I’ve never met Bo Peabody, but I know I’d like him. His half book – Lucky or Smart? – (Amy told me that if it only has 58 pages, it doesn’t count as a whole book) is a quick and delightful romp through his entrepreneurial brain. If you are too lazy to read a half book, you can try this Inc. Magazine article that will give you a feel for it.
Bo’s first company – Tripod (the one he sold to Lycos for $58m – maybe that’s why the book has 58 pages – and then was locked up for two years while Lycos stock went up 10x) – is still around. We were investors in Tripod’s competitor Geocities – also still around (and part of Yahoo) – which are both logical predecessors to the things we now call blogs.
Enough history – back to the book. Since it’s a short one, I’ll summarize by listing the table of contents. If you can’t figure out why you’d like this book from the table of contents, then it’s not for you.
I’ve been really busy so January was a slow reading month. I hurt my knee running today so I decided to lie on the couch, ice my knee, and chow down on some books. I consumed the second half of A Million Little Pieces by James Frey, which I had been slowly wading through the past two weeks.
This is one of the most intense books I’ve read in a long time. It’s Frey’s autobiographical account of his six weeks in rehab. The fly leaf sets up the story with the following: At the age of 23, James Frey woke up on a plane to find his four front teeth knocked out, his nose broken, and a hole through his cheek. He had no idea where the plane was headed nor any recollection of the past two weeks. An alcoholic for ten years and a crack addict for three, he checked in a treatment facility shortly after landing. There he was told he could either stop using or die before he reached age 24.
The first half of the book is just fucking bleak. I’m fortunate that drugs, alcohol, and addiction have not had a meaningful role in the play called my life. While I’ve got a friend who became addicted to drugs 20 years ago and I spent a decade trying to help him before giving up, the vast majority of my “one degree of separation” friends and family have not had any addiction issues. As a result, the impact of the book on me might have been amplified as the landscape was so unbelievably foreign to me. I worked my way through the first half slowly during the past two weeks – both because I was concentrating on other things – and it was hard to move through it very quickly.
The second half is a story of renewal. Slowly – painfully slowly – Frey starts to make progress. As the period of time that he’s sober and clean lengthens, he starts to address – with the treatment counsellors and lawyers – his legal issues, his parents, and some of his real demons. He is incredibly stubborn, yet extremely insightful, and admirable in how he takes responsibility for himself. When one of his counsellors – in treatment with his parents – suggests that the core of his problems may be a combination of genetics and a severe / chronic ear infection he has for the first few years of his life (unbeknownst to his parents) he rejects it.
James: It’s an interesting theory. It probably holds some weight. I can accept it for what I feel it is, which is a possibility. I won’t accept it as a root cause, because I think it’s a cop-out, and because I don’t think it does me any good to accept anything other than myself and my own weakness as a root cause. I did everything I did. I made the decisions to do it all. The only way I’m going to get better is if I accept responsibility for the decision to either be an Addict or not be an Addict. That’s the way it has to be for me. I know you’re going to try and convince me otherwise, but you shouldn’t bother.
Joanne (counsellor): … you are the single most stubborn person that I’ve ever met.
James: I just won’t let myself be a victim. … People in here. People everywhere, they all want to take their own problems, usually created by themselves, and try to pass them off on someone or something else. I know my Mother and Father did the best they could and gave me the best they could and loved me the best the could and if anything, they are victims of me. I could say I’m flawed in my genetic makeup, that I have this disease and my addictions are caused by the presence of it, but I think that’s a lot of shit. I’m a victim of nothing but myself, just as I believe that most people with this so-called disease aren’t victims of anything other than themselves. If you want to call that philosophy stubbornness, go right ahead. I call it being responsible. I call it the acceptance of my own problems and my own weaknesses with honor and dignity. I call it getting better.
This exchange reminded me of my favorite quote from Atlas Shrugged, “Nobody stays here by faking reality in any manner whatever.” Buried in this emotionally devastating and ultimately awesomely inspiring 400 page book about one man’s effort to overcome his addiction is a component of my own personal philosophy – “take complete responsibility for all of your actions.” Intense.
I just finished Joel on Software. It is fabulous! Joel Spolsky – CEO of Fog Creek Software – has written a must read book for everyone in the software industry.
Joel has a popular blog by the same name as the book. While some of the book is a simple refactoring of his blog posts over the past few years, don’t be fooled – this is a well organized, often hilarious, and always insightful compendium of Joel’s thoughts. It’s fresh. And relevant. And – almost always dead nuts on.
If you are a software developer, I expect you’ll roll around on the floor in empathy while simultaneously gleaning new insights into why the world are you is so bizarre and the marketing people in your company are so stupid. You’ll gain a deeper understanding of the cause of the general cluelessness of venture capitalists and still wonder why Microsoft doesn’t have a .NET linker (but it’ll inspire you to go searching for one on Google.)
If you manage software developers, or are a manager in a software company, you’ll end up with a much deeper understanding of what a typical software developer worries about when he’s not smirking at the last thing that came out of your mouth. You’ll learn why you should never try to set software development strategy based on what you read in airline magazines and why it’s just fucking dumb to create incentive programs for software developers that treat them like they are still in kindergarten.
If you are the CEO of one of my companies, don’t bother buying this book. You’ll get one in the mail from me in the next week or so. However, if you are someone else, and want to learn about – in Joel’s words – “on software and on diverse and occasionally related matters that will prove of interest to software developers, and managers, and to those who, whether by good fortune or ill luck, work with them in some capacity”, buy it now.
P.S. I don’t know Joel, but I respect him, even if he worked at Juno.
I just received an email from a blog reader asking for a recommendation for a book that addresses the “importance of intellectual property with regard to building successful technology companies.” I’ve read several IP-related books in the past (one of the guest lectures I used to give at MIT Sloan School for 15.351: Managing the Innovation Process was titled “Copyrights, Patents, and Trade Secrets” – the online lecture notes from 2002 have some references to readings on Standards, Patents, & Open Source) but I’ve never found one that I would call my “go to book.”
I passed on the request to Jason Mendelson (our general counsel and my co-conspirator on the Term Sheet series of posts) and he recommended The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Business Law. While this book isn’t specifically about IP, there is a large section on general IP law. It’s also a superb book that should be in every entrepreneur’s library.
Craig Dauchy – one of the co-authors – is a long time friend and collegue of ours and one of the managing partners at Cooley Godward – one of the premium law firms for VC-backed companies. So – Craig knows of what he speaks.
I believe that one can never have enough books. As an avid reader, I’m always on the lookout for random lists of “favorites” of other people so I can stretch my palate. I’m not selective as I’ve learned that if I don’t like a book, I can simply put it down and go to the next one.
I got a nice note from a Steve Proper with a pointer to 20 Strange and Wonderful Books – a magnificent list by a guy named John Cartan. I don’t know John (and don’t think I know Steve, but he reads my blog) – but I am now the proud owner of 17 new books via Amazon (I already owned three of them – 2. Flatland; 11. Godel, Escher, Bach; and 20. The Tolkien Reader.)
One of my favorite piles (the “book pile”) just got bigger.
I’m been in Hotchkiss, Colorado with Amy the past few days enjoying the run up to Christmas. Amy has family here (on the western slope of Colorado near Grand Junction) and we’ve been hanging out in this town of 800 doing what you’d expect.
It’s pretty useful to head over the continental divide every now and then and remember what small town America is like. The houses do NOT have high speed Internet (so – I’m typing this at Weekender Sports – the local sporting good store owned by Amy’s uncle – surrounded by all the snowmobiles and guns one could ever want.) I managed to find the local coffee shop which does a nice Starbucks imitation, but I’m yet to find any democrats. That said, the people here are delightful and I always am welcomed as family, which takes the edge off this cranky jewish boy at Christmas time (years of therapy haven’t managed to cure me of my annoyance at not getting gifts on December 25th and I’m too stubborn to just accept fate.)
So – I’ve been reading.
I started with The Runes of the Earth – Stephen Donaldson’s newest book (book seven) in the Thomas Covenant Chronicles. This sent me back to eight grade sitting in study hall devowering Donaldson’s books between fantasizing about how I was going to kick all my friends butts at Dungeons and Dragons. Donaldson has mastered the epic fantasy – I’ve read them all – and I think he’s the best (Zelazny comes in a close second for me.) Thankfully Donaldson decided to write “the final trilogy” – this is the first book and it lived up to my expectations. If you are a fantasy fan, give Donaldson’s Thomas Covenant Chronicles a try – but start with the first one – Lord Foul’s Bane
Next up – Wil Wheaton’s magnificent Just A Geek. I’m not a Star Trek: The Next Generation fan, so I missed the whole Wil Wheaton / Wesley Crusher thing. I saw Wil’s book referred to by enough bloggers that I grabbed it one day just to see what it is about. Wil is great – he mixes a real book, his blogs, and his personal evolution in a captivating, hilarious, and endearing way.
Since Wil managed his own Movable Type-based web site, I decided I should learn PHP (since I recently PHP-enabled my site.) PHP 5 was a good start and – as expected – PHP is pretty simple, but extremely powerful. Now – I’ve just got to figure out what I want to do with it.
Jenny sent me the publishers proof of Leg The Spread. This is a fascinating romp through the Chicago Merc (and other Chicago exchanges) from a woman’s point of view. While it reinforces a truism that male traders are generally disgusting creatures, it’s extremely well written, gets underneath the personalities in the trading pit, and highlights a handful of incredibly powerful women and how they’ve adapted and succeeded in a male-dominated, testosterone-laden scene. I’ve never been to the Merc, but whenever I see it on CNBC, I’ll think of it differently.
Ok – Amy’s been making me watch too much Jeopardy these days (although I’ve had a blissful week off from it since I banned TV from this trip.) Fortunately, I can read while it’s in the background (plus Ken just wins all the time – what’s the fun of that.)
So – I picked up Getting Everything You Can Out of All You’ve Got with my typically cynical point of view toward marketing. As I wrote in my post Your Marketing Sucks (the title of my favorite marketing book to date), I expected very little from this book even though it was recommended in a comment to the forementioned post by Troy Angrignon (who I don’t know, but did appreciate the comment.) Troy highly recommended this book so it went into the “read some day pile.”
Some day came. For a marketing book, it was a notch above sucking. The pretty little “bonus star” on the cover says “21 Ways You Can Out-Think, Out-Perform, and Out-Earn the Competition” – never, in my mind – a particularly good sign. However, while the book was pretty simplistic, I found myself getting into it after about 100 pages. Jay Abraham (the author and self proclaimed “master motivator”) loads it up with examples – many of them commonplace ones that ironically made me think “oh – that makes sense – duh – why aren’t we doing that at company X.”
The chapters on Internet and email marketing were pretty lame, especially in contrast to the final publisher proof of Sign Me Up! by Matt Blumberg and the Return Path folks that I read earlier this week. But the rest of the book had plenty of straightforward but useful ways to out-think, out-perform, and out-earn the competition.
Ok – I’m done with business books for a while – time to go for one last run on the beach this trip and then disappear into The Runes of the Earth – Stephen Donaldson’s first book in The Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant.
My official best book of Thanksgiving week is Hackers & Painters by Paul Graham.
I know Paul Graham indirectly through his role as founder of Viaweb, which was bought in 1998 by Yahoo! for $49m in stock. Viaweb was a startup in Cambridge that was down the block from NetGenesis (when I was chairman) and was part of the first wave of Cambridge/Boston-based Internet companies.
While I never knew Graham personally, I’d heard that he had a provocative personality (“provocative” in a good way – typical of the Cambridge / MIT / Harvard software set.) A look at his web site confirms this.
Hackers & Painters is a collection of Graham’s essays woven together in a captivating book. While I don’t agree with all of his thoughts – the book makes you think – which is refreshing. Blogging has helped stimulate the re-birth of the personal essay – which I love to read (and am trying to be effective at writing.) Graham’s book is 200 pages composed of 14 essays (at least half of which are likely to be interesting to anyone that is in the computer business, half of which are likely to be interesting to anyone that likes to think, half of which are likely to be interesting to people involved in startups, and half of which are likely to simply be – interesting.)
My favorite paragraph in the book is about startups in the essay titled How to Make Wealth. “A startup is a like a mosquito. A bear can absorb a hit and a crab is armored against one, but a mosquito is designed for one thing: to score. no energy is wasted on defense. The defense of mosquitos, as a species, is that there are a lot of them, but this is little consolation to the individual mosquito.”
Back to the beach for another day of running, reading, and thinking.
When some people think of Thanksgiving, they think of turkey and football. I think of sleeping late and reading a book a day.
Amy and I are in Cabo San Lucas and off to a good start. Beach running is much different from mountain running, but when you net everything out, it’s about the same effort.
I’m tracking to a book a day this trip. I started with The Dinner Club which is the story of a bunch of DC-area Internet heavy hitters – including Ted Leonsis, Art Marks, Mario Morino, Russ Ramsey, John Sidgmore, Rajendra Singh, Steve Case, Raul Frenandez, James Kimsey, Bill Melton, Michael Saylor, and Mark Warner – who started an angel group called “Capital Investors.” Their investments stunk, but the story of their dinners, the thought process at the time, and their respective struggles with the ending of the Internet-bubble was a nice “recently passed current events retro-read.”
The Warren Buffet Way was what you’d expect – a solid treatise on Warren Buffet by Robert Hagstrom. As one of the many people on this planet that are simultaneously fascinated by and in awe of Warren Buffett’s investing skill and style, this book exceeded my expectations and is a must read if you are into Buffett.
The best book so far is Raising The Bar – the story of Gary Erickson and his company – Clif Bar Inc. The first chapter starts off with the story of him deciding to walk away from the sale of Clif Bar for $120m on the day they were signing the definitive documents. He tells an awesome entrepreneurial story – both of the run up to this amazing decision to not sell – as well as the aftermath as he buys out his parter and recreates the magic of Clif Bar. Erickson is a great storyteller, adventurer, and entrepreneur – this one is an inspiration for anyone creating a company.
Enjoy your turkey.