Books

Very broad book about general finance and life tactics to increase optionality and financial freedom.

The book is full of references to other anecdotes from other books and explains some financial concepts in a very simple way.

I actually recommend this book to any beginner in personal finance, to me lots of the parts were already very obvious, but i think it's a great book to get started.

you can have anything you want, but you can’t have everything you want.

In other words, there's no such thing as a free lunch. Whenever someone tries to sell you a new 'smart drug' or supplement, the starting assumption should always be that you're paying for very expensive urine.

Put simply, debt is borrowing money for consumption, and leverage is borrowing money to invest. Many businesses fund their operations through debt; not because they’re financially irresponsible, but because they expect to earn an outsized return on the loan.

Of course, trading is for chumps: while you think you’re making a genius move, the person on the other side of the trade has an equal and opposite opinion. Only one of you can be right.

If you’re convinced you do have an edge, but you notice that you are not sitting atop an enormous pile of money, you might consider the possibility that you are wrong.

Remember Ray Dalio’s heuristic: the risk of ruin, whatever that means to you, must always be zero. Don't bet the farm on an investment with slim chances of success, even if it has a large positive EV,

The assumption that market timing doesn’t matter is wrong. It matters a whole lot. There’s enormous variance in outcomes, purely based on luck.

This is a highly counterintuitive insight, but it's one of the most widely-accepted ideas in economics: each individual or country should specialise in their comparative advantage, and then single-mindedly exploit the heck out of it.

Constraints are unpleasant if they’re imposed upon us from above—by fiat, by force, by threat of starvation. But they take on a completely different character if we deliberately choose to impose them upon ourselves.

Real story about a young boy from El Salvador who illegally migrates to the US to reunite with his parents.

The story was very touching, it was told from his point of view when he was 9 years old.

Me gusta lo rápido que dice la primera parte de la palabra, como masticando las primeras dos sílabas y convirtiéndolas en una sola. Hijue se convierte en jue. Luego le pone énfasis al pu, como si fuera un pequeño estallido que luego aterriza en la ta, y que a su vez alarga el aaaa: jue-pu-taaaa.

Yo no voy con ustedes. Nos acabamos de conocer, pero les pido que, cuando me vaya, por favor cuídenmelo. Está muy chiquito y va a viajar sin su familia. Ustedes son su familia. Por favor, cuídenmelo”,

Estoy bravo porque no le importó a nadie, solo a Carla. Patricia un poquito. Pero no a los hombres. Soy como una piedra en su zapato. Una astilla. No me gusta sentirme así, como que me hiciera falta algo. Como un rompecabezas sin terminar.

Quiero tomar agua. Quiero el aire acondicionado del Pizza Hut, que está en San Salvador. A Mi Mamá a Mi Papá. A Tía Mali. Siento la boca pesada. La lengua bien seca.

DURANTE SIETE SEMANAS (del 20 de abril de 1999 al 10 de junio de 1999), nadie sabía dónde estaba.

Nunca olvidé a El Chino, Patricia, Carla, Chele, Marcelo y todas las personas que conocí de camino, pero recordarlas era algo doloroso.

Espero que este libro me reúna, de alguna forma, con El Chino, Patricia y Carla, que sepa qué pasó con ellos después de que nos separamos y saber cómo ha sido su vida en este país. Creo que nunca les di la gracias. Quiero agradecerles ahora, como un adulto, por arriesgar sus vidas por un niño de nueve años al que no conocían.

Famous investment book. First published 1973, but since then it has had many revisions.

It's updated every year. I read the 2023 version, which also includes references to recent events.

In an efficient market, there are no possibilities for earning extraordinary gains without taking on extraordinary risks.

Thus, when you look at the ten- and fifteen-year performance of actively managed mutual funds, it turns out that 90 percent of them do worse than the market. It’s not that outperformance is impossible. But finding the real star stock picker is like looking for a needle in a haystack.

Hence they also were called “one decision” stocks. You made a decision to buy them, once, and your portfolio-management problems were over.

Eventually, every stock can only be worth the present value of its cash flow.

To me, the following three explanations of technical analysis appear to be the most plausible. First, it has been argued that the crowd instinct of mass psychology makes trends perpetuate themselves. When investors see the price of a speculative favorite going higher and higher, they want to jump on the bandwagon and join the rise. Indeed, the price rise itself helps fuel the enthusiasm in a self-fulfilling prophecy. Each rise in price just whets the appetite and makes investors expect

Amazing book from Dan Martell, one of my favorite entrepreneurs.

He talks about building processes and delegating tasks based on your hourly rate calculated from your total income. Everything that is at least 2x below your hourly rate should be delegated to someone else.

Successful people aren’t doing what they love because they’re rich. They’re rich because they’ve learned to do what they love, and only what they love.

80% done by someone else is 100% freaking awesome.

I’d told them what to do, but now I needed to let my team figure out how to do it—that was their responsibility.

Every leader who goes through this cycle will end up hitting what I call the tell-check-next ceiling, at which point they simply can’t handle any more work.

Spanish Fiction. Great for learning but i did not enjoy the story that much.

My first ever book that i read in spanish.

Contains short stories from different latin american countries.

I read this in a hammock in El salvador.

I've had this book on my reading list for years and finally got around to reading it. The story of the founding of Nike Inc. by Phil Knight is amazingly well written and a real page-turner. The stories about the relationship with their first shoe supplier from Japan were very captivating.

Are the best moments of my life behind me? Was my trip around the world… my peak? The pigeons were less responsive than the statue at Wat Phra Kaew.

Toward the end of the picnic I sat on the sand and looked out across the Pacific Ocean. I was living two separate lives, both wonderful, both merging. Back home I was part of a team, me and Woodell and Johnson—and now Penny. Here in Japan I was part of a team, me and Kitami and all the good people of Onitsuka.

Aside from our war with the government, we were in great shape. Which seemed like saying: Aside from being on death row, life was grand.

And maybe it would cure my burnout. Maybe the cure for any burnout, I thought, is to just work harder.

Having already read many books about Apple, this book was a great addition with more insight into other key individuals than just Steve. The book covers the rise of Tim Cook and his relationship and tensions with Johnny Ive.

He wanted to make it something that people felt compelled to touch. Jobs immediately grasped it. “That’s cool!” he said. Some engineers objected to the feature because it increased manufacturing expenses, but Jobs overruled them. There was a new way of doing things: Design came first.

They dreaded wasting Cook’s time. If he sensed that someone was insufficiently prepared, he could lose patience and say “Next” as he flipped the meeting agenda page. Some people exited meetings in tears.

Apple’s finance team eventually recognized an opportunity. Beats’ headphone business was generating about $1.3 billion in sales a year and paying its manufacturers a 15 percent margin for production. By comparison, Apple paid its manufacturers 2 to 3 percent. If Apple pressured the manufacturers to slash their margins, as Cook planned to do, the profits from Beats would surge and the acquisition would pay for itself in a few years.

Old-timers and newcomers alike knew that Jobs had built the iPhone using a different approach: he had relied on a lean team of mostly existing employees in various divisions whom he had guided. But in Tim Cook’s new collaborative kingdom, Apple’s CEO no longer led product development, and that void continued to challenge the company’s efforts to innovate.

Interesting book from one of the co-founders of a publicly traded enterprise software company called Okta.

The book contains some great insights about running a successful enterprise sales organisation.

According to Marc, it’s because three things must come together before an idea’s time has come: Technology: Is the tech available to make this idea happen? Economics: Can it be produced and distributed at a price that customers will pay? Psychology: Are people ready for it?

Many entrepreneurs try to do everything themselves for as long as possible. Partly out of necessity: you don’t have the money to hire people. But often, it’s because you think you can do it better than anyone else. So I’m telling you this from personal experience: You can’t. Doing everything on your own doesn’t work.

“First, we’ll say, ‘This is what we expect of you. This is where you are today. This is the gap you have to make up. Are you willing to step up to that?’” If the answer is no, Shashank will let the person know there’s an option B: a healthy severance and positive references for their next jobs.

Always fire on a Monday and never on a Friday. You want them to have the whole week to start moving forward. If you let them go at the end of the week, they’ll stew on it the entire weekend.

Bringing up money becomes a litmus test. The customers who aren’t serious will start backpedaling. “It’s not the right time for us,” they might say. “I’m not sure it’s our highest priority right now.” You now know you can put them on the back burner while you pursue more promising leads.

The goal is to build our customers’ trust and confidence by giving them one of our top people as their personal go-to “buddy.” It shows them we’re invested in their success. But it helps us too. It keeps our executives extremely close to what our customers need. It also creates a virtuous cycle: the executives give us great insights that lead to new products and features.

I’ve heard a lot of people talk about work-life balance, and I think the sentiment is well intentioned, but it overlooks a key opportunity. Running a company is hard as hell.

Book about the transformation of providing a great customer experience.

The core innovation is that the customer should not have to leave the screen on which he is using the product that he needs help with, new tools like Co-Browsing do allow customer support directly trough the web browser.

Do I feel smarter as a result of this interaction? Do I feel like the decision I made to choose this company was a good one, or am I thinking I could have done better for myself by going with a competitor? Do I feel like I understand something better as a result of this interaction? Did I learn anything of value?

The human brain is engineered to overweight negative experiences five times more than positive experiences, and this has been borne out in experiments that analyze our brain's chemistry in a variety of different situations.

(Be careful not to confuse what you know about what a customer can or can't do in self-service when resolving specific issues … it's not about what's possible, it's about what that person thinks is possible in any given situation.)

Great book about the early days of PayPal. Lots of great stories about each of the founders and early employees of Paypal. Super inspiring about the hard work and sacrifice that was required to make Paypal a success, i can highly recommend this book to any founder.

Musk would later correct an interviewer who offered that PayPal was a hard company to create. The company wasn’t hard to create at all, he said. Rather, “it was a hard company to keep alive.”

Eventually, eBay spun PayPal out on its own, and today it’s worth roughly $300 billion—making it one of the largest companies in the world.

Musk was astonished, too. “I thought they were on crack,” he said to a journalist two years later. “They don’t know anything about us and they’re going to hand over $3.5 million?”

“He’s one of the greatest salesmen I have ever met,” Fricker said of Musk’s entreaties. “Like a Steve Jobs. When he articulates something, he tends to find the kernel that will appeal to a broad mass intuitively.”

And he said, ‘My mission in life is to make mankind a multi-planetary civilization.’ And I’m like, ‘Dude, you’re bananas.’”

Sacks told Thiel he’d join the company—if the email product was given primacy. “I said, ‘If that’s what the company’s going to do, I’ll quit my job at McKinsey tomorrow,’ because that sounded to me like a killer idea,” Sacks said.

Engineer William Wu remembered that Musk expected employees who worked late on a Friday night to return by Saturday morning.

That said, Musk demanded as much of himself as he did of his team. “We slept under desks,” Catlan said. “Even Elon slept under his desk. He didn’t pull himself away from that sort of thing.” The engineers recall their CEO working elbow-to-elbow with them through knotty technical challenges.

many of its earliest employees simply hated being employees. “The very best employee at any job at any level of responsibility is the person who generally believes that this is their last job working for someone. The next thing they’ll start will be their own,” Levchin said.

Book about the early days of crypto, and very detailed stories about the formation of the Ethereum foundation.

Tokens solved the chicken-and-egg problem of how to incentivize people to join a network early when it is small: give them partial ownership, much like offering equity in a start-up, whereby the earlier one joins, the greater one’s reward. How was that ownership represented? Tokens.

Coinbase story from the early beginnings to it's rise. It's very well written, for me it was a page turner.

The company would run calculations to predict how many bitcoin it would need to satisfy customer demand over a given period of time, obtain the bitcoin from Mt. Gox and, thanks to Fred’s Goldman Sachs–born trading genius, even set up hedges to profit on price swings on the pool of bitcoin. The system worked for most of 2013 until, in Olaf’s words, “Mt. Gox started getting weird.”

the case of Coinbase, the slowdown didn’t affect customers who sent bitcoin to another Coinbase account—the site cleared those transactions internally—but any payment to an outside party got stuck in the overflow queue as both parties had to wait for it to appear on the sluggish blockchain.

The Wall Street establishment, he says, has become smugly complacent about crypto since the collapse of the 2017 bubble. But Schuler says the status quo can’t last. “Look back at the first phase of the internet from the ’90s to now,” he continues, “and look at all the businesses that have been disrupted—from retail to media to advertising. Financial services is basically untouched. They’ve built a transaction layer on top of their core services

As long as the industry is driven by speculation, he says, it will be exchanges—Coinbase, Binance, Kraken, and Gemini—that occupy the most prominent place in crypto. But as the industry matures and tokens become part of the financial mainstream, it could be companies that offer other services—loans, investment advice, or consulting—that become its face.

Great book about how our monetary system consists of layers, and in how Bitcoin is a good fit to make it as a new base level currency.

Throughout the ages, currencies have ceased to exist because of one rudimentary fact: governments are unable to resist the temptation to create free money for themselves.

By the end of the third century, the denarius had been devalued so frequently that its purity was down to only 5% silver, corresponding with the Crisis of the Third Century, a period in which several Emperors were assassinated and the Roman Empire almost collapsed.

Second-layer money is therefore inherently unstable, as the power to create it will always be subject to human abuse,

In actuality, gold represented 84% of the Federal Reserve’s assets upon its founding, a number that would dramatically fall over time. Today, for reference, gold represents less than 1% of the Fed’s assets.

between the explosion in Eurodollars and Treasury Repo dollars, the dollar money supply had unquestionably lost all measurability. Instead, the Fed shifted to a monetary policy regime focused on managing short-term interest rates.

Gone will be the days when an individual only uses the currency of the country where he or she resides. No currency in the digital realm will ever be able to prove itself as resistant to corruption as BTC, wherein transactions once confirmed are impossible to override, making Bitcoin the ultimate tool of financial freedom anywhere in the world.

I was reading this book in El Salvador on a hammock right in front of the ocean.

It's a beautiful story about life, love, meditation and surfing.

Thoughts create our reality, went the thinking, and suffering is an experience in the mind. Master your thoughts—or simply let them be without constant reactions and identification—and you master reality. You master being.

Suzuki Roshi once said, “If your mind is empty, it is always ready for anything, it is open to everything. In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s mind there are few.”

If you don’t have an internal peace practice, your stability is linked to external circumstances, which is a terrible peace plan.

Technical book about the science of surfing. I started reading it while i was learning to surf in Costa rica.

In deep water, way beyond the breakpoint, waves don’t transport water anywhere (see Chapter 5). The particles just go round and round in circles and there is no net displacement of water.

This book was a page turner for me, i've read it in a couple of evenings.

The book storyline in combination with comments by the the authors makes it very enjoyable to read and i definitely learnt something new about the economy.

With credit, suddenly the real economy is a lot more flexible, but also more complex. People are shifting their consumption forward and back in time. And yet, we want the economy to be constantly producing and consuming at around full capacity, so that more or less everyone is gainfully employed. This means that the advance and delay of gratification, which are constantly shifting, must be carefully balanced with each other.

This is the biggest threat to the economy. It is the easiest thing in the world to spend a bit less one month and leave a bit of cash in the wallet or checking account. But if a lot of people are putting aside a bit of cash in the same month, that has a bad effect on the real economy; not all the goods and services are being consumed and pretty soon you have downsizing and unemployment.

However, due to the potent combination of fractional reserve banking and the ability of banks to create bank money, banks can actually loan out around 900 percent of checking accounts in bank money, when times are good. This means they are creating loans that may not be matched by savings. And it is hard to see how this extra bank money, which is expensive, is benefiting the real economy. Worse, at the first sign of economic trouble, banks worry about credit and the supply of bank money, denoted M1, may suddenly shrink.

In fact, central banks no longer target a specific supply of money; instead, they set nominal interest rate targets and use these as a barometer indicating whether the economy needs more or less cash on any given day. Central banks, such as the Fed, control nominal interest rates by having a virtually infinite ability to print or withdraw cash from circulation, and buy and sell bonds on the open market, or lend to banks directly.

Inflation can only be measured accurately in retrospect but the market yield on inflation-protected government bonds is a very good barometer of inflation expectations.

Trading countries cannot enjoy stable exchange rates, free flow of capital, and independent monetary policy all at the same time. They have to sacrifice one of those aspects.

We saw that the balance of payments is always zero: if countries have a trade deficit in goods and services, which economists call the current account, they will have a surplus in the capital account. For example, Americans buy more Chinese goods and services; and China purchases more American bonds and companies.

Fun book consisting of little stories written by the engineers of the original Macintosh project. Very inspiring to think back to that time and how far desktop computing has come.

Favorite quotes about Steve jobs:

“Well, just because he tells you something is awful or great, it doesn’t necessarily mean he’ll feel that way tomorrow. You have to low-pass filter his input. And then, he’s really funny about ideas. If you tell him a new idea, he’ll usually tell you that he thinks it’s stupid. But then, if he actually likes it, exactly one week later, he’ll come back to you and propose your idea to you, as if he thought of it.”

On graphical window based desktop computing:

Today, twenty years later, the user interface that we pioneered is ubiquitous, and used by hundreds of millions of people on a daily basis, even though most experience it through non-Apple platforms.

On keeping in contact with Sony to use their hard drive:

When Bob Belleville revealed that he and George had kept the Sony alternative alive, Steve swallowed his pride and thanked them for disobeying him and doing the right thing. The Sony drives eventually worked out great,

On removing a feature:

I was surprised a few days later when Bill told me he decided to remove the character recognition feature from MacPaint. He was afraid that if he left it in, people would actually use it a lot, and MacPaint would be regarded as an inadequate word processor instead of a great drawing program. It was probably the right decision, although I didn’t think so at the time. I was amazed Bill was able to detach himself from all the effort he’d put into creating the discarded feature; I know I probably wouldn’t have been able to do the same.

Bill Gates business tactics:

Bill Gates had Apple in a tight squeeze, and, in an early display of his ruthless business acumen, he exploited it to the hilt. He knew Donn’s BASIC was way ahead of Microsoft’s, so, as a condition for agreeing to renew Applesoft, he demanded that Apple abandon MacBASIC. He then bought it from Apple for the price of $1 and buried it.

A book by the journalist who had written multiple articles about Steve and Apple and over the years built a friendly relationship with. The book is an excellent addition to the Walter Isaacson biography.

Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication

Mac was critical for Microsoft, which had assigned a slew of developers to create graphical software for the new machine. And eventually Microsoft would become the leading Mac software vendor.

The Mac had been a radical new conception of the user interface for a computer, and the iPod’s thumb-wheel had been a user interface breakthrough as well. Multi-touch had the same potential as the Mac’s GUI. But he’d have to move quickly.

THERE ARE SOME people who have always believed that Steve did everything he could to engineer a triumphant return to the top job at Apple, that he was executing some grand master plan all along. Gil Amelio is one of them; Bill Gates is another. The truth is more subtle.

Instead, research projects flowered in pockets all around the company, many of them without Steve’s blessing or even awareness. They’d come to Steve’s attention only if one of his key managers decided that the project or technology showed real potential. In that case, Steve would check it out, and the information he’d glean would go into the learning machine that was his brain.

Steve was this incredibly intelligent, strong-willed person who made things happen, but at the same time he enabled people. He was always big on going for walks with people. So he would take the director out on a walk, where you talked more slowly, you think through things … just talking, just a friendly back-and-forth talking.

And Tim took out his iPhone and showed me—he still had Steve’s number in his phone, too.

financial success is not a hard science. It’s a soft skill, where how you behave is more important than what you know. I call this soft skill the psychology of money.

Your personal experiences with money make up maybe 0.00000001% of what’s happened in the world, but maybe 80% of how you think the world works.

One is the obvious: few gains are so great that they’re worth wiping yourself out over.

Money’s greatest intrinsic value—and this can’t be overstated—is its ability to give you control over your time.

The historical odds of making money in U.S. markets are 50/50 over one-day periods, 68% in one-year periods, 88% in 10-year periods, and (so far) 100% in 20-year periods.

And I think for most investors, dollar-cost averaging into a low-cost index fund will provide the highest odds of long-term success.

Amazing book about the beginnings of Space X. The hardships the team faced to in getting to orbit are just mind blowing.

Over the course of a single meeting Musk could be, at turns, hilarious, deadly serious, penetrating, harsh, reflective, and a stickler for the finest details of rocket science. But most of all, he channeled a preternatural force to move things forward. Elon Musk just wants to get shit done.

Musk will make snap decisions. This is one of the keys that enables SpaceX to move so quickly. “I make the spending decisions and the engineering decisions in one head,” he said. “Normally those are at least two people.

They were excited to tell Musk that SpaceX had won one of two contracts. Musk couldn’t believe it. He told them, “I love NASA. You guys rock.”

On April 8, 2016, a Falcon 9 rocket launched a Thai communications satellite toward a high orbit around the Earth, and then, as if it were a magical being, the first stage landed on a drone ship playfully named Of Course I Still Love You. It was one of the most jaw-dropping things I have ever seen.

In 2018, the company launched the Falcon Heavy for the first time, giving it the world’s most powerful rocket. Essentially, this titanic booster strapped together three Falcon 9 first stages to form a monster first stage. In less than a decade, the company went from launching a rocket with a single engine to one with twenty-seven engines.

Great book, humorous title.
The author got rich and told his story in an entertaining way. He shares his wisdom with lots of practical experience as an entrepreneur.

Stamina is crucial, as is a capacity to work so hard that your best friends mock you, your lovers despair and the rest of your acquaintances watch furtively from the sidelines, half in awe and half in contempt.

The follow-through, the execution, is a thousand times more important than a ‘great idea’. In fact, if the execution is perfect, it sometimes barely matters what the idea is. If you want to get rich, don’t sit around waiting for inspiration to strike. Just get busy getting rich.

If you think that it can’t be done and dwell on that thought too long, then you are likely to remain poor. It’s as simple as that.

Still, let me repeat it one more time. Becoming rich does not guarantee happiness. In fact, it is almost certain to impose the opposite condition – if not from the stresses and strains of protecting wealth, then from the guilt that inevitably accompanies its arrival.

If you are unwilling to fail, sometimes publicly, and even catastrophically, you stand very little chance of ever getting rich.

It is my hope that this book will cause you to consider very carefully whether you are truly driven by inner demons to be rich. If you are not, then my earnest and heartfelt advice to you is: do not on any account make the attempt.

Hire winners or people you believe will become winners. Fire whiners and moaners swiftly.

But even if you discover that you truly have a talent for the minutiae that management demands, it’s best to abandon the role just as soon as you can afford to hire appropriate personnel.

You are not a manager, remember? You are trying to get rich. Whenever the chance comes to sell an asset at the top of its value, do so.

But my earnest advice is that you establish yourself first, retaining as much control of any start-up or acquisition as you can, and then, and only then, seek pastures new with partners in the picture.

Interesting book about the origin story of Bitcoin. The book is written by Craig Wright, who claims to be behind the pseudonym, Satoshi Nakamoto. Satoshi is the author of the Bitcoin Whitepaper, which was released in 2009, making Craig the inventor of Bitcoin. His claims have not been validated as he has not yet proven to own the private keys to the first mined bitcoin blocks. I have watched a couple of hours of interviews with Craig. To me, his story is very compelling. He seems extraordinarily smart and has a deep understanding of bitcoin. Furthermore, he has a history of working with financial systems and transaction auditing software.

Craig mentions in the book that after he launched bitcoin, he was troubled to see what it was mainly being used for. Bitcoin was used by illegal online marketplaces like the famous Silk road.

In the book, he makes the case that the original Bitcoin protocol is already able to scale to thousands of transactions per second. To achieve this scalability, it would require increasing the block size substantially. This debate has split the Bitcoin community, with Craig now working on his original Bitcoin version called Bitcoin SV (Satoshi Vision).

I have studied law, economics, computer science, history, mathematics, and even theology and ethics, and my greatest failure in doing so has been losing track of the understanding of the average person.

It is time to start teaching people the truth. Bitcoin does not replace banking. It is cash.

They are attempting simply to take the network effect of Bitcoin and steal it into their experiment. Luckily, we have enough capital now to be able to patent my ideas. Bitcoin, every blockchain that could possibly ever compete with it, and every other distributed ledger technology compete, and only one will win. None of that fazes me because I’m about two decades ahead of the market. I’m very happy to be here, and I don’t really care if you wish to ignore me because you don’t cost me money.

What people fail to understand is that Bitcoin is designed as a commercial system.

Orphans are an economic signalling technique in Bitcoin. One of the reasons the block cap was put in place is that I did not have a clue how we could have a floating limit work at the time. The problem was that the solutions all required monetary value.

Most importantly, as the block subsidies start to disappear, more and more of the profit-earning capability of a node will need to be derived from transactions. To do so, a node will want to build more and more transactions into a block. The issue now becomes one of paid versus unpaid transactions and of a rate per transaction.

The socialist fools of Core don’t understand that markets don’t need their help. They seem to believe that they need to be the socialist planner saving the Utopia that they wish to create.

What I’d like you to think about is very simple. I am being painted as a fraud and a criminal by people who opposed me and my ideals. My ideals involve delivering an immutable evidence chain that will record transactions and make fraud difficult. On the other hand, we have people who promote anarchy and crime.

Great book about the story of how the Winkelvoss twins got into bitcoin.

The twins started an Investment Firm called Winkelvoss Capital. They wanted to start investing in startups, but they were rejected from the exciting deals in silicon valley because of their history with Facebook.

On a trip to Ibiza, they were first introduced to Bitcoin. After reading the white paper and researching it more, they were convinced that Bitcoin would be very big one day. They later purchased a considerable amount of Bitcoins, which amounted to about 1% of all Bitcoins at that time. This investment later turned out to be one of the best investments of all time, making them both multi Billionaires.

To me, the Winkelvoss twins seem very smart. Having the conviction to make such an early and big bet on Bitcoin takes courage. They knew that for Bitcoin to grow and get more widespread adoption, its image had to be more legitimized, including the creation of regulation around it. They later created their own Crypto exchange called Gemini. To me, their story is very inspirational in an Entreprenierual sense.

Ultimately, the twins and their lawyers reached a compromise; the twins would take 20 million in cash, and the rest of the $65 million settlement (approximately $45 million) in stock. For the foolish, batshit crazy twins, this proved to be one of the greatest investments of all time. Their lawyers saw none of that upside.

After Facebook’s IPO, the twins’ $45 million in shares soared. It appreciated fifteen times and went on to be worth more than $500 million. If Quinn Emanuel had taken its fee in stock, the firm would have earned upward of $300 million for six months of work.

Zuckerberg had gotten lucky—in another world, the twins never would have had to approach him for coding help. In any event, Tyler and Cameron didn’t believe they were on the earth to exist; they were here to create, to build.

The book details the investigation and capturing of the criminal mastermind Paul le Roux. Paul built an enormous drug cartel that only he had the full understanding of its complexities. He was running an online network of websites to sell prescription pills in America. The network was multi-layered, with real doctors writing prescriptions only based on questions&answers filled in by the customers. Paul made lots of money but was not satisfied. He then expanded into much heavier drug trafficking and weapons dealing. The story is well researched and written in great detail.

He claimed that he had made $300 million in his illegal online pharmacy business, employing between one and two thousand people, and then laundered it through gold, diamonds, and timber in Africa and Asia.

Contract murder was a thriving industry in the Philippines; having someone killed cost as little as 5,000 pesos, or around $100.

Outstanding book full of wisdom about startups and business. The author, Scott Belsky, is the founder of a company called Behance. Behance is a website for designers to show their portfolio. He talks about his experience in creating products that customers want. The company later got acquired by Adobe for over 100 million.

Your challenge is to create product experiences for two different mind-sets, one for your potential customers and one for your engaged customers.

Having to explain your product is the least effective way to engage new users.

But the daily drive to optimize your product using metrics, quarterly goals, and other short-term measures will get you trapped in a local maxima: You’ll feel remarkably successful but only within the confines of the assumptions and market you’ve optimized around.

The inevitable outcome of any business governed by too much incrementalism is a limited market size because the local maximum—the one thing that has worked in the past that keeps getting iterated—becomes the ceiling.

You are not your org chart, your department budget, or your title. Don’t let success at a company prevent you from pursuing scary and wonderful new opportunities to build.

Detaching your self-worth from what you create is complicated, especially for creative people for whom work is very much self-expression.

The final filter for an idea is whether or not you are passionate about the solution.

Great book about Larry Ellison, the founder of the well known global company called Oracle Inc. The book is written by Matthew Symonds, who is the editor of The Economist publication. He followed Ellison closely for over two years to write this book. What is very special about the book, Larry had an agreement with the author to have editorial rights to add his own commentary in the form of footnotes in the chapters. This structure made the book very entertaining, especially on the Kindle reader, where you can read Larry's comments in between the lines. I really enjoyed getting his perspective on some of the book's statements. I loved reading the book so much that I've bought a physical copy.

Summarizing this book is very hard. It describes Larry's upbringing and the origin story of Oracle. The company was the first to commercialize SQL databases. Larry had read research on the SQL query language and brought it to the enterprise market. The first project they did as a company was for the intelligence agencies of the united states. The project was code-named "Oracle," which he later changed the name of his company. The oracle database is, to this day, one of the most advanced databases and is used by many enterprise companies.

Larry was truly one of the greatest CEO in the technology industry and is one of the most successful entrepreneurs of our time. He was and is a visionary, his prediction of the network computer, a stripped-down computer that did not have much more than a web browser on it, did not reach broad adoption at the time (1996-2000). The cost of personal computers fell so much that it did not make sense to buy a less powerful computer that only had a browser. But when we look at how we work today, he was totally right. Almost everyone that works on a computer is mainly using the web browser, and most apps are available through the web.

As CEO of Oracle, Larry was always running the product division and was very involved with product roadmap decisions. He made the call to move from client-server to web-based applications, which also turned out to be right.

Larry has a very competitive mindset. He always has to win. In the software business, he was competing with the number one, Microsoft. Even in his life outside of Oracle, he had very demanding hobbies like flying and competitive sailing. The book detailed some fascinating stories of the races on the high-speed sailing boats. Elison was also best friends with Steve Jobs.

To better summarize the book, I will add some comments to my favorite quotes from the book.

Neither of us would be able to alter the words of the other. It is a

unique form of joint copyright.

Author, about the book commentary agreement with Ellison.

It’s also an opportunity to expound on a core Ellison theme: “the war against complexity.” Software has to be made much more simple. Computing has become so complex that customers have to hire experts just to explain the industry’s products.

Even more than 20 years ago, Larry made an effort to reduce complexity.

recommended by the application server group’s Thomas Kurian, a young Indian who’s a rising star at Oracle.

The "rising star" at Oracle is now CEO of Google Cloud.

always feel good when everyone says I’m nuts because it’s a sign that we’re trying to do something innovative—something truly new and different. On the other hand, when people say you’re nuts, you just might be nuts. You’ve got to constantly guard against that possibility. You don’t want people saying you’re nuts too often—once every three or four years is good.

Modern application design must focus on one piece of information—customer orders—and then layer on all processes that touch the order information: taking the order, billing the customer, initiating customer service, marketing additional services to that customer, and so on. It’s not the process at the center, it’s the data.

Ellison began to realize that not for the first time, in his eagerness to carve out just the portion of the CEO’s job that he enjoyed, he had delegated too much power and responsibility. It’s a characteristic of Ellison that when he thinks he has found someone who is competent and who can help him, he invests an excessive amount of faith in his or her ability.

We’re the second largest applications company in the world. How come we have so many custom applications? And if I need these applications to run the business, why aren’t they part of the product suite?’ We looked at each other: Yeah, that’s a damn good question.

Larry looked inside Oracle and found that the company itself had lots of different third party applications to run their business.

Now, most people hate to admit they’re wrong, but it didn’t bother Bill one bit. All he cared about was what was right, not who was right. That’s what makes Bill very, very dangerous.

Larry about a long argument he had with Bill Gates in a meeting. Bill then called Larry later that day to tell him that Larry's point of view was in fact right.

It’s not a desktop browser war, it’s a server software war. I don’t think that we can beat Microsoft on the desktop, and I don’t care. We’re a server software company.

I can’t work unless I work out. I can’t push myself mentally unless I push myself physically.

Larry's physical and mental fitness is very inspirational.

people who had very intense work lives often found relaxing difficult and that the best they could do was to find some alternative stress that so fully engaged their attention that it drove everything else out of their mind. Ellison said, “That’s certainly true for me. I’d never heard the expression ‘alternative stress’ until you said it, but it immediately struck me as a perfect explanation for all my hobbies.

Ellison dreads the kind of relationship in which two people almost merge into one: “The happier you are with your separate and independent life, the better your relationship is likely to be.

He is ultraconfrontational in business. But he goes to almost any lengths to avoid confrontation at a personal level. He either delegates to the point of detachment or is obsessively controlling down to the last detail. He prides himself on never losing his temper. But he is manifestly driven by overwhelming passions.

The finality of the defeat is hard to describe. All the time and effort you spent wasn’t enough. You weren’t smart enough. You weren’t good enough. You lost. It’s over. Go home. It’s a vacant, numb feeling. You congratulate the winners and slip away as quickly and as quietly as you can. As you leave you can hear the cheering—but they’re not cheering for you. You just don’t matter anymore. Your race is over. I hate that feeling. I hate being beaten. Especially when I know it was because of mistakes I made.

Larry on losing. About a sailing race and in life in general.

Great book about the entrepreneurial journey of Rand Fishkin, from starting his SEO agency and doing client service work to creating products that are sold online as a subscription. He also describes how raising venture capital money impacts the excitation of the business and what success in those cases looks like. The book is filled with great insights and business lessons.

There are two traits fundamental to an effective product-focused business. The first is reach (i.e., the ability to influence a large audience). The second is scalability (i.e., an aptitude for growing revenue far more quickly than costs).

Use the services revenue to fund the product’s creation and testing. Don’t let obsession with your new idea overtake your focus on the consulting business’s success.

Great ideas and products are often born from mediocre ones. The keys are time (enough to iterate and evolve into something remarkable), humility (enough to see what’s wrong and admit a failure so you can move forward), and survival (a profitable services business can be a godsend here).

Pro Tip: If you have any type of subscription or recurring revenue, make sure you measure LTV (Lifetime Value—the total revenue customers spend during their relationship with your firm) by referral source(s) and by the number of visits prior to conversion.

Iterate on the fundamentals. Then build it one element at a time. Add functionality, data, features, visual elements, etc., until you’ve got something new to show your trusted advisers and beta customers. But don’t release it broadly until the buzz you’re getting from these groups is firmly in the “we love this and can’t live without it” camp

I think that’s my biggest lesson from the many times I’ve launched MVPs over my career. Sometimes, something is better than nothing. Surprisingly often, it’s not.

Instead, they (usually) see new things and think: “Is this interesting? Does it do what I need? Is it way better than what I already use? Is it worth the hassle of learning something new and switching away from what I’ve always done?” and if the answer to those questions is a “no,” or even “Well, maybe, but I’m not quite sure,” your product is unlikely to have substantive impact.

Remember how “growth hacks” are almost always inferior to consistent investments in the right marketing channels and tactics for your strengths and your audience? The same principle applies to your life.

The book is more geared towards existing companies that want to transform existing transaction-based revenue into subscription revenue. The goal of a forever transaction is to acquire a customer base and maximize customer lifetime value rather than short term profit. Each chapter contains very actionable steps at the end.

You must care deeply about the customer. Your product has to be designed to produce the best results for your best customers—in a way that earns their trust, forever.

It’s your job to understand how customers can get the greatest value from your products and services. Then you are morally obligated (in my opinion) to price in the space where your best interest and the customer’s best interest are maximized.

However, growth hackers don’t necessarily have revenue generation responsibilities; their objectives may conflict with long-term revenue.

Pricing is the servant, not the master. Strategy is in charge.

I have been a follower of the Author, Nathan Latka, for quite some time. His podcast, where he interviews SaaS founders about their business metrics, is one of my favorites. I finally get around to read his book. Nathan talks about what he has done personally and even shows some of the Emails he used to buy SaaS companies. He teaches of building scalable systems like the one he made to produce his podcasts. He also outlines how he combines different businesses and audiences to create a multiplier effect. Finally, a controversial but compelling concept that he teaches in the book is that to get success in business, you should not launch new ideas but instead aggressively copy others and then add your own twist to it and improve on already proven businesses. Nathan is a very sharp guy, i am sure he's success is not by accident. The book was an entertaining and educational read.

The key is to analyze a business and pinpoint a need it’s not meeting for its customers—and then meet that need yourself.

So if you’re creating a tool for people to use on top of Facebook, you’re essentially capitalizing on the money Facebook has already spent by selling into the market they created.

Systems thinking requires you to give up making money today in exchange for taking the time, energy, and sweat equity to set up systems that will do the work for you in the future.

This is the essence of systems leverage. If you have a clear system, it can be done faster and cheaper by somebody (or even something) other than you.

The author describes his experience of creating what he calls a "company of one." He makes the argument against growth at all costs and even marks that most companies fail primarily because of artificially growing too fast.

A company of one should consist of as little full-time employees as possible with only adding in contractors for projects when they are needed. The company should be profitable form the start and always grow based on profits. Even with more profits available, additional growth should be questioned, as it can bring more operational overhead. The author instead advocates for creating automated systems to grow the business. He also argues that smaller companies can treat their customers with more care, which in turn gives them a competitive edge.

I like the book's core message of not always going for growth at all costs and staying small while making substantial profits. This does obviously not work in competitive markets where growth and economies of scale are essential to survive.

Decisions should be made with a focus on realized profit, not based on the expectation that profit may happen. This is such a key and main difference in how growth-focused businesses and companies of one operate.

Letting growth as a goal guide your company’s decisions can be shortsighted or result in high churn.

Before you respond, give yourself time to understand the situation and fully listen to the complaint. This usually involves validating a customer’s wronged feelings, being transparent about what happened, and clearly detailing how you’ll fix the problem and ensure that it doesn’t happen again.

Companies of one need to turn complaints into opportunities to do better and use them to attempt to build closer relationships with the customers who stick around.

If you’re utilizing systems, automations, and processes to build a long-term business, you’re not trading time for money, but instead operating and profiting outside of the time you spend working and beyond your one-to-one relationships.

Companies of one aren’t anti-scale; rather, they’re aware that they need to determine which areas of their business need to scale and when it makes the most sense to do so. Scale can sometimes create efficiency, and volume can increase profit margins.

The author of the book is working at a big advertising agency. The book tries to make the point that the emotional and psychological aspects of why we buy things should be treated with as much importance as the logical aspects. The book contains examples of rational marketing methods that had irrational outcomes.

We don’t value things; we value their meaning. What they are is determined by the laws of physics, but what they mean is determined by the laws of psychology.

One of the great contributors to the profits of high-end restaurants is the fact that bottled water comes in two types, enabling waiters to ask ‘still or sparkling?’, making it rather difficult to say ‘just tap’.

Context is everything: strangely, the attractiveness of what we choose is affected by comparisons with what we reject. As one friend remarked, ‘Everyone likes to go to a nightclub in the company of a friend who’s slightly less attractive than them.’

This book has been a delight to read. The author is Rober Bob Iger, the current CEO of The Walt Disney Company. He tells about his upbringing growing up in Brooklyn and describes all the jobs he had up until becoming the CEO of Disney. Bob started at the lowest level entry job as a studio setup guy at ABC studios, from there, he climbed the corporate ladder by working hard and treating people with respect. He then became the president of ABC Studios. Disney later acquired ABC, and Bob became the COO of Disney working closely with the then CEO Micheal Eisner.

After Michael Eisner had to resign as the CEO of the company, the board went on a long process of searching for a new CEO. Bob was the only person from inside the company in question to become his successor. Bob describes the interviews he went trough with numerous individuals from the board and outside performance interviews. After the long stressful process, he then finally became CEO of Disney.

With his new role as the CEO he made a clear vision for Disney to execute against

• recommit to the concept that quality matters
• embrace technology instead of fighting it
• think bigger, think global

One of his first moves was to get on good terms with the then CEO of Pixar, Steve Jobs. Disney has already been working with Pixar on animation films like Toy Story. The deals for those movies were negotiated heavily in favor of Disney. Steve Jobs had a distrust of doing business with Pixar. Bob reached out to Steve to replenish the relationship with him. He first agreed on a deal to put all ABC shows on the iPod when it came out with video capabilities. This first step made Steve Jobs, who also was the CEO of Apple, feel more confident again in Disney's abilities to do business together.

Bob knew that Disney animation hadn't had any successful movies in the last couple of years. He felt that there needs to be a change in how the animation studio was run. He again reached out to Steve to judge if he might be willing to sell Pixar to Disney. Steve was not turned off by the idea and suggested Bob to visit Pixar and meet with the other co-founder's Ed Catmull and John Lasseter. After his visit, he was convinced that Pixar was a valuable asset and later bought Pixar for 7 billion. Before announcing the deal, Steve told Bob that he had cancer and was ok with Bob dropping out, Bob prevailed and went through with the deal anyway. The deal kept both studios separate, but Ed Catmull and John Lasseter were made head of Disney Animation. Over the next years, Disney animation started to flourish again. Bob and Steve grew very close friends, and Steve also took a seat on Disney's board.

Disney owns an enormous amount of intellectual property. The whole company is built on those properties where each character is appearing in movies and in their theme parks. The IP is also licensed to other companies like toy manufacturers. Bob made another huge move and acquired the company that owned the Marvel IP. To make this deal, he again got to know the owner of Marvel and built up a good relationship until the owner was ready to sell. Disney then bought Marvel for around 4 billion. They since released several Marvel movies like the Avengers End game, which became the highest-grossing movie of all time with over 2.7 billion of box office sales.

After the success with Marvel Bob had his target set on another creative studio, Lucasfilms, the studio owned by Goerge Lucas. George is the inventor and owner of the Starwars saga. Bob reached out to get to know George and to let him know if he ever intended to sell Lucasfilms that he was interested in buying it from him. He intentionally did not put any pressure on George and build a relationship first. After about six months, George reached out that he is ready to sell to Disney. They went into negotiations, and George first requested the same deal as Pixar got when Disney acquired them. The Pixar deal was worth 7 billion dollars. For every acquisition, the team at Disney always performed an extensive due diligence process and tried to create future revenue forecasts to estimate a reasonable acquisition price. They settled on an acquisition price of 4 billion. Bob requested full creative rights, which gives him the ability to have the final word in creative decisions. At first, this did not sit well with George Lucas, but Bob did not give in and said this is the terms of the deal, or there is no deal at all. George accepted the terms and signed the terms.

In the final chapters of the book, Bob describes how they were seeing a shift in how media was being consumed. The shift towards streaming services and direct to consumer distribution was gaining more traction than ever. They did not have the technical expertise to build a streaming platform from the ground up. Bob went seeking to acquire a tech company capable of building a streaming service. He almost acquired Twitter but canceled the deal last minute because he did not find it a cultural fit for Disney. He then instead acquired a majority stake in a streaming technology business.

The shift in media consumption and the adaption to it meant that Disney would have to encounter short term profit losses for longer-term sustainability and profit. Bob restructured the companies compensation plans not to be tied to profits in order to keep the companies moral and effort high into succeeding with this new strategy. They've launched the streaming service Disney+ at the end of 2019, which went to be very successful.

Innovate or die, and there’s no innovation if you operate out of fear of the new or untested.

The tone you set as a leader has an enormous effect on the people around you. No one wants to follow a pessimist.

“What do you think about the idea of Disney buying Pixar?” I waited for him to hang up or to erupt in laughter. The quiet before his response seemed endless. Instead, he said, “You know, that’s not the craziest idea in the world.”

You can’t make small talk once you bring someone in for that conversation. I normally say something along the lines of: “I’ve asked you to come in here for a difficult reason.” And then I try to be as direct about the issue as possible, explaining clearly and concisely what wasn’t working and why I didn’t think it was going to change.

With every success the company has had since Steve’s death, there’s always a moment in the midst of my excitement when I think, I wish Steve could be here for this. It’s impossible not to have the conversation with him in my head that I wish I could be having in real life.

The book is about the story of the creation and rise of Pixar Inc, the movie animation studio. The author, Ed Catmull, is the president and one of the founders of Pixar. He has been inspired at a young age by Walt Disney's hand-animated films and dreamt of one day creating the first computer-animated movie.

Ed studied computer science and studied and also invented some of the very fundamental 3d computer animation technologies. After he finished his Ph.D., he started working at Lucas films as the head of the computer division. Lucas films is famous for making the Star Wars movies. George Lucas did not see the prospect of using computers to animate movies and saw the division as too expensive and wanted to sell it off or shut it down. After a long search for a potential buyer, they finally found someone, which was no one other than Steve Jobs.

Steve saw potential and believed that the company could be valuable in the future. They had a slow start with trying to sell hardware to other movie studios, they sold very little and struggled to make profits. Ed Catmull still had his vision of making the first fully computer-animated movie. This became a reality when the movie Toy-Story was released 9 years after the founding of Pixar. The movie was made in association with Disney. Pixar was still not very financially successful at that time. Steve Jobs took the opportunity to take the company public at the hight of the press exposure with the release of Toy-Story. Pixar went public, and they took in a large amount of capital, which allowed them to make new movies themselves without being reliant on other movie studios like Disney.

Pixar went on to release many box office hit movies like Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Monsters, and many more. What is fascinating to me is how different the making of a computer-animated movie is compared to a regular movie. There are no actors and no movie sets, everything is entirely virtual. There are a vast amount of animators working on the movie scenes in perfecting the gestures to convey real emotion in the mostly fictional characters. The task of making a movie still is very much a creative process, Ed Catmull describes how the Directors are collaborating in so-called "Braintrust" meetings where they are encouraged to give very candid feedback. He mentioned that this process is essential to create a good storyline with narratives that resonate with the audience.

In the second half of the book, Ed describes some of his leadership principles and how managers are responsible for inspiring their direct reports and encouraging them to come up with bold ideas and not be afraid to try something new which might fail.

Pixar later got acquired by Disney. Ed Catmull and John Lasseter made clear that they will keep the two studios entirely separate from each other. They tried to bring the learning from Pixar on how to successfully manage creative people and led to transform the animation division of Disney to become thriving again.

I really enjoyed this book for the stories about Pixar and its culture and the multitude of management wisdom from Ed Catmull, I can highly recommend it to anyone interested in entrepreneurship.

Getting the right people and the right chemistry is more important than getting the right idea.

TO UNDERSTAND WHAT the Braintrust does and why it is so central to Pixar, you have to start with a basic truth: People who take on complicated creative projects become lost at some point in the process. It is the nature of things—in order to create, you must internalize and almost become the project for a while, and that near-fusing with the project is an essential part of its emergence.

The film itself—not the filmmaker—is under the microscope. This principle eludes most people, but it is critical: You are not your idea, and if you identify too closely with your ideas, you will take offense when they are challenged.

We tend to think of emotion and logic as two distinct, mutually exclusive domains. Not Steve. From the beginning, when making decisions, passion was a key part of his calculus.

A book about the creative development process at Apple Inc. The author is an ex-Apple engineer who has worked on multiple big projects at Apple, including the project code-named "Purple" that lead to the creation of the iPhone.

The book describes the iterative process that Apple uses on product development. The process entails frequent demo sessions where the engineers demo each other's features and get rapid and honest feedback. When a demo reaches an acceptable level, it gets shown the higher up management levels, leading up to demoing a feature directly to the then CEO, Steve Jobs. The author describes multiple of such demo meetings, including meetings with Steve.

One thing I've got from the book is even though Apple is a huge company, most product teams are still in the 2-10 people range, and each engineer has a responsibility attached to some feature, the call this the DRI (Directly Responsible Individual).

The author has worked on the earliest versions of the touch screen keyboard for the iPhone. He describes how they ended up using the known QUERTY layout for the touch screen and how there were many obstacles he had to overcome to make the keyboard work properly. Detecting inaccurately touched keys and looking up words in a dictionary for autocorrection of the inputs were some of the features that he had built.

The iPhone was the first multitouch device with revolutionizing software that creates a feeling of full control over the pixels on the screen. They invented the scrolling effect, how each pixel below your finger moves when you move your finger, creating the illusion that you are moving something on the screen. We are now so used to this feature on every list view that this became the new normal. That is was Apple is about, creating beautiful, innovative and simple to use products.

His eyes met mine. Over the years, many people have commented on Steve's special ability to tell you something, whatever it was, no matter how implausible, and make you believe it. This reality distortion field, the RDF, has become legendary.

Demos served as the primary means to turn ideas into software. The setup of these demo review meetings reveals how we went about making our software great.

The need to keep churning out demos that could eventually be shown to Steve meant our day-to-day software development work became a pyramid of demos, reviews, and decisions building up to the top and to Steve's final judgment.

I stumbled across the Guy Kawasaki, the author of this book when searching for interviews from Steve Jobs on youtube. I've watched the 12 Lessons Steve Jobs Taught Guy Kawasaki talk from Guy, which made an excellent first impression on me, so I picked up his newest book.

The book contains short stories about his experiences in his life. Each chapter finishes with a short paragraph of wisdom. It is fair to say Guy has a vast amount of experience in the industry of technology and marketing. He worked at Apple as a Macintosh evangelist and later started his own software businesses. Today, he is the evangelist for the digital design startup company Canva.

There is a lot of wisdom in this book, but what I am taking away is how Guy led his family life. He and his wife first had two kids on their own and then adopted two more kids a couple of years later. One unique thing that I liked was that Guy picked up the same hobbies as his children and got deeply involved with them. He first picked up Ice hockey with his sons and later surfing with his daughter. If you ask me, this is what a truly successful life looks like.

In the Macintosh Division, you had to prove yourself every day, or Jobs got rid of you. He demanded excellence and kept you at the top of your game. It wasn’t easy to work for him; it was sometimes unpleasant and always scary, but it drove many of us to do the finest work of our careers.

Unlike Jobs, the top management of most tech companies cannot judge whether products are good.

When people asked for a large-company reference account, we would pause for a few seconds as if narrowing down an extensive list and finally say, “Peat Marwick, for example.” The truth was that Peat Marwick was the only large company that had adopted Macintosh, besides Apple itself. This was a fake-it-till-you-make-it, Steve-Jobs-reality-distortion field at its best.

Be curious. Mistakes and failures can yield opportunities. If you have the right mind-set, the opposite of success is not failure, it’s learning.

Learn to like yourself, or change yourself until you can like yourself.

I wish I knew how incredible this book is when I first received it as a Christmas gift from my mother right after the book was published in 2011. I remember only reading the first couple of pages. Back then, I was just starting to get deeper into technology and computer science, and I was not ready to appreciate the book as much as I did now as I just finished reading it.

This book brings you deep into the world of Steve Jobs. The author tells the full story from Steve's birth, his upbringing, the formation of Apple, much about his family and relationships till the ending with his death. Steve was a fascinating person with a dominant personality. He had a passion for building truly great products. His passion was so strong that he pushed his employees to the limit, and sometimes beyond, there was a saying in the company about Steve's "reality distortion field" which ment that he was always right and believed anything was achievable. This thinking pushed everyone to do their best work. It resulted in amazing products like the first Macintosh, which had the first commercial window manager inspired by Xerox technolgy or the iMac with a design, unlike any other computer at that time. The iPod, in conjunction with iTunes, revolutionized the music industry. Steve had to do a lot of negotiations with the record label companies to get them to agree to sell the songs trough the iTunes store. The whole "i" series of products that led to the iPhone was so successful that Apple became the most valuable company in the world. Steve Jobs was an extraordinary technologist, businessman and negotiator. He left a legacy in Apple's company culture that will live on for a long time.

Because of the book, I got really inspired by Steve Jobs and watched numerous old interviews he gave. Those interviews were even more enjoyable with the additional context from the book about the particular area of Apple and its products.

The best way to predict the future is to invent it. (Steve Jobs)

I discovered that the best innovation is sometimes the company, the way you organize a company. The whole notion of how you build a company is fascinating. (Steve jobs)

Steve Jobs had a tendency to see things in a binary way: A person was either a hero or a bozo, a product was either amazing or shit

This intensity encouraged a binary view of the world. Colleagues referred to the hero/shithead dichotomy. You were either one or the other, sometimes on the same day. The same was true of products, ideas, even food: Something was either “the best thing ever,” or it was shitty, brain-dead, inedible.

More significantly, in the early 2000s Jobs’s insistence on end-to-end integration gave Apple an advantage in developing a digital hub strategy, which allowed your desktop computer to link seamlessly with a variety of portable devices

The “i,” Jobs later explained, was to emphasize that the devices would be seamlessly integrated with the Internet.

Steve Jobs thus became the greatest business executive of our era, the one most certain to be remembered a century from now. History will place him in the pantheon right next to Edison and Ford. More than anyone else of his

I think the biggest innovations of the twenty-first century will be the intersection of biology and technology. A new era is beginning, just like the digital one was when I was his age.

Wow, what a book. This book is a complete guide to increase the chances to build or to work at a successful technology startup. The author clearly knows what he is talking about, having worked at multiple startups and some big companies like Linkedin.

The book chapters cover the many different parts that make up a technology company. For instance, product development, the author talks about the importance of product iteration based on customer feedback in contrast to long development cycles. Same for the software engendering, testing, and release process.

The book is full of wisdom. It contains many quotes from other books and industry leaders.

done is better than perfect.

To build a successful product, you have to identify where you’re wrong and fix it. And because everything changes rapidly in the startup world, you have to repeat the identify-and-fix process continuously.

Design is a useful skill even if you aren’t building a product and even if the word “designer” is not part of your job title

The solution is to realize that you can’t bolt a “design” onto a product after the engineering and product work. Design is the product.

But many interesting problems in the world are wicked problems, where you must build the solution before you can really understand what problem you were solving. That is, solving the problem gives you a clearer view of the problem, which will allow you to build an even better solution. Building the new solution will lead to an even better understanding of the problem, and the cycle can repeat again and again.

Instead of intelligent design, we need evolution. That means letting go of the God complex and admitting to yourself that you don’t know the right answer. This is hard because schools condition you to think that there is a right answer to every problem and that you can get it just by thinking hard.

A good tech stack is one that scales faster than the people required to maintain it.

Another great book from the people at Basecamp, the famous company with the same name as their flagship project management software Basecamp.

This book goes into detail about the processes they use to build and ship software. Their approach to developing software evolved over the many years that the company exists and is, in my opinion, a very novel twist on the whole Agile software development movement.

Some characteristics of their process are;

• 2 week cycles for short projects.
• 6 week cycles for longer projects

One very unusual element is the distinct divide between so-called shaping-work and developing-work. Shaping is the task of predefining the use-cases of a new product or featrues. Shaping work is created with high-level abstractions like UI steps and sequences without to much detail to leave room for creativity of the designer and programmers picking up the "shaped" projects. The shaper also tries to think of any pitfalls that potentially can occur during the implementation phase and tries to eliminate those. A shaper does not necessarily have to be a developer, but someone with enough domain knowledge to create a useful "shaped" project that is completable in one project cycle.

After a project is shaped, the management team will decide if it gets built by "betting" on the project.

The development part has its own project cycle. Some useful concepts that are described for this phase are;

• Scoping the project into smaller sub-features
• Vertical instead of horizontal development to create actionable progress, by finalizing one part, which enables designers to work more efficient with programmers
• Downhill vs. Uphill. Uphill means the developer does not yet know how much time is needed to finish a feature because there are still some unknowns. The developer is "over the hill" when he/she knows that the rest of the work is more evident, this part is called Downhill.
• A cool-down period between projects that allow for finalizing and bug fixing of projects.

I would love to try to work more in this way, but I am also not sure if this is the right way for a very new startup that is still in search of product-market-fit. Even having the time to do shaping work is a luxury in a startup.

Story of Uber's rise and struggles with the company image told by a journalist that covered Uber over the years. The book covers a lot about Travis, the founder of Uber, how his relentless strive for growth and entrepreneurial work ethic made the company in what it is today. The story covers a lot of the difficulties and disagreements between the investors of Uber and the then CEO Travis. I enjoyed the book and read through it very fast.

Living with passion is, by definition, living without balance.

Embrace acute failure for chronic gains.

Mindlessly living with a passion can be extremely harmful and destructive. Mindfully living with a passion can be the key to a life well lived.

Individuals who are on the path of mastery not only accomplish great things, but do so in a healthy and sustainable manner. They exude a Zen-like aura, are resistant to burnout, and produce work that is of a special kind of quality - a quality that is born out of love. And yet perhaps their greatest accomplishment is an even more cherished one: continual growth and development, a fulfilling life. Just about every great performer who embodies and sustains the best kind of passion also adheres to what we call the mastery mind-set. The good news is that this mind-set and all its benefits are available to anyone who is willing to put in the work necessary to adopt it.

These amazing quotes speak for themselves. Excellent book that goes into the details about how passion is developed and how to live with a passion in a productive way.

An emergent AI is one that spontaneously arises after the local server farm plugs in one transistor too many

This book was my first ever fiction book i have ever read. The book is science fiction with a special focus on the science part to make it as realistic to be real in the near future. The storyline is about a technology company which builds a social network that eventually gets very sophisticated and out of control trough the use of artificial intelligence and quantum computing. The author writes in a very hipster kind of way with many technology slang words and references from the Silicon Valley tech culture.

I've read this book while traveling over a period of three months. The story line is a little confusing at times and some parts are not very meaningful, but when you stick with it and keep reading there are some nice cliff hangers that get resolved by finishing the book. Respect to the author Rob Reid for writing up with such a detailed fictional story with so many technology references that are in the realm of possibility in the near future. Overall it was a nice change from my usual reading material, but im not sure when i will pick up the next sci-fiction book.

Seventy thousand years ago, Homo sapiens was still an insignificant animal minding its own business in a corner of Africa. In the following millennia it transformed itself into the master of the entire planet and the terror of the ecosystem.

Humans in Europe and western Asia evolved into Homo neanderthalensis (‘Man from the Neander Valley’), popularly referred to simply as ‘Neanderthals’. Neanderthals, bulkier and more muscular than us Sapiens, were well adapted to the cold climate of Ice Age western Eurasia. The more eastern regions of Asia were populated by Homo erectus, ‘Upright Man’, who survived there for close to 2 million years, making it the most durable human species ever. This record is unlikely to be broken even by our own species. It is doubtful whether Homo sapiens will still be around a thousand years from now, so 2 million years is really out of our league.

There are no gods, no nations, no money and no human rights, except in our collective imagination

Great book about the history of humankind. The author clearly did some serious research into the events that lead to our species today.

The book first describes the origin of your species "Homo Sapiens". We evolved from a Gene pool called "The great apes", next to our species was another closely related kind called the "Neanderthal". The book makes the reasoning that we wiped out the Neanderthals because "They were too familiar to ignore, but too different to tolerate."

The book exhibited three main revolutions in our history. First, the Cognitive Revolution (70,000 years ago), which enabled our brains to envolove and allowed for complex communication and language to develop. Then the Agricultural Revolution (10,000 years ago), which brought more consistent food and enabled a higher population growth, the author argues that this revolution decreased the well being of the individual human but increased the spreading of the species. And finally the Scientific Revolution (500 years ago), which is very recent and brought many medical advances and a real understanding of human DNA. Now we are at a time where we have the power to alter the natural selection process of evolution by using genetic engineering. Where this will lead us is yet to unfold.

How we pay attention to the present moment largely determines the character of our experience and, therefore, the quality of our lives.

Our minds are all we have. They are all we have ever had. And they are all we can offer others.

Every moment of the day—indeed, every moment throughout one’s life—offers an opportunity to be relaxed and responsive or to suffer unnecessarily.

This book review feels very difficult for me to write. This book tries to guide a way to spirituality without following the nonsensical masquerades of religion. As an atheist, this sounded very promising.

The author, Sam Harris, talks about how we only have our own thoughts in the present moment, and controlling those thoughts could lead to a better, happier life. The book gives an intro in the use of mindfulness meditation in order to be less reactive to our own thoughts and have more control over our actions.

The book then goes into describing the sense of self in consciousness, and in how this sense itself is an illusion. This part is kind of controversial and a little confusing to me. I read this book mainly because I'm a fan of the meditation app from the author, called "the waking up " app.

We, human beings, are a species that’s not only capable of acting on hidden motives—we’re designed to do it

Self-deception is therefore strategic, a ploy our brains use to look good while behaving badly.

Education isn’t just about learning; it’s largely about getting graded, ranked, and credentialed, stamped for the approval of employers.

From the metaphor "The Elephant in the Room", which states something obvious that everyone is thinking, but nobody is saying out loud. The Elephant in the Brain analogy talks about what our brains think, and what our motives are and how we act on and justify those motives.

The book states a disconnect between what our brain motives are and how we internally and externally justify our actions. The first part of the book tries to describe why this happens, the verdict is essentially that we are animals, social primates, our genes envolved over multiple thousands of years to act in this way, mainly to increase the chance of survival.

The second part of the book goes into many different areas of life where our hidden motives are at play. Some of them include Body Lanuage, Conversation, Education and many more. This part of the book felt a little long-winded to me.

It all came down to this: no one in tech, no one in media, no one from Bill Gates to Jerry Levin to Hollywood ubermogul Barry Diller had realized what Marc Andreessen and Jim Clark had realized: the information superhighway was already here. The Internet and the World Wide Web were the information superhighway. The revolution was now, and it was being delivered not by the television, but by the computer.

The first banner ads got click-through rates in astronomical percentages. “People just clicked on anything to see what might lead them somewhere,”

Great book on the history of the Internet up to today. The author describes the origins of the Internet, where it was still called ARPANET and then goes into detail about the birth of the World Wide Web and the first browser called "Mosaic" which was developed by the Internet startup company Netscape, founded by Marc Andressen and his colleagues.

The book also covers the "dotcom" bubble in which many companies raised a ton of venture capital money on no real revenue and then spent the money to market their brand in order to exit the Company with an IPO. The bubble bursted in 2000 and many company shares lost most of their value.

The book continues with the story about the Internet companies that had the greatest impact. From Microsoft with the launch of Internet Explorer, Yahoo with the starting the Internet directory and the later search engine, the history of Google and the Pagerank algorithm and Amazon with the birth of e-commerce and finally the social revolution with Facebook.

The final chapters focus on the birth of mobile computing with smartphones and the introduction of the Apple iPhone.

Great book, recommended for anyone interested how the internet has evolved up to today.

Your true obsessions are the things you would pursue if you already had what you want in life, when it’s not about making money or reaching a goal.

in order to upgrade yourself, you have to pay attention to the spiritual, emotional, cognitive, and physical parts of life all at the same time.

when someone says something that bothers you, instead of reacting with anger as you normally would (downwiring), pause to consider why the comment upset you so much and then choose with intention how you want to respond (upwiring).

I will continue to read every new book that Dave comes out with. All of his books are packed with state of the art information about optimizing health and performance.

This book is structured in "Laws" based on a statistical analyse from his amazing podcast "Bulletproof Radio".

This book cuts trough the bullshit advice from the fitness industry and details real world practical tactics to get strong and ripped.

Martin is one of the earliest members of the internet fitness community back when there were only message boards to find information about fitness and training. He first pioneered of intermittent fasting for better diet adherence. His training style, Reverse Pyramid Training and his minimalistic training programm approach is set out to get you the best results, without having to spent countless hours in the gym.

In a world where nobody really know anything, you have the incredible freedom to continually reinvent yourself and forge new paths, no matter how strange. Embrace your weird self.

Another great book from tim ferrris that is full of short essays from guest the appeared on his popular podcast "The Tim Ferris Show".

Note for my future self: reread the chaptor "Some closing thoughts" from time to time.

This ability of Life 2.0 to design its software enables it to be much smarter than Life 1.0

In other words, we can think of life as a self-replicating information-processing system whose information (software) determines both its behavior and the blueprints for its hardware.

Perhaps life will spread throughout our cosmos and flourish for billions or trillions of years—and perhaps this will be because of decisions that we make here on our little planet during our lifetime.

Your synapses store all your knowledge and skills as roughly 100 terabytes’ worth of information, while your DNA stores merely about a gigabyte, barely enough to store a single movie download

Amazing book by Max Tegmark, Professor at MIT, about Intelligence (Biological or Artificial) and its evolution and where it might lead us in the future.

We do not simply live in this universe. The universe lives within us

The power and beauty of physical laws is that they apply everywhere, whether or not you choose to believe in them. In other words, after the laws of physics, everything else is opinion.

If all mass has gravity, does all gravity have mass? We don’t know.

Dark energy is a mysterious pressure in the vacuum of space that acts in the opposite direction of gravity, forcing the universe to expand faster than it otherwise would.

Earth’s Moon is about 1/ 400th the diameter of the Sun, but it is also 1/ 400th as far from us, making the Sun and the Moon the same size on the sky—a coincidence not shared by any other planet–moon combination in the solar system, allowing for uniquely photogenic total solar eclipses.

This book contains short chapters about topics and the laws physics in the Universe.

I recommend it to anyone who is curious about the Universe.

This book covers the story of how the gene editing technolgoy CRISPR was discoverd. It also goes into some of the discussions about the ethics of gene editing.

Fascinating topic.

Great book about the current state and the potential of Augmented Reality.

Great book for anyone interested in building a startup.

The book is written by successful startup founders and they bring a lot of highly valuable lesson from their own experiences.

Take it down to the physics

You don’t tell Elon you can’t do something. That will get you kicked out of the room. You need everything lined up. After we presented the plan, he said, ‘Okay, thanks.’ Everyone was like, ‘Holy shit, he didn’t fire you

Every time he’s fired someone and taken their job, he’s delivered on whatever the project was

He will pick the most aggressive time schedule imaginable assuming everything goes right, and then accelerate it by assuming that everyone can work harder

If there was a way that I could not eat, so I could work more, I would not eat. I wish there was a way to get nutrients without sitting down for a meal.

The fascinating biography of Elon Musk, from his childhood to the success with his companies Zip2, Paypal, Space X and Tesla.

I believe Elon is the entrepreneur of this century. Reasoning from first principles is one of his super powers.

One of the only technical books that i'll list on this page.

The way that Google runs production systems with a lot of automation and processes is fascinating. They created a new job role called Site Reliability Engineer which sole purpose is it to keep the production systems up and running.

I recommend this book to anyone working with software and distributed systems.

The first symptom that your mitochondria are overtaxed is fatigue. Fatigue is an absolute performance killer. It causes cravings, moodiness, brain fog, forgetfulness, and lack of focus.

An inflamed brain can make you unreasonably angry, can be a source of severe food cravings that distract you from whatever you’re trying to accomplish, and can rob you of your memory,

Coffee is the number one source of polyphenols in the Western diet

Dark chocolate (at least 85% dark) is full of polyphenols and contains a mild amount of caffeine, which also enhances performance.

Another amazing book by Dave Asprey, the created of bulletproof coffee and one of the original biohackers.

This book goes deep into mitochondria and how to optimize for maximal energy and health using alot of practical tips.

A must read for anyone interested in optimizing health and performance.

A parable is a message wrapped into a story. The human brain loves stories.

How to X (represents what your ideal prospect desires) Without Y (what your ideal prospect is looking to avoid) So you can Z (the real benefit that the prospect receives) An example of this formula is, how to lose weight without exercise so you can fit into skinny jeans for your birthday party.

While my friends were playing video games at night, I worked.

Set strict hours and goals; for example, work three hours a night until you are making $3,000 a month and then quit your job to devote more hours to your business.

Traffic fighters focus on hoarding every penny that they make so they can spend it later. Smart entrepreneurs focus on spending every dollar they need to so that they can make ten dollars off of each dollar in the future.

Alex Becker is an internet entrepreneur and owner of multiple online businesses. This book offers a lot of practical real word advice and i can recommend it to anyone looking to build a business and attain wealth.

Now, immediately after a person joins my list, through either the squeeze page or the blog, they are taken to my first frontend offer. This is the offer I use to qualify my buyers. Those who purchase that product will immediately see a few point-of-sale upsells.

Russell Brunson is a experienced internet marketed and the creator of the popular Saas software Clickfunnels

This book is the ultimate marketing hack by providing value to the reader while promoting his products.

Smart email marketers know that a long-term email marketing strategy requires segmentation.

Automated marketing at its best by Ryan Deiss, the founder of the company Digital Marketer.

Inflammation is the body’s natural response to a pathogen, toxin, stress, or trauma.

You get healthy inflammation after you lift weights and your body works to repair the stressed muscle or when you cut yourself and increased blood flow ferries in white blood cells to heal the injury.

Leptin is produced by fat cells, and your leptin levels are proportionate to your body-fat levels. This means that the fatter you are, the more leptin you have in your body.

What you eat directly affects how well you sleep, and the quality of your sleep also has a dramatic impact on your weight loss (or gain) and your performance.

The author Dave Asprey seriously know his stuff. I highly recommend this book for anyone who wants to optimize performance & health at the same time.

Read my full review here

The hardest thing to do is to build trust, but if the trust exists, you can accomplish so much more.

Amazing book from Toney Hsieh about business and friendship in the process of building the company Zappos.

Read my full review here

Most people don't know why they're doing what they're doing. They imitate others, go with the flow, and follow paths without making their own.

When you make a business, you get to make a little universe where you control all the laws. This is your utopia.

Success comes from persistently improving and inventing, not from persistently doing what’s not working.

Tim ferrris

This book helped me to stop the smoking habit. I highly recommend it for anyone who wants to stop.

When you have enough omega-3 fats in your diet, the effect of saturated fat on your cholesterol is either neutral or beneficial.

Great book that shows how we were mislead in beleving the macronutrient fat is bad for our health.

Read my full review here

This book inspired me to get more productive.

I started writing lists of stuff i wanted to accomplish and i use a modified version of the system that the book describes for getting sh** done.

Great book about fitness and health written by a neurosurgeon