Tag: book
Book: The Red Web: The Struggle Between Russia’s Digital Dictators and the New Online Revolutionaries
The Red Web: The Struggle Between Russia’s Digital Dictators and the New Online Revolutionaries was one of two books I read this weekend (the other was Brain on Fire: My Month of Madness).
It was outstanding. I made it the August book club book for my dad and my brother. And then, this morning, I woke up to the following headlines.
- Putin bans VPNs to stop Russians accessing prohibited websites
- Apple Removes Apps That Allowed China Users to Get Around Filters
This shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone who is paying attention. There is now a long history of governments trying to control the Internet. One approach over government is censoring the Internet; another is weaponizing it.
The Red Web covers Russia’s history around the Internet starting during the Cold War with a focus on the last twenty years. While Russia had a slow start, the Internet played a big part in both sides of things – the increasingly free flow of information combined with government control over information.
I believe we are at the very beginning of a new version of this battle. Since the beginning of humans, information – and the control of information – has been one of the key dynamics of power. At least we don’t need to use ravens anymore. But, depending on which country you are in, they might be a good backup plan.
On May 23rd, I got an email from one of my favorite sci-fi writers (and close friend) Eliot Peper. It was titled “My very first scifi short story” and said:
“David Cohen shared the idea that inspired this story. I drafted it last week. Thought you might enjoy and would love to hear what you think.”
I was in the middle of grinding through my email backlog, so this stopped me in my tracks as I spent the next 15 minutes reading Eliot’s new short story. The first few sentences grabbed me.
“Kamran Tir gazed into the mirror and confronted the fact that his genes had betrayed him. His thick dark hair was carefully groomed, his olive cheeks clean shaven. For someone who worked late so often, he was in reasonable shape.
The problem was his eyes.”
It was stunning. I’ve been reading and responding to Eliot’s writing since he wrote his very first book in 2014 titled Uncommon Stock. It’s a great example to me of the development of a writer and the effort required for mastery of the craft.
The backstory of how this came together, is a fun one. Eliot put it up on Amazon in the From the Author section, but it’s worth repeating to warm you up to the story.
A few months ago, I received an email from my friend David Cohen, “I’ve had an idea for a book for a while. Given what’s going on in America, I thought I’d send it to you because I sure as hell am never going to write it.” David went on to present a thought experiment: what if discrimination targeted eye color instead of skin color or any other trait?
Now, I’ll let you in on a little secret. If you start writing books, your friends will start sending you ideas. Strangers too. You’ll get very good at letting people down easy. After all, you have your own dreams to bring to life.
But David’s premise stuck with me, lurking in the shadows of my subconscious and rearing its head at opportunity moments. It would visit me as I took the dog on a walk or did the dishes. It made me think of my opa whose entire family was murdered by the Nazis and my oma who risked her life every day to fight in the Dutch Resistance. Every time the idea resurfaced, it took on weight and texture, building up creative momentum until I had no choice but to write it.
Speculative fiction has a secret superpower. Imaginative stories invite us to experience plausible realities unlike our own. In doing so, they empower us to confront the myriad hidden assumptions we take for granted in our day-to-day lives. We cannot explore new worlds and return unchanged.
True Blue is a story about the absurdity of discrimination, the importance of being true to yourself, and our irrepressible capacity for overcoming injustice. It’s a story about standing up instead of standing by. It’s a story about finding the courage to stop caring what other people think.
These are truths we need to keep in mind now more than ever. Oh, and next time someone sends me an idea, I promise to pay attention.
Eliot just released True Blue on the Kindle. If you have Kindle Unlimited, it’s free, otherwise, it’s $2.99.
I’ve written this post in the style Geraldine used in her book. As you read this, assume that I’ve failed miserably at it and Geraldine is 1000x funnier and more clever than I am.
I had a weekend of books. Amy’s cold drifted over into my part of the world so I slept a lot, ran a little to try to clear out the goo in my head, and read until I feel asleep again. And I ate nachos, several times, which I never do at home.
Last week I ordered 51 hardcover copies of Geraldine DeRuiter‘s new book, All Over the Place: Adventures in Travel, True Love, and Petty Theft, from Amazon. I did it to celebrate that my 51st year on this planet coincided with the publication of Geraldine’s first book. I brought two of the books home – one for me, and one for Amy. I think I’ll make a chair out of the other 49.
Geraldine writes a popular travel blog called The Everywhereist. Amy has characterized it as “pee in your pants funny” which I’ve never actually experienced, but I think I understand. Geraldine’s book doesn’t disappoint, as I wandered to the bathroom several times while consuming the 274 pages on Saturday. I laughed out loud a lot, but I also drank two bottles of Pellegrino in an attempt to stay hydrated.
All Over the Place is a memoir masquerading as a travel book. Geraldine starts off strong with a disclaimer which points you at what the journey of this book will actually be.
“So, if there is any advice I could dispense, it would be this: it’s absolutely incredible, the things you can learn from not having a clue about where you’re going – lessons that emerge after making a wrong turn, or saying the wrong thing, or even after accidentally doing something right. And in my case, this was all undertaken not in the company of a new love, but one that has enough miles on it to circle the earth three, maybe four times, is now sufficiently jet lagged, and lost its pants somewhere over Greenland.”
If you know Geraldine’s husband Rand Fishkin, you may recognize him as the not a new love. I learned a lot about Geraldine and Rand in this book, including their experience with poop and toilets, but is gender reversed from the experiences Amy and I have had (hint: Rand and Amy are the heroes of those particular stories.)
The chapter titles give you a feel for what you are in for:
- Marry Someone Who Will Hel You Deal with Your Shit (see above paragraph)
- Home Is Where Your MRI Is
- The Contents of My Mother’s Carry-On Look Like Evidence from a Prison Riot
- Life Lessons from a Three-Hundred-Year-Old Dead Guy and His Boring Clock
- Gelato Is an Excellent Substance in Which to Drown Your Sorrows
I think y’all know I’m a big fan of chocolate gelato. Which is what I went out and got after I had an extremely uncomfortable phone call with Geraldine after realizing that she’d found out that FG Press wasn’t going to publish her book by noticing that we’d taken her off the FG Press website as a future author. Of course, this was totally my fault, as I’d told the FG Press gang a month or so earlier that I’d call Geraldine to tell her we were shutting FG Press down and, as a result, wouldn’t be publishing her, or any other, books. I apologized 49 times, went out and found a chair to sit in, and had a chocolate gelato. I think she eventually accepted my apology, kept working on her book, and found a serious publisher (PublicAffairs/Hachette) who did an awesome job with All Over the Place.
I’m extremely proud Geraldine. Her first book is extremely true to her writing, her soul, and her soulmate. I learned a lot while reading it, and not just about Geraldine and Rand, but about life.
If you have purchased the hardcopy edition of Venture Deals 3rd Edition, you can now buy the Kindle version also for $2.99 via the Amazon Kindle Matchbook program.
Jason and I have been asking our publisher (Wiley) for this for a while and we are psyched they’ve agreed to it. It came about after a number of you asked us if we were going to do this, so thanks to y’all for pushing us on it.
If you are a regular reader of this blog, you know that my dad Stan is one of my best friends. So is my brother Daniel. Over the last decade we’ve been doing regular things together like an annual trip (me/Dad, Daniel/Dan) and monthly dinners (me/Daniel).
Last month I proposed a new idea – a monthly book club between the three of us. We’d rotate choosing the book of the month. We’d read it separately but talk about it over the course of the month. Then, the next person would pick the next book. We’d iterate on the process – maybe we’ll end up doing a real book club video call for 30 minutes once a month to discuss, maybe we won’t.
I started off with Ben Mezrich’s newest book – The 37th Parallel: The Secret Truth Behind America’s UFO Highway. I’m a huge Ben Mezrich fan and UFOs are fun. Unfortunately, this wasn’t one of Ben’s better books. It was scattered with lots of time shifting back and forth. I never became entranced by the main characters and the backstory was unexpectedly shallow.
Our book club comments were short.
“It was not Ben’s best book. In fact, it was one of his worst. I felt like he mailed it in.” – Brad
“I am almost finished but it is downright boring. It going from one UFO incident to another. Big deal. Brad you are excused.” – Stan
“yep, read it in Cabo. Agree with your reviews.” – Daniel
Oh well – sometimes you start off strong, sometimes not. Daniel was up next and he choose Dark Matter by Blake Crouch. I loved it when I read it in August and I’m going to get to enjoy it again in January!
I had a great digital sabbath yesterday with Amy and my friends Dave and Maureen. I had a cold so I took a three hour nap in the middle of the day. For the rest of the day, I sat around in my PJs.
I read Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle. Amy and I loved Season 1 of the Amazon series but struggled with the first episode on Season 2 (I’m sure we’ll fight through it and watch it this week.) Since we got off to a slow start on Season 2, I decided to read the book, which I had resisted reading because I didn’t want it to confuse the TV series with the book.
Not surprisingly, I thought the book was better than the TV show. Since we loved Season 1, that’s high praise for the book. I’m a huge PKD fan and have been gradually reading all of his books.
I’ve started to be more open about my potential support of the theory that there are an infinite number of parallel universes. Reading books that cover different parallel universes, like the one where the Germans and the Japanese win World War II and split the US with the Japanese controlling the “Pacific States of America”, the Germans occupying the East Coast, and the Rocky Mountain States being a neutral buffer zone between the two countries, is – well – mind-bending.
It’s haunting, it’s challenging, it’s upsetting, and it’s enlightening.
In the evening, we chose Thirteen Days as our Christmas Eve movie. As the US and Russia walk to the edge of nuclear war during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, we sat rapt for two and a half hours even though I’ve seen this movie before. I woke up this morning to World War Three, By Mistake in the New Yorker, talking about the continued existential risk of nuclear war because of a computer error, system failure, or a hack. As part of that, I discovered that there is a Windows for Submarines (get it?) product from 2007 from Microsoft that is still in use today.
If there are an infinite number of universes, imagine what has happened in them.
Venture Deals v3 (the third edition) is now shipping in both hardcover and Kindle.
If you are looking for a last minute holiday gift for your favorite entrepreneur (or lawyer, VC, or angel investor), we’ve got you covered.
Jason and I wrote the first edition of Venture Deals in 2011. When we were updating it for v3, I read every single word several times. It’s pretty cool how much it has held up over the last five years and we are delighted that it continues to be at the top of the Amazon bestseller list for Venture Capital books.
We added some new things in v3 and fixed a few things that were either unclear or wrong. This includes:
- A new foreword from Fred Wilson of USV.
- A second new foreword from James Park (Fitbit CEO).
- Updates to Chapter 1: The Players
- Additions to Chapter 8: Convertible Debt
- A new chapter (now 9) on Crowdfunding
- A section on Corporate Venture Capital and Strategic Investors
- A new chapter (now 15) on Why Do Term Sheets Even Exist?
- A new and very improved Glossary
- Lots of little edits everywhere
- New back cover blurbs from Mark Suster (Upfront), Bill Aulet (MIT), Heidi Roizen (DFJ), Brad Bernthal (CU Boulder), Jeff Harbach (Kauffman Fellows), and Jeff Clavier (SoftTech VC) to go along with the new cover design
Jason and I finally sprung for the VentureDeals.com domain and moved all the old AskTheVC posts over. We’ve got a lot of cleanup and updating to do on the site – that’ll happen over the next month. Then, around the end of January we’ll start rolling out the teaching guide to Venture Deals on the site along with a bunch of ancillary materials for this.
For everyone who has supported us along the way, either by purchasing a book, giving us feedback, or just helping us get smarter about doing deals, thank you.
I had a great digital sabbath today. I was wiped out from the week so I slept until 10am, had breakfast, and then crawled back into bed with Amy until 2pm.
I spent the afternoon on the couch reading March by John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, and Nate Powell. It’s a comic book trilogy that is the story of the Civil Right Movement through Congressman Lewis’ eyes.
While I’m reading very little current news right now, I am reading a lot of American history. I’m in a Civil Rights phase that started with Devil in the Grove. I’m sure some of my recent work with Defy Ventures had caused me to dig in deeper into this segment of American history. I know that my reaction to the recent election is reinforcing this.
I was born in December 1965 so the Voting Rights Act had already passed. While I was born in Arkansas I grew up in Dallas, Texas so I was somewhat disconnected from the dynamics of race in the deep south and instead got to experience a different dimension of it since there is generally a Texas version of most things.
I’ve always been confused by the labels Hispanic and Latino and, after living in Boston from 1983 – 1994 and getting a dose of a totally different version of race dynamics than I’d had in Dallas, I realized my upbringing in fashionable far North Dallas was a comfortably privileged one.
Reading a book like March in 2016 helps me realize how far we’ve come as a country, but at the same time reminds me how much more we can and need to do.
Book: Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man’s Fight for Justice
After the election, I took a break from social media. Prior to this election cycle I rarely read online news and almost never watched news on TV, so that was easy to stop as well. I needed some emotional distance from the election and decided I wanted some intellectual distance as well. So, I went back to writing and reading books during all the time that I had previously occupied myself with what passes in 2016 for real time news and current events.
Some of that writing has appeared on this blog – and will continue to appear here and on two other blogs – Venture Deals and Startup Revolution, both of which have lain fallow for a while. The third edition of Venture Deals comes out on December 12th and I feel like Jason and I made some strong updates to it. I’m working on a second edition of Startup Opportunities, which will come out sometime in Q117 and be published by Wiley since FG Press is defunct. And, I’ve started on my next book, Give First, which should come out in Q417 (again published by my friends at Wiley.)
I’ve used the past month to refocus myself on areas that I feel like I can impact. One of the primary ways I develop this frame of reference is by reading books (for the current list of what I’m reading you can always take a look at my Goodreads page.) I’m not a particularly good book ranker – so I just give five stars for “must reads”, four stars for “read if you like the topic”, and three stars for “meh – some interesting stuff here.” If I start something that I find completely uninteresting, I stop reading it and don’t post it.
In the past 24 hours I’ve read a must read. Bill Browder’s Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man’s Fight for Justice is one of the best books I’ve read this year. It reads like a John le Carré novel, except it is non-fiction. It starts out as the autobiography of Bill Browder and his creation of a massively successful hedge fund (Hermitage Capital Management) that was one of the first non-Russian investors in Russia in the mid to late 1990s. It then shifted into an incredibly complex story of intrigue, corruption, lawlessness, injustice, and murder all at the hands of the Russian political system.
I know that was a mouthful, but if you want a little taste, just read the Wikipedia page for Sergei Magnitsky which is central to the second half of the book, where Browder shifts from successful financier to international human rights activist. If you want a taste, watch the following interview with Browder.
Amy and I just finished watching The Night Manager on Amazon, which was based on John le Carré novel by the same name. I’m an optimistic person and I tend to bury my cynicism in what I read and the movies I watch. My optimism holds that the good guys eventually come out on top. I’m going to keep holding onto that notion while doing the little bit I can to help impact that outcome, especially when it means supporting people like Bill Browder. While I don’t know him, if he ever called and asked for anything, I’d be immediately responsive.
If you are looking for a powerful read over the holidays, I’d put Bill Browder’s Red Notice at the top of the list.
Update: I came across the article The Need To Read today and thought it was very appropriate for this post.