Tag: book
I’m continuing my weekend reading goal of a book on racial equity. Last week was Kingonomics: Twelve Innovative Currencies for Transforming Your Business and Life Inspired by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. by Rodney Sampson who I’m partnering with on the #RacialEquityEcosystemPledge.
Yesterday I read Ijeoma Oluo’s So you want to talk about race. It was excellent.
My goal with reading these books is to bring a beginners mind to racial equity, allow myself to feel uncomfortable while reading, and let the impact of what I read over the summer accumulate, with a hope that I can personally eliminate many of my unconscious biases, unhelpful behavior, while unlearning (or challenging my own) perspectives that I’ve built up over my 54 years as a White person in America.
Several of my Black friends recommended Ijeoma’s book as one that I should read early on. As book #3 on my weekend reading, I’m glad I put this at the front of the list. It has 17 chapters – each which answers a very specific question about race. Following is the list.
- Is it really about race?
- What is racism?
- What if I talk about race wrong?
- Why am I always being told to “check my privilege?”
- What is intersectionality and why do I need it?
- Is police brutality really about race?
- How can I talk about affirmative action?
- What is the school-to-prison pipeline?
- What can’t I say the “N” word?
- What is cultural appropriation?
- Why can’t I touch your hair?
- What are microaggressions?
- Why are our students so angry?
- What is the model minority myth?
- But what if I hate Al Sharpton?
- I just got called racist, what do I do now?
- Talking is great, but what else can I do?
A day after George Floyd was murdered, I called a Black friend and asked, “what are two things you are involved in that I can immediately support with time and money.”
He had a response that I then heard echoed in slightly different ways in several conversations. The composite is below:
Thank you so much for approaching things this way. I’m so tired of explaining to White people what I’m going through, what I go through every day, and why so many things in America are horrible when you aren’t White. It’s not my responsibility to do that anymore, and I’m glad you are trying to get involved, rather than ask me to explain what’s going on.
Ijeoma’s book was extremely clear and enlightening on all of these questions. Near the end, there was a paragraph in the chapter “Talking is great, but what else can I do?” that really hit home.
“Talk. Please talk and talk and talk some more. But also act. Act now, because people are dying now in this unjust system. How many lives have been ground by racial prejudice and hate? How many opportunities have we already lost? Act and talk and learn and fuck up and learn some more and act again and do better. We have to do this all at once. We have to learn and fight at the same time. Because people have been waiting far too long for their chance to live as equals in this society.“
I strongly recommend Ijeoma Oluo’s So you want to talk about race.
I took a digital sabbath yesterday. I ended up doing three things.
- Read The End of October by Lawrence Wright
- Took a nap
- Watched three episodes of Breaking Bad
I feel so much better than I did at the end of the day Friday. After I finish this blog post, I’m going to participate in the Emerge Family Virtual 5k.
The End of October was intense. It’s the story of a modern day pandemic. It’s fiction, but deeply researched. I have no idea how much was modified to suit the actual reality, but given the time frame for publishing most books, my guess is “not that much.”
I was shocked by how close the ramp-up was to what has actually happened during the Covid crisis. The pandemic movies have similar ramp-ups, but other than Contagion have happy Hollywood endings. In contrast, many books do not. There is no happy ending in The End of October.
Wright did an amazing job of showing the collision of politics and science, economics and health, and top-down control vs. distributed collaboration. Some authors spend too much time “telling.” Wright just used his story to show, and show, and show.
We are still early on in the Covid-19 pandemic – probably 25% of the way through Wright’s book. The darkness in the last 75% is a fundamental warning for us in one way this can go. While I’m ultimately optimistic, I’m not at all comfortable with or confident in much of anything right now.
The End of October is a dose of heavy medicine for anyone who thinks “this is no big deal” or “this is all over” or “this is heading on a good path that can’t be derailed.” I’m not suggesting any of these things are true or false, but rather recommending the book as perspective on the bad path that might be in front of us.
It’s a beautiful day in Colorado. The animals are everywhere, enjoying spring. Amy and I are in our pajamas, experiencing a typical Sunday morning. But, we are aware that the overall context we are living in is very different than what we are used to.
My next book is The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History
Jason Mendelson and I recently published the 4th Edition of Venture Deals: Be Smarter Than Your Lawyer and Venture Capitalist.
The book now has three forewords – one by each of Fred Wilson (USV), James Park (Fitbit), and Dick Costolo (now 01 Advisors, then Twitter).
The 1st edition had 13 chapters. We are now up to 19.
- The Players
- Preparing for Fundraising
- How to Raise Money
- Overview of the Term Sheet
- Economic Terms of the Term Sheet
- Control Terms
- Other Terms of the Term Sheet
- Convertible Debt
- The Capitalization Table
- Crowdfunding
- Venture Debt
- How Venture Capital Funds Work
- Negotiation Tactics
- Raising Money the Right Way
- Issues at Different Financing Stages
- Letters of Intent: The Other Term Sheet
- How to Engage an Investment Banker
- Why Do Term Sheets Even Exist?
- Legal Things Every Entrepreneur Should Know
The new chapters in this edition are 11. Venture Debt (with help from SVB), and 17. How to Engage an Investment Banker (with help from Golding Partners).
We also significantly updated Chapter 2: Preparing for Fundraising and Chapter 19: Legal Things Every Entrepreneur Should Know (with help from Cooley).
As with each edition, we cleaned up stuff throughout the book.
Finally, we updated the website which is now at VentureDeals.com.
For everyone who has read the book, given us feedback, used it in a course, or recommended it to someone, thank you!
Amy and I didn’t feel like taking a Christmas or New Year’s vacation this year so we just hung around Boulder, worked, and did our thing. We then decamped to Mexico last week for warmth, sun, beach, and books. News flash: there are a lot fewer people at a fancy resort in Mexico in the third week of January.
It was a good reading week.
How to Raise an Adult: Break Free of the Overparenting Trap and Prepare Your Kid for Success: We don’t have kids, but a friend recommended this. I decided to read it to see if any of it applied to being an investor or board member in a company. Yup – a bunch of it was spot on. After reading it, I’m still glad I don’t have kids.
The Heap: A Novel: This one ended up on my Kindle because of my weekly perusal of the NY Times Book Review. The premise intrigued me. A 500 story tall building collapses in the desert and a community develops around it to excavate it. Once it got rolling, it moved quickly, but the interwoven historical backstory became a little tedious. But, for a first novel, it’s a great effort.
Veil: I got to read a draft of Eliot Peper‘s new book. Wowza. Elliot has turned into an incredible writer who totally dominates a near-term science fiction novel.
Atomic Accidents: A History of Nuclear Meltdowns and Disasters: From the Ozark Mountains to Fukushima: Yum yum. Todd Vernon pointed me at this one. It was long, chewing, and spectacular. After watching Chernobyl on HBO, I’ve become fascinated with nuclear energy. Unfortunately, it’s impossible to get a short course on it and I’ve thought about going back to MIT to get a degree in Course 22. While that’s a pretty steep hill to climb, I’m just enjoying a bunch of books for now. And yes, count me on the side of more nuclear.
Uncanny Valley: A Memoir: Loved it. Fantastic. Go get it right now. I particularly enjoyed how the author called people and companies out without naming them. This book nourished my inner Silicon Valley cynic.
Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones. This one was recommended by Katie Elliott. I was hoping it was about nuclear energy, but it wasn’t. Amy looked over my shoulder while I was reading it and said, “James Clear’s book. You don’t need to read it because you do all that stuff already.” I read it anyway, one page at a time.
I sense an annual mid-January off-the-grid vacation in a warm place for the rest of my time on this planet.
I stayed up late last night finishing Lost and Wanted. If you are a reader, get this book in physical form. It’s worth savoring.
Amy bought this book for me last week. When I asked her why, she belted out a stream of words: “MIT, female professor, the afterlife, sexual harassment, physics, racism, women.”
She then said, “Fiction is a good way to access complicated topics.” This is a recurring dynamic in our relationship, as we often use shared fiction to discuss complex topics. Amy hasn’t read the book yet, so it’s now on the top of her infinite pile of books to read.
Whenever we overlap reading books, even if they are separated by time, I have to be careful about what I say. The other day, as Amy was grinding through the first 100 pages of The Three-Body Problem, she said, “I’m not sure I’m going to finish this.” I asked a simple question, “Have you reached the Trisolarans and their eleven dimensions.” She responded, “AEEEEEEEKKKK are you ruining it for me?” I said, “Hang in there – the first 100 pages are hard.” She finished it that day and the next day I heard her utter, “Holy Shit – the Droplet!”
Amy’s going to love Nell Freudenberger‘s writing. It’s remarkable to me that Freudenberger didn’t know any of the physics in this book before she wrote it. It’s beautifully done, extremely accessible, and very meta to the underlying story.
My reading in 2019 took me far and wide. I’m happy with my shift to the infinite pile of physical stuff when I’m home, and my Kindle when I’m on the road, as I feel like I’m getting a better variety this way.
Happy almost New Year.
29 years of nightmares. Over 10,000 nights in a row. That’s hard to fathom.
David R. Mellor, the Senior Director of Grounds for the Boston Red Sox Baseball team, experienced this. His eloquent memoir, One Base at a Time: How I Survived PTSD and Found My Field of Dreams, takes the reader on a very complicated journey, with extremely obvious physical pain intermingled with less apparent emotional pain.
David describes it amazingly well in the summary on his website.
For 29 years, every night I had one to five night terrors/nightmares and was scared to go to sleep. During that time in my life I was also having flashbacks often triggered if I heard a revving car engine, squealing tires, the smell of car exhaust, or the aroma McDonald’s french fries. At the time, I didn’t understand what my symptoms were or how best to treat them. I was too ashamed and scared to ask for help.
A chance reading of a magazine article set the course for treatment of my Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). I was at my doctor’s office to receive acupuncture for pain management and looking for something to read during the treatment. A Smithsonian magazine caught my eye because it contained an article about a new facility treating veterans with PTSD (see article here). My oldest daughter was studying psychology and interning at the newly formed Home Base Program at Massachusetts General Hospital and I thought the article might give me some insight into what she was learning. As I read the article I realized I suffered from most of the symptoms it described as relating to PTSD. No doctor had ever asked me or my wife about PTSD. I always thought only active duty military members or veterans could have PTSD from the horrors of war. Now I know that anyone can get PTSD from a life threatening trauma. As a result, I don’t want other people who are dealing with PTSD to suffer in silence like I did. I tried my best to protect my family: I tried to keep my symptoms a deeply guarded secret because I didn’t want to burden them. Now I know that I wasn’t able to protect and shield them from my PTSD symptoms, as through treatment I have learned that PTSD affects the entire family.
A tragedy of his story is that it took him many years before realizing he had PTSD. Soon after he started getting treatment for PTSD, his nightmares stopped.
After finishing the book, I went down the David R. Mellor rabbit hole on the web. This ESPN video segment with his dog Drago is powerful.
As is this one.
David’s story is incredibly inspiring for anyone, but especially powerful if you suffer from PTSD or any related mental health issues.
I love how David ends his bio:
Many people have told me they think I’m one of the most unlucky people in the world since I’ve been hit by a car 3 times and had 43 surgeries and PTSD to name a few things. But I strongly disagree; I think I’m one of the luckiest people in the world. It’s up to us how we turn our challenges into opportunities to not only help ourselves but help others too.
In my book, there is no stigma here. Only life.
As Amy and I settle into our time in Homer, we spent a lot of last weekend (and the evenings) reading. We don’t have a TV up here, so our lying around entertainment is reading with some bonus knitting time for Amy.
I’ve been working my way through the books at the upcoming Authors and Innovators Business Ideas Festival and got through three of them so far. I also read a near-final draft of John Minnihan’s upcoming book and The Impossible Long Run: My Journey to Becoming Ultra by Janet Patkowa.
But, the best book of last weekend was Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber by Mike Isaac. It’s the first major book about the story of Uber, by a New York Times writer who has covered tech (and Uber) for a long time.
It’s incredibly fast-paced. It’s in the same category of a number of other “first major book about an emergent important company by a journalist” including Bad Blood (Theranos) by John Carreyrou and The Facebook Effect by David Kirkpatrick.
While I knew over 80% of the content in the book, having it strung together in a time sequence, with emphasis on key activities that happened at the same time, or influenced other future actions, was critical to the narrative and extremely well done by Isaac. While some of it had a reporter flavor, most were non-judgmental and let the activities stand on their own. Periodically Isaac would nudge you toward a conclusion, but most of the time he let you take your view where you wanted from the context provided.
It’ll be interesting to see where Uber is in a decade. In the meantime, reflecting on how it got to where it is today is fascinating.
Amy and I arrived in Homer this evening for some time in a different place. We are TV-free up here, so that means, well, books.
She fell asleep early so I finished off The Bookish Life of Nina Hill which I had started several weeks ago but got distracted and read a few other things. The distraction was more a function of being in Boulder, surrounded by physical books which I read, in contrast to being in Homer with my Kindle, where I simply picked up on the last thing I had been reading.
This was a fun book. The protagonist, Nina, loves books, schedules “nothing” for Thursday nights so she can go home and read, and works in a bookstore. While she gets along with people, her favorite thing in the world is to be home alone reading a book. Sound like someone you know?
It covers Los Angeles, books, romance, endless book and movie references, trivia quiz competitions, books, a cat named Phil, a recently discovered family, and David Hasselhoff. Like good contemporary fiction, it moves quickly, the protagonist (Nina) is super-awesome-hilarious-complicated, and time disappears for a while and then suddenly the book ends.
But the backstory of the book is even more entertaining. The author, Abbi Waxman, shares the last name with David Waxman, who is a partner at TenOneTen Ventures. Oh, and they are married. While I’ve never met Abbi, I’ve known David since the late 1990s when I was on the board of PeoplePC and he was a co-founder. Foundry is an LP in TenOneTen and it’s been fun to work with David again after a long hiatus.
I knew, somewhere in the back of my mind, that David’s wife, like my wife Amy, was a writer. It popped up a few times over the years, but it never stuck in my brain. Over the summer, when Amy and I were having dinner with Nick Grouf (David’s co-founder at PeoplePC) and Shana Eddy, it came up again when one of Nick or Shana (I can’t remember which) recommended The Bookish Life of Nina Hill. Dots were again connected, and the circle now included Amy.
On the plane today, as Amy was reading my Kindle over my shoulder, she said “didn’t someone recommend that book to us?” which then prompted a fun conversation about Nick, Shawn, David, and the mysterious Abbi who I hope to someday meet.
While that backstory was merely a lame approximation of the fun tangling of characters in Abbi’s book, it seemed fitting to unroll it that way.
If you like fiction, books, Los Angeles, stories about interesting characters, and a few plot twists, go grab The Bookish Life of Nina Hill.
And, just like that, I’m off to bed …
I’m keynoting the Authors and Innovators Business Ideas Festival on 10/24/19 at the UMASS campus in Newton, MA.
As a writer, I’m excited to see events like this happening. When I got the invite from Larry Gennari, I was delighted that it overlapped with a Wellesley College board meeting that Amy was attending. So, while we won’t be together (she’ll be in Wellesley and I’ll be in Newton), we’ll be near each other.
The event is free so if it’s interesting to you, register here.
The other authors presenting are:
- Donna Hicks (Harvard Univesity): Leading with Dignity
- Gerald Kate (Boston College): The Technology Fallacy
- Dan Albert (Cox Automotive): Are We There Yet?
- Tom Davenport (Babson College): The AI Advantage
- Gary Pisano (Harvard Business School): Creative Construction
- Jonathan Gruber (MIT): Jump-Starting America
- Karen Mills (Harvard Business School): Fintech, Small Business & the American Dream
- Jules Pieri (The Grommet): How We Make Stuff Now
I just bought all the books on Amazon so my Kindle is extra loaded up for my trip to Alaska at the end of the week.