Tag: book
One of my favorite things in the world to do is lay on my couch and read.
Last night I finished Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future by Ashlee Vance. I didn’t expect to love it because I’m usually disappointed by biography written about people who are still alive.
I loved it and couldn’t put it down. I started it Sunday afternoon. A big biography typically stretches out over a week for me so gobbling it up in two evenings was pretty fast for me for a chunky (400+ page) biography.
I don’t know Elon Musk, but I know a lot of characters in the book. I’m friends with his brother Kimbal, who is prominently featured (I’ve invested in two of Kimbal’s companies – OneRiot, which wasn’t successful, and The Kitchen, which is doing incredibly well.) I’ve gotten a taste of Elon through my friendship with Kimbal, but I’m definitely not part of the social circuit the two travel in together, which has limited my frame of reference to random conversations with Kimbal after he’s come back from a SpaceX rocket launch.
In the past few years, Elon’s star as an entrepreneur has been burning bright. Vance’s book does what any good biography should – it covers the good and bad along the journey. Vance expresses his own skepticism and anxiety at the beginning, as his initial efforts to get Elon engaged in the book project didn’t work. Eventually a switch flipped, Elon engaged, Vance used it constructively.
From a purely factual point of view, I have no idea how accurate the book is. But many of the stories line up with whatever I remember from points in time. Some of the negatives are consistent with what I’d heard in the past, while others were new to me. Same with the positives. There’s plenty of broken glass along the way, including some that Elon has famously eaten while staring into the abyss.
Overall, the book paints a very comprehensive picture of someone who on the surface feels extremely complex, but simultaneously very internally consistent. This combination of complexity and consistency is by no means easy, nor does it result in a straightforward person or a clean path from past to present. I think that’s what I liked best about the book – Vance didn’t try to boil it all down, but let it flow with all the messiness that is an amazing life pushing the edge on all dimensions.
Highly recommended.
I hope you had a nice 4th of July yesterday. Amy and I hid out all day in Longmont, playing with the dogs, napping, and reading. As a result yesterday was a three book day.
One of them was Semi-Organic Growth: Tactics and Strategies Behind Google’s Success by George T. Geis. If you are a Google watcher, aspire to have you company acquired by Google some day, or just want to understand Google’s approach to acquisitions (which Geis calls “semi-organic growth”) this is a must read book that is well worth the money.
Geis covers a detailed history of Google’s acquisitions along with a framework for how to think about them. It’s comprehensive and well done. We were investors in several of the companies mentioned and Geis gets the details, and the general context, correct. While I knew most of the history from just paying attention over the years, I learned a few things.
There was one construct that bothered me – Geis’ use of the phrase “acqui-hire” and his effort to categorize acquisitions as acquihires, ACQUI-hires, acqui-HIRES, and ACQUI-HIRES. His goal was to use “acquihire” as a substitute for acquisition, while emphasizing the relative importance of the product/technology or people in decision to make an acquisition.
I don’t like the use of the dash in the phrase, so I stubbornly don’t use it, just like I don’t like the dash in the word startup. I also don’t really like the word, as it has morphed to mean too many different things. I regularly hear people talk about any type of acquisition as an acquihire, rendering the nuance of the word meaningless.
While I appreciate Geis trying to use it as a framework for categorizing each acquisition, I wish he’d just come up with something simpler, like a set of things Google was searching for when they made an acquisition. The four that are most relevant in my mind are product, technology, customers, and people.
Acquihire only really refers to one of these things, which is people. The earliest use of the phrase I could find was in 2005 in Rex Hammock’s post Google acquires(?) Dodgeball.com.
Google acquires(?) Dodgeball.com: But really…When a public company with a market cap of $64.1 billion “acquires” a two-person company, isn’t that more like a “hire” with a signing bonus?
Hammock called it an “Acq-hire” and defined it as:
Acqhire – When a large company “purchases” a small company with no employees other than its founders, typically to obtain some special talent or a cool concept. (See, also: NFL first round draft signing bonus; book publishing “advance” after publisher bidding-war.)
Acquihires quickly expanded to cover deals that were more than just the founders, but clearly only talent acquisitions. In acquihires, the products were quickly abandoned as the team that was acquired went to work on the acquirers products. Often this was built on top of the concept that the acquiree brought to the table, but the core product was rarely used.
We went through a phase where acquihires were positive ways for large companies to pick up talented teams to work on a specific thing that was important to the acquirer. Then we went through a phase where acquihire often referred to the acquisition of a failing startup, just as a way to give the team a soft landing. Then acquires started using the concept of acquihire to try to shift consideration away from the cap table and instead increase the amount of “retention consideration” going to the remaining employees, independent of the capitalization of the company. If you take it to its logical conclusion, acquihire starts to be a substitute for acquisition.
I’m not a fan of this as I think it’s confusing. I like Hammond’s definition with the extension that it can include more than just the founders. But it’s clearly an acquisition of the people, not of the product, technology, and customers of the company being acquired.
I pains me as an investor when entrepreneurs talk about their goal of being acquihired by a large company. I think your goal should be to build something a lot more important and valuable than simply the team being acquired.
I just pushed out a major update to the Startup Revolution site. This is the URL that I use for all the books I’ve been involved in and all the discussions around the books.
Take a look and give me feedback. Special bonus points for finding bugs.
On Saturday, I polished off Hot Seat: The Startup CEO Guidebook. I started it last weekend at the tail end of my Weekend Reading on Startup Communities but four books weren’t in me so I didn’t finish it.
It was excellent and is now on my “all startup CEOs must read” list. My recommended book list for startup CEOs is very long, but there are only three books on the must read list.
- Startup CEO: A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Business by Matt Blumberg
- The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers by Ben Horowitz
and now #3: Hot Seat: The Startup CEO Guidebook by Dan Shapiro.
All three are from experienced CEOs. Each is a delightful mix of stories, advice, and experiences. They are all contemporary, highly relevant, and fun to read. Regardless of the number of times you’ve been a startup CEO, from having started ten companies to being an aspiring CEO/founder, you will learn a lot from each of them.
I don’t think I’ve ever physically been in the same place as Ben, but we’ve exchanged emails in the past and he was willing to allow me to republish his classic essay The Struggle in the book I wrote with my wife Amy – Startup Life: Surviving and Thriving in a Relationship with an Entrepreneur. In contrast, I’ve known and worked with Matt since 2001 when I first invested in his company Return Path (well – it’s a little more complicated than just an investment – see my post Return Path Launches Email Intelligence from 2012 where I recounted some of the story.)
Return Path is an extraordinary company that I’m proud to have been involved with for the past 12 years. At our board meeting last week, Matt gave me and Fred Wilson our 12 year anniversary gift – a pair of red Return Path-branded Adidas sneakers. I still vividly remember the phone call Fred and I had where we cut a deal to merge two nascent companies – Veripost and Return Path – in what became Return Path. We cut a deal in 10 minutes – I offered up a 50/50 merger and Fred suggested he wanted a little more since Return Path had raised 3x the money Veripost had. I responded with “how about 55/45″ and Fred said “it’s a deal.”
Matt has become one of my best friends and I treasure every minute I get to spend with him.
Dan is a new friend. The first email I remember getting from him was from 9/3/13, titled My new project: Robot Turtles, and he acknowledges in Hot Seat that it’s the one time he spammed everyone in his address book. I don’t know why I was in his address book, so I asked Dan, and he dug up his very first email to me, which happened to be about the term sheet series that my partner Jason Mendelson and I wrote that lead to our book Venture Deals.
The first substantive email exchange we had was on 3/18/15, as a result of an intro from Ben Huh, the CEO of Cheezburger and another long time friend. We went back and forth on a rapid fire thread about Dan’s newest company Glowforge and the round he was starting to raise. We agreed to terms on a financing on 4/20/15 and closed a $9m financing with True Ventures on 5/8/15, at which point Amy and I went to Paris to celebrate (actually, we just went on vacation for one of our quarterly off the grid vacations.) There were a number of articles around the financing, but the best – and most thorough explanation of the company – was in Natasha Lomas‘s Techcrunch article Seattle’s Glowforge Is Building A Maker Machine To Challenge Amazon Prime.
Suffice it to say that in 75 days, I’ve gotten a good dose of Dan and am having an absolute blast working with him. He’s definitely got a healthy dose of evil genius combined with deep wisdom from being around the startup block a number of times. He’s tireless, intense, but delightfully funny and witty. He’s got extremely broad range as a CEO and entrepreneur, which comes through in his daily activities as well as his writing.
Which brings me back to Hot Seat. Like Matt and Ben’s books, it’s very fast paced. The chapters are short, written in first person, and easy to read. He’s not shy about calling things out clearly, including his own crazy experiences, especially the things he totally fucked up or had no idea about when he first encountered them. His examples are great, including some from mutual friends including Rand Fishkin and Ben Huh. The book is well organized and easy to dip in and out of. He flogs Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist, which I put in the flattering special bonus category. And – he’s got great footnotes in each chapter which give you a special dose of his sense of humor.
I hope to get to work with Dan for a long time on Glowforge. But, regardless, I know I’ll be regularly recommending Hot Seat: The Startup CEO Guidebook to every CEO I know.
Amy and I had a very quiet weekend hanging out with each other, Brooks the Wonder Dog, and Super Cooper the Pooper. We like Memorial Day weekend – it always feels like the beginning of summer to us.
I read three books over the weekend. Since I was home, rather than reading on my Kindle, I grabbed some books from the infinite pile of physical books I have in my office. New stuff shows up every week – mostly business and entrepreneurship books, and the occasional “I think you’d like this” book. In addition, whenever I want something that isn’t on the Kindle, I just buy the physical book.
So this weekend was about startup communities with a bonus book on the startup visa tossed in for good measure.
The first was The Making of Silicon Valley: A One Hundred Year Renaissance. This book was written in 1995 and published by the Santa Clara Valley Historical Association so the updated subtitle should be “A One Hundred Year Renaissance – 20 Years Later.” Anyone interested in Silicon Valley, what it means, and how it came together should read this book carefully from cover to cover. There is so much shortened history out there, where the most extensive typically only goes back to Shockley, Fairchild, The Traitorous Eight, and the founding of Intel. The history is so much richer, the one page stories about the companies the shaped each era are just awesome, and the perspective of what 120 years really means for a the startup community that is undeniably the most robust in the world right now is very powerful. It also ends just as the rise of the Internet begins, so it’s the long arc of Silicon Valley is not overshadowed by the last twenty years.
The next book I read was Screw the Valley: A Coast-to-Coast Tour of America’s New Tech Startup Culture. I don’t like the title – it’s too intentionally provocative for my tastes because I’m not anti-Silicon Valley but rather pro-building startup communities everywhere – but the book is excellent. Timothy Sprinkle interviewed me early in his process and then set off on an almost one year trip across the US where he spent real time in Detroit, New York, Las Vegas, Austin, Kansas City, Raleigh-Durham, and Boulder. He writes extremely deep stories about each startup community, along with strengths, weaknesses, and things that are going on that shape them. I show up in a number of times, both personally along with references to my book Startup Communities, and Timothy does a nice job of using some of the concepts from Startup Communities to draw out major themes in each city. This is a great snapshot in time – right now – to show how startup communities develop anywhere.
The last book I read was The Startup Visa: Key to Job Growth & Economic Prosperity in America. Tahmina Watson wrote an extremely clear and easy to process book on the problem of the startup visa, why the US immigration system and visa process doesn’t work for entrepreneurs, why this matters, and makes recommendations about what to do about it. She also gives a nice history of the various bills in Congress, going back to S.3029 in 2010 (Lugar, Kerry) titled “The Startup Visa.” It’s disappointing that it’s five years later and Congress can’t seem to get a bill on the Startup Visa passed – or anything on immigration for that matter – but that’s life in government.
If you want a real punch line to the whole situation, read the short article from the NY Times Magazine – Debunking the Myth of the Job-Stealing Immigrant by Adam Davidson. Amy handed it to me on Monday and I said “I don’t really feel like reading another thing on immigration because I’m so annoyed by our lack of progress.” But then I did, and it was a great read.
As of today The Intel Trinity,The: How Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore, and Andy Grove Built the World’s Most Important Company wins my award for best business book of 2015.
I got an Apple ][ for my bar mitzvah in 1978. Ever since then I’ve been fascinated with computers and the computer industry. I obviously missed the 1950s and 1960s, but the history of that time period has deeply informed my perspective, especially the definition of Moore’s law by Gordon Moore in 1965.
I work with many first time and young entrepreneurs who know the phrase “Moore’s Law” but know nothing about the origin story of Intel or the history of how Moore’s Law built the base of an industry that we continue to build on. I also know many experienced entrepreneurs who seem to have forgotten that the phenomenon we experience around innovation, disruption, innovators vs. incumbents, and radical shifts in the underlying dynamics of markets is nothing new.
If you fall into this category, as hard as it may be to acknowledge, get a copy of The Intel Trinity and read it from cover to cover.
Michael S. Malone has written another excellent book (he’s one of my favorite tech history writers) that does more than document the history of Intel and its impact on the universe. The best part of this book is understanding the characters of Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore, and Andy Grove, especially how they worked together as early co-founders (Noyce / Moore), an initial management troika (Noyce/Moore/Grove), and the subsequent leadership of Intel for 30 years. It’s a powerful example of founding entrepreneurs and their leadership of a company from inception, through several near death events, to sustainable market dominance.
It also gives anyone who says “this time is different” some perspective. Just remember, “All this has happened before, and all of it will happen again.”
I first discovered David Eagleman in a 2011 New Yorker article titled The Possibilian that Amy had torn off and put in my “to read” pile. It was a fascinating long article on his research, life, and ideas about time and death especially around the question, “Why does time slow down when we fear for our lives?”
In the section about studying drummers (yup – it’s a wide ranging article), Brian Eno is introduced. I’ve been intrigued with Eno ever since college when I listened to his Ambient albums over and over.
“Eno first met Eagleman two years ago, after a publisher he knew sent him a book of Eagleman’s short stories, called “Sum.” Modelled on the cerebral fiction of Borges and Calvino, “Sum” is a natural outgrowth of Eagleman’s scientific concerns—another spin of the lazy Susan that has circled back to the subject of time. Each of its forty chapters is a kind of thought experiment, describing a different version of the afterlife. Eagleman establishes a set of initial conditions, then lets the implications unfold logically.”
Yup – that got me. I downloaded Sum and read it. A spin of the lazy Susan is a great metaphor for it as each short story is a few pages long, totally random relative to the story before and after, and each about a different view of the afterlife.
While a few of them are “meh”, most are intriguing, surprising, depressing, unsettling, or powerful. It’s one of those books that stimulated me in a totally different way than normal. It wasn’t philosophy, but it wasn’t fiction, but it wasn’t science, nor was it science fiction. While defying categorization, it stimulated a lot of thought.
And, if you’d like a nice five minutes with Eagleman and Colbert, it’s a fun one. “There’s someone in my head but it’s not me” followed by “Are you high?” Nothing like a Pink Floyd reference by a neuroscientist.
As a huge reader, I love the recent plethora of startup / entrepreneurship books. I’m involved in three new ones – one that I’ve co-authored, one that FG Press has published, and one where I’m part of a Kickstarter campaign. I encourage you to grab each of them.
The first is Startup Opportunities: Know When To Quit Your Day Job. I wrote it with Sean Wise, a professor at Ryerson University in Toronto. It’s aimed at the first time entrepreneur or soon to be entrepreneur who is asking herself the question, “Is this a good idea?” or “Is this an opportunity I should dive all in on?” I’ll be writing a lot more about this on my blog in the coming weeks. For now, go get a copy of Startup Opportunities.
The second is Bend The Curve: Accelerate Your Startup’s Success, written by Andrew Razeghi and part of the Techstars series of books. Andrew is a professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and is involved in Techstars. Bend The Curve includes a huge amount of information useful to any existing startup and I’m excited about what Andrew has put together. I’ve got a section in the book on board of directors and you’ll recognize many other contributors to this book.
The last is Eric Ries’ new project, The Leaders Guide, which just launched on Kickstarter. One of the award levels is a day in Boulder with me, time with Techstars, several of my portfolio companies, a night at the St. Julien Hotel, and dinner with me at Kasa Sushi (my favorite sushi place in Boulder.) Oh, and you get a bunch of other stuff, including a ton of Eric’s Lean Startup work, access to the new community he’s creating, and special bonus lean startup content.
When I started my first company in 1987, there was almost no information on being an entrepreneur, starting, or scaling a company. While there were business biographies and lots of ego books, almost everything was about management and leadership of large companies. It’s awesome to see how that has changed and I’m glad to be a tiny part of it.
As my newest book, Startup Opportunities: Know When To Quit Your Day Job, has begun shipping on Kindle (order now and give me feedback, leave a review) I’ve been thinking a lot about writing lately. Startup Opportunities took 18 months to write and most of the slowness was me, not my co-author Sean Wise. It was an interesting struggle to get done which I’ll write about at another time.
I love to write. It’s the way I put my thoughts together. I’ve never really understood the phrase “I’m thinking about it” – I never consciously sit and think, but when I’m writing my brain is often doing the job of thinking.
I also love to read. It’s the way I put my thoughts together and learn new things. I’ve never been an auditory learner. I remember sitting in classes at MIT, listening to the professor lecture, and understanding almost nothing. But then, when I sat down and read the course notes, or whatever reading material was assigned, it all became clear. I’m sure the verbal stuff entered my brain somehow, but it didn’t really turn into something I understood completely until I was able to sit and read.
Fortunately, I’m a fast reader. And after writing millions of words, I’ve become a fast writer. When I’m asked how I read or write so fast, I have a simple answer – practice.
I continuously read essays that talk about the end of books. The end of the publishing industry. How humans are reading less. Crap like that. While it makes for nice self-referential essays in magazines like The Atlantic, or books by authors about how Google is making us stupid, I think it’s all wrong.
I think the fundamental thing that is changing is the distribution of written information. This is nothing new – it’s been going on since the Egyptians created the writing systems 4,500 years ago. And, it is going to get really interesting in the next twenty years as humans become much more integrated with machines, as I’m completely ready to jack in to the Internet full-time.
When I think of the different forms I read and write, it ranges from what I call “the long form” (books) to “the nano-form” (tweets). On a daily basis, I consume books, essays (posts on Medium, magazine articles), blogs, emails, Facebook posts, Tweetstorms, and Tweets. While I don’t use Yo anymore, you can bring it all the way down to the human-nano level.
When I look at the activity in my Goodreads feed, it’s clear to me that the book is not dead. Many of the people I respect, follow, and have relationships with are deep thinkers and love to read – both for learning and recreation. Sure, the book is competing with a lot of other media types, but reading (and writing) seems to persist quite successfully.
Is the book really dead? In 20 years, will we still be calling them books, or will they be something else, in the same way that no one under the age of 10 knows what a record is.