@Misc

• Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman

  • Founder of Patagonia

  • rec'd by Jesse

Business Biographies: Shaken, Not Stirred by Stephen Troy

• General thoughts

  • This is a quick read; I finished it in a day. ~150pp. It seems like Troy just summarized biographies he had read about less-well-known businessmen. At the end of the book he lists his sources, which are all full-length biographies of the same people he talks about. Each of his chapters are 5-10 pages of the boiled-down story that you would get from reading the biography. It was definitely worth the money, though; I'm sure he skips over details that I would have found significant in their biographies, but for the most part he seems to do a good job of showing the most significant elements that led to each person's success (or eventual failure).

• Overall Lessons from the book

  • Author's Lessons (things that were common to EVERYONE in the book):

    • "[E]ach and every one of them had a sharp focus on his goals. They were almost blind to the views of others. None of them know the meaning of the word 'quit'. They took defeat as just a bump in the road on the way to success." (p.xii)

    • "[T]hey all had great partners. Each had a partner or a second-in-command who brought talents and skills that these leaders knew they themselves lacked and needed. Sometimes that meant unethical or illegal activity, and they found a 'partner in crime'. Most of the partners stayed in the background while the leader was the public face enjoying the spotlight." (p.xii)

  • My Lessons (patterns I noticed):

    • One of the most important problems you need to deal with when starting a new business is how you're going to deal with competition. There are different strategies that people used: patents, buying up the competition, merging

    • Patents have been extremely important in the past (IDK if anything has changed since the early 20th century).

    • big companies can really squash little guys if they want to.

• Chapter-by-Chapter Lessons

  • 1. Aaron Burr

  • 2. Alexander Graham Bell

  • 3. A.P. Giannini

  • 4. Benjamin Eisenstadt

  • 5. Chuck Feeney

  • 6. Daniel Ludwig

  • 7. Edwin Armstrong

  • 8. Forrest Mars Sr.

  • 9. Harry Snyder

  • 10. Henry Ford

  • 11. Ivar Kreuger

  • 12. Ernest Woodruff

  • 13. John Ringling

  • 14. Larry Hillblom

  • 15. Lewis Tappan

  • 16. Milton Hershey

  • 17. Philo Farnsworth

  • 18. Powel Crosley Jr.

  • 19. Robert Morris

  • 20. Samuel Insull

  • 21. Isaac Merritt Singer

  • 22. Thomas Adams

  • 23. William Durant

  • 24. Frank W. Woolworth

  • 25. Armand Hammer

Forbes Greatest Business Stories of All Time by Daniel Gross

• Robert Morris

• Cyrus McCormick

• John D Rockefeller

• J.P. Morgan

• Henry Ford

• Charles Merrill

• David Sarnoff

• Walt Disney

• John H. Johnson

• David Ogilvy

• Ray Kroc

• Joseph Wilson - Xerox

• American Express

• Mary Kay Ash

• Intel

• Sam Walton

• William McGowan - MCI

• Harley-Davidson

• Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co.

• Bill Gates

Founders at Work by Jessica Livingston

• I'm not very far into this yet but it looks like it may be one of the best books I've bought. The first 25 pages were packed with wisdom and lessons learned. It reminds me a lot of the super-document I compiled with the collected advice of high-scorers on the LSAT.

• p161 - Note that Paul Buchheit, the creator of Gmail, had the same idea as the founders of Hotmail (internet-based email), but he never got around to executing it. So whatever brilliant idea you think of, it's very likely that someone else has thought of it, and what will separate the two of you is whether you actually execute it well.

• Contents

  • Introduction

  • 1. Max Levchin of PayPal

  • 2. Sabeer Bhatia of Hotmail

  • 3. Steve Wozniak of Apple

  • 4. Joe Kraus of Excite

  • 5. Dan Bricklin of Software Arts

  • 6. Mitchell Kapor of Lotus

  • 7. Ray Ozzie of Iris Associates, Groove Networks

  • 8. Evan Williams of Pyra Labs (Blogger.com)

  • 9. Tim Brady of Yahoo

  • 10. Mike Lazaridis of Research in Motion

  • 11. Arthur van Hoff of Marimba

  • 12. Paul Buchheit of Gmail

  • 13. Steve Perlman of WebTV

  • 14. Mike Ramsay of TiVo

  • 15. Paul Graham of Viaweb

  • 16. Joshua Schachter of del.icio.us

  • 17. Mark Fletcher of ONElist, Bloglines

  • 18. Craig Newmark of craigslist

  • 19. Caterina Fake of Flikr

  • 20. Brewster Kahle of WAIS, Internet Archive, Alexa Internet

  • 21. Charles Geschke of Adobe Systems

  • 22. Ann Winblad of Open Systems, Hummer Winblad

  • 23. David Heinemeier Hansson of 37signals

  • 24. Philip Greenspun of ArsDigita

  • 25. Joel Spolsky of Fog Creek Software

  • 26. Stephen Kaufer of TripAdvisor

  • 27. James Hong of HOT or NOT

  • 28. James Currier of Tickle

  • 29. Blake Ross of Firefox

  • 30. Mena Trott of Six Apart

  • 31. Bob Davis of Lycos

  • 32. Ron Gruner of Alliant Computer Systems, Shareholder.com

Moneyball by Michael Lewis

• This is probably my favorite finance book. Finance is fundamentally about making smart investments. Moneyball is about a fantastic investor named Billy Beane, who invested in baseball players instead of companies.

• I still haven't seen the movie.

The Monk and the Riddle by Randy Komisar

• although I know you shouldn't, I do judge books by their titles, and I did not think I would like this book because the title and cover made me think it was going to be a bunch of fluffy nonsense. but this is actually a great book for anyone to read who is thinking about what career they should go into.

• the book takes place in silicon valley CA and the basic story underlying the whole thing is this (this is based on my memory of it, so I could be wrong): randy komisar (the author) is a 40-something HLS grad who switched into advising start-ups after a few years of IP law in silicon valley. he basically talks/advises people and gets them off the ground, and is apparently a bit of a big-shot around silicon valley (or at least has a very good reputation for being knowledgeable).

• over a couple of meetings-for-coffee he has conversations with a start-up novice who wants to create a website that will allow people to accomplish the things that would normally be handled by a funeral home: caskets, grieving, etc. It's an admittedly random idea for the book to be centered around, but I think it's a stand-in for the myriad of start-up ideas people have. Anyway, the HLS guy basically educates the neophyte to the ways of start-ups and points out a bunch of problems with his plan/idea. That's the meat of the book, the really useful part: all of the information that is passed from this knowledgeable guy to the neophyte.

• The most memorable idea I remember reading was, "this website idea of yours could very well fail; you should make sure that if it does, you won't see these next two years of your life as having been wasted. you shouldn't do it just to get rich; you should have a deeper reason." or something like that. I should probably buy this book.