those superpowers at the same time. Reid uses the car analogy. Cars were once so scary they required a person walking in front waving an orange flag. Now we can’t imagine life without them.
What I love about the book is how practical it is. Reid and his co-author Greg Beato didn’t use AI to write it, but they used AI to vet it – checking facts, doing research, getting different perspectives. That’s exactly how I think about AI tools. They’re not going to replace my thinking, but they can definitely amplify it.
The timing feels perfect given what’s happening here in Colorado with our AI regulation mess. While Reid is writing optimistically about AI’s potential, Colorado has been having a complete meltdown trying to regulate it. Our state legislature passed SB 24-205 in May 2024, making us the first state to broadly restrict private companies using AI. Governor Polis signed it “with reservations” and within a month Polis, our attorney general Phil Weiser, and the bill sponsor Robert Rodriguez issued an open letter that “Starting today, in the lead up to the 2025 legislative session and well before the February 2026 deadline for implementation of the law, at the governor and legislative leadership’s direction, state and legislative leaders will engage in a process to revise the new law, and minimize unintended consequences associated with its implementation,”
This is exactly the kind of regulatory approach Reid warns against. In his recent podcast, he explained his philosophy: “I tend to be more regulatory cautious than anti-regulation.” The key difference? Start with measurement rather than prohibition. “When you start having the impulse that maybe there should be regulation, you should start with, well, how do we measure the questions that we’re worried about as harms?”
Colorado did the opposite and went straight to broad restrictions without first understanding what we were actually trying to prevent or how to measure it. The timeline since then has been a comedy of errors – multiple failed attempts to amend the law during the regular session, and most recently, an August special session that ended with lawmakers just pushing the start date from February 2026 to June 2026. That’s it. After over a year of fighting, we got a four-month delay.
Reid believes in “iterative deployment” – getting AI tools into people’s hands and then responding to actual feedback and real problems, not hypothetical ones. Instead, Colorado jumped straight to prescriptive rules based on fears rather than evidence. Reid’s approach would have been: Deploy AI systems, measure actual discrimination outcomes, then iterate on solutions. Our approach was: Assume the worst, regulate preemptively, and figure out implementation later.
The Colorado situation perfectly illustrates Reid’s point about fear-based thinking around AI. Superagency offers a much better framework – one that acknowledges challenges while focusing on AI’s potential to increase individual agency and create better outcomes for society.
Read the book. We need more thoughtful optimism and less regulatory panic. Especially here in Colorado, where we’re supposed to be leaders in technology, not cautionary tales about how fear can paralyze good policy-making.
I love books. I love reading. I love reading books.
Ensorcelled by Eliot Peper is genius. It’s a unique format that can be read in one setting. The writing is beautiful. The story, like the image on the cover, pulls you in with steadily increasing intensity. And then, a delicious twist. Amy and I have been supporting Eliot’s writing since his first book, and he’s become a dear friend. I started my weekend with this, and it inspired me to read a few more things by friends.
The Night Slayer by George Jankovic was next. I fondly remember a vacation to Hawaii with the McIntyres when their son Quinn was a pre-teen. This particular vacation was dedicated to me and Quinn reading several Percy Jackson books while lying on adjacent beach chairs overlooking the ocean. George’s book teleported me back to that week. I funded George’s first company, RF Globalnet, when he lived in Boulder in the mid-1990s. We had a failure together with a company called eVulkan, but then I was fortunate to be invited to fund NutriSystems when he and his partner, Mike Hagan, took it over as it was on the brink of bankruptcy. If you had told me in 1997 that almost 30 years later, George would write an epic YA coming-of-age fantasy series that moves faster than the Percy Jackson books, I would have laughed out loud. I can’t wait for The Princes of the Abyss to show up on my Kindle.
I’ve been remiss in addressing the infinite pile of PDFs on my Kindle from friends that are drafts of their books, so I tackled the first three chapters of the upcoming book City on the Edge by Jonathan Weber. It’s fantastic and is going to be a powerful and definitive story of San Francisco from 1990 to the present day. I’ve known Jonathan since he was editor-in-chief of The Industry Standard and was an investor in his online venture New West. Jonathan’s writing reflects a journalist’s cynicism and inquisitiveness, unwilling to accept the endless surface-level storytelling, self-promotion, and general deceit and deflection of many people. As a reward for giving him feedback, he sent me the rest of the book to read.
I’m halfway through When River Loves Deborah by Yong Kim. We are tiny investors via FG Angels in Yong’s company, Wonolo, and I hadn’t realized he’d written this book. I’m halfway through and am looking forward to lying on my couch on Thursday to finish it up.
I’m ensorcelled when I read books by friends (see what I did there…)
Book: Fever Pitch: A Novel About Selling Your Vision, Raising Venture Capital, and Launching Your Startup
As I gear up for the official launch of Give First: The Power of Mentorship this week, I spent the weekend reading, playing with my 7GL, running, celebrating my 32nd wedding anniversary with Amy, and hanging out with some friends who were in town.
Ben Wiener’s book Fever Pitch: A Novel About Selling Your Vision, Raising Venture Capital, and Launching Your Startup was delightful! Ben is a partner at Jumpspeed, based in Jerusalem, Israel. We are email friends, and he has been key in helping develop and lead the Jerusalem startup community. I don’t know his portfolio well, but I do know he was an investor in BreezoMeter, an app I obsessively used during a fire season in Boulder one summer.
I’ve read some fiction that attempts to blend classic crime drama with startups, technology, relationships, and venture capital. Eliot Peper is my favorite in that category, and William Hertling (who needs to add https to his website so Google doesn’t barf on it) is a close second. Even though this is Ben’s first book, I’m adding him to that list.
If you like a fast novel that you can read in a few hours while still learning something (Ben’s H.E.A.R.T. framework: five essential elements of a pitch that mirrors how venture capitalists evaluate deals), I highly recommend Fever Pitch: A Novel About Selling Your Vision, Raising Venture Capital, and Launching Your Startup.
Nice job, Ben – good inspiration for me if I get around to writing fiction some day!
I haven’t read much in the last 30 days as I’ve been consumed with writing, speaking, and events around the launch of Give First: The Power of Mentorship. The Kindle version is now available, and the paperback version will be released on Tuesday, June 24, so I’m in the home stretch of pre-launch. It hit #1 in Startups yesterday, so if you are inclined to buy, now is the time to keep the momentum going!
Amy and I are in Aspen, so I’m having a lot less social in the evenings. That means – reading on the couch after dinner.
I finished two books last night. The first was Barry Eisler’s new novel The System: A Novel of the Deep State. I love Barry’s writing and read every book he writes. He has total mastery of the contemporary thriller with extraordinarily vibrant characters and a zillion endnotes that tie to things that are actually happening in the real world. The protagonist, Valeria Velez, is fantastic, and I hope she shows up in a few more books. And, John Rain needs to show up in the Valeria Velez series. If you like mental floss, Brad-the-book-salesman says make today a two-fer and buy The System: A Novel of the Deep State and Give First: The Power of Mentorship.
I try to only read mental floss every third book, so last night I got to work on consuming Little Black Classics Box Set (Penguin Little Black Classics). It’s my summer reading project, which is a curated library of eighty pocket-sized books that encapsulate the breadth and diversity of literary history. This collection spans continents and centuries.
For example, here are a few summarized by my favorite AI: the searing social commentary of Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal; the timeless Greek tragedy of Sophocles’ Antigone; haunting tales of the macabre in Edgar Allan Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart; the revolutionary political theory of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’ The Communist Manifesto; profound reflections on life from ancient Japan in Kenkō’s A Cup of Sake Beneath the Cherry Trees; the witty and satirical juvenilia of Jane Austen’s The Beautifull Cassandra; psychological depth in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s short story The Meek One; the lyrical beauty of John Keats’ narrative poem The Eve of St Agnes; early feminist arguments in Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman; and the sharp, observational fiction of Anton Chekhov’s Gooseberries.
I read the first one in the series last night: Mrs Rosie and the Priest by Giovanni Boccaccio. I’ve never read anything by Boccaccio and didn’t know that 14th-century Italians were so filthy and degenerate (well, yes, I did, nothing ever changes, we are humans after all.) The commentary on gender, female agency, and society is sharp. I liked all the female protagonists, but Bartolomea was my favorite. The dialogue, even translated into English, is fun and spicy.
As I continue to see how good (or bad) different AIs are, I asked Gemini, “What lesson am I supposed to learn from the book.” After it gave me three tedious and overwrote paragraphs, I asked, “Give this to me in one paragraph. Use Brad Feld’s style of writing from feld.com”
“I love when a piece of writing from the 1300s delivers a mental model that feels like it was written for a startup founder in 2025. Boccaccio’s story about Mrs. Rosie is a masterclass in hacking a legacy system. You have a protagonist facing a fatal outcome from a set of rules—a legal and religious OS—that is fundamentally asymmetric and designed to benefit the people in power. Instead of accepting the premise of the game, she calls bullshit on the entire system with an argument so logical and witty that it forces the system to self-correct. She doesn’t fight the power structure with force; she uses intellectual arbitrage to expose its hypocrisy and bankruptcy. It’s a powerful reminder that challenging the core assumptions of a broken system is often infinitely more effective than trying to win within its stupid, arbitrary constraints.“
Eh – not so good. And the description is only about one of four stories.
I had a weird, unsatisfying, and not particularly restful weekend because of Colorado politics and post-exertional malaise. So, in between work, a short run, a long nap, a bunch of online Swedish death cleaning, and lying on the couch responding to endless text messages, I read Carrie Soto Is Back and The Big Gamble (Kevin Kerney Novels Series Book 7). And when I say “read”, imagine me on the coach, with my Kindle in one hand and my iPhone propped up on my leg so I could read what came in and respond when necessary.
The Big Gamble was good. I’m enjoying cruising through the Kevin Kerney novels after consuming the entire C.J. Box Joe Pickett series (all 25). But Carrie Soto Is Back was spectacular.
I was a serious tennis player from age 10 to 14. While football dominated Texas sports, well, forever, tennis was up there in the mid 1970s alongside soccer (anyone remember Kyle Rote Jr and the Dallas Tornados?) I stopped playing tennis when I discovered computers and girls (in that order) and started running instead. For my 30th birthday, Amy took me to Bollettieri Tennis Academy (RIP Nick Bollettieri), which rekindled a casual interest in tennis for me and a serious interest in tennis for Amy.
Today, Amy is a tennis superfan. Our default TV channel is the Tennis Channel (turn on the TV and it goes to the Tennis Channel). She always talks about Rafa and compares all the new up-and-comers to him.
While I’m also a tennis fan, I’ve grown to enjoy watching the women’s games more than the men’s. Coco Gauff is my current fave, but I almost always root for the underdog. And while I rarely cheer for Sabalenka, she is an amazing player.
Carrie Sota was the best (fictional) female tennis player in the 1980s, winning the most Grand Slams of any player (20). She hurt her knee in 1987 and retired in 1989. The book starts in 1994 with Carrie watching the new top female tennis player, Nicki Chan win the US Open and tie Carrie’s record.
In 1995, Carrie decides to come out of retirement and compete in all the majors. If you are a tennis fan and this sounds familiar, it is a recurring theme in real-life tennis that rarely ends well.
The drama is phenomenal, and the character development of Carrie, Chan, Carrie’s father, her love interest, and a few other minor characters is outstanding. The story moves quickly, and the tennis match sections keep up the drama and pace. Our protagonist has multiple moments of increasing difficulty that aren’t histronic or hard to believe, many of which deal with her changing reality of life as she gets a little older.
When I watched (and then read) Daisy Jones & the Six several years ago, I thought Taylor Jenkins Reid was a gifted storyteller. I don’t know why it took me so long to discover and read Carrie Soto Is Back, but The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo and Malibu Rising are now on my Kindle.