Book

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. ...

Dan Caruso’s new book Bandwidth: The Untold Story of Ambition, Deception, and Innovation that Shaped the Internet Age and Dot-Com Boom is available for pre-order, to be released on February 4, 2025. Order your copy today on Amazon or Barnes & Noble . You can also subscribe to Dan’s Bandwidth newsletter to receive updates on the book release and launch events. Dan asked me to write the foreword, which I happily did. See an excerpt explaining why I loved reading this book. ...

Some day there will be a genre called “startup fiction .” I mean, if science fiction, which is a sub-genre of fiction, can have libertarian science fiction and recursive science fiction , surely startup fiction belongs in a sub-genre of a sub-genre of a sub-genre. Please Report Your Bug Here by Josh Reidel is an excellent example of startup fiction. I began reading it at the end of the day Saturday after finishing The Age of A.I. and Our Human Future . I enjoyed Reidel much more than Kissinger, Schmidt, and Huttenlocher (even though I greatly respect them.) ...

Since Matt Levine is so effectively covering anything interesting in the world of the Twitter deal (and all kinds of bizarre, random, and complicated crypto, fraud, debt, and other financial stuff), I think I’ll stick with book reviews for the time being. Andy Dunn , who I only know indirectly, wrote an important book titled Burn Rate: Launching a Startup and Losing My Mind . While it covers the story of Andy’s company, Bonobos, it’s really about mental health and entrepreneurship. ...

Steve Case’s new book, The Rise of the Rest: How Entrepreneurs in Surprising Places are Building the New American Dream , is out. I read it on Sunday, and it is outstanding. If you are interested in understanding how high-tech entrepreneurship has evolved from a primarily coastal phenomenon to one that covers the entire US in the past decade, grab this book now. Steve is a great storyteller. While he tells the entrepreneurs’ stories, he has been part of helping create them. He created Rise of Rest and did the first of many bus tours in 2014. I was part of the one in Denver, and my partner Chris Moody was part of the one in Birmingham. They were each awesome experiences. ...

Since releasing my newest book The Entrepreneur’s Weekly Nietzsche: A Book for Disruptors I’ve been continually getting the questions “Why Philosophy and Entrepreneurship?” and “Why Nietzsche?” Dave and I cover this right off the bat in the book, so I thought I’d toss up an excerpt that addresses the question with part of my own origin story with Dave. It follows. Nietzsche? For entrepreneurs? It was the end of January 1988, about nine months since we had embarked on turning Brad’s solo consulting shop, Feld Technologies, into a real business. We were fraternity brothers and close friends and opened our first office directly across the street from our fraternity chapter house in Cambridge. We planned to use smart yet inexpensive software developers to build business application software. We employed half a dozen programmers, most of whom were undergraduates from our fraternity working part-time. We didn’t have any financing except for Brad’s credit card and the $10 with which we had purchased our common stock. ...

Most of the quotes we discuss in The Entrepreneur’s Weekly Nietzsche we found by reading his work, but a few are well-known lines that you may have heard before. This is one, used in our chapter “Monsters”: He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee. The quote leads quickly to questions of ethics. In the chapter, we discuss the fact that we each have our own views of what constitutes ethical or unethical behavior in business. It is a line-drawing game – there is no reference that everyone agrees on. The choices have both short- and long-term consequences for both the success of your business and for your own reputation. Further, once you choose an ethical approach, it becomes entrenched in your organization and is difficult to change. ...

My newest book, The Entrepreneur’s Weekly Nietzsche: A Book for Disruptors, shipped today. It’s available on Amazon in Kindle, Paperback, and Hardcover. If you are so inclined, go buy a copy today! I’m particularly proud of this book, as it is a more philosophical approach to entrepreneurship than my other books. I wrote it with Dave Jilk, the co-founder of our first company (Feld Technologies, 1987) and one of my closest friends for 38 years. ...

My long-time business partner Seth Levine has written a book with Elizabeth MacBride titled The New Builders: Face to Face with the TRUE Future of Business . It’s extraordinary – buy a copy now! For many years, Seth has been frustrated about the entrepreneurial narrative around the White male tech founder. He’s been active as an investor and philanthropist around entrepreneurship in rural Colorado and with organizations, such as Entrepreneurship for All , that are focused on accelerating economic and social impact in communities nationwide through inclusive entrepreneurship. He’s been exploring this and investing both in the US and other places globally, including Africa and the Middle East. ...

Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture is weekend reading for anyone who wants to understand me and my generation. I was born in 1965 – right at the beginning of the transition from “Boomers” to “Xers.” I’m glad my parents had me in 1965 instead of 1964, where I’d spend my life arguing (maybe with myself) that I’m not a boomer. A millennial friend of mine didn’t know anything about Generation X, so I sent her a copy of the book. I suppose I was teasing her too much about being a millennial, which was just me mostly being a typical ironic Gen X slacker. ...