CategoryBooks

The Snowball, another Buffett biography

If you want to understand the history of Berkshire Hathaway there are two good books to choose from. Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist by Roger Lowenstein, which I summarized six months ago, or The Snowball by Alice Schroeder, summarized below. The main difference between the two tellings is that Lowenstein focuses more on the Buffett Partnership and then Berkshire Hathaway as a...

The Next Step: Paperback

The Next Step 10th Anniversary (header)

Nine of every ten startups fail. For the the last decade I’ve been sharing my 30+ years of experience to help lower that horrible statistic. And it is working. Eight of our ten of the companies at Africa Eats are still running, the oldest now over 10 years old and many soon to reach that milestone? How? Business planning. By not stopping with a Plan A, as Plan A rarely succeeds. By not only...

Inside the Apple II4

Do you remember my journey down the 8-bit computing rabbit hole? Well… if you are going to do something for fun like designing an upgraded 1976 CPU and writing a 1979 personal computer operating system, you might as well go all the way and write the accompanying book too, in the matching late-1970s style. I read a lot of fan fiction in my free time, but I don’t recall ever seeing much...

Buffett, a Biography

After finishing Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist by Roger Lowenstein, I’m confident that Warren would be quite pleased that I managed to pick up a used copy for just 75ยข at my local library. Warren may be one of the 10 richest people on the planet, but Warren Buffett loves a bargain. Like most owners in Berkshire Hathaway, before reading this book I knew a little about Buffett...

Harry Potter: Chapters 8 through 800,000

As an entrepreneur and investor I’m constantly running through “what if” analyses. In my off time it seems I do something similar, but there I let creative others come up with new variation. What this looks like is Harry Potter fan fiction, where you already know the characters and story arcs, but where each time you start a new story, you get a different “what if”...

Sequoia Capital’s simple, compelling pitch deck

Attention and time

I wrote a whole book walking entrepreneurs through the process of creating a simple, compelling pitch deck, and I’ve posted a slide-by-slide guide to the standard, 12-15 slide pitch. But there are other frameworks, and here is Sequoia Capitals, as posted by Alex Banks on Twitter. Slide-by-slide Slide 1 This is your first impression. Pick a great name. Spend a little money on a great logo...

The 10th Edition of The Next Step

The Next Step 10th Anniversary (header)

Ten years ago I published my first book, The Next Step. This was inspired by a few life changes, including being asked to teach entrepreneurship to MBA candidates at Bainbridge Graduate Institute, working as an Entrepreneur in Residence at the University of Washington, and the imminent launch of Fledge, which at the time was one small business accelerator. This first book covered the process from...

Money, a true page turner

Money by Jacob Goldstein

What is money? It’s a simple question to ask but the answer is complicated. I know, as I’ve read and blogged about Wealth, Capital, Debt, Lords, Americana, and America’s Bank, amongst a lot of far dryer, far more challenging economic history books. Then along came Money: The True Story of a Made-Up Thing by former Planet Money host Jacob Goldstein, and wow, what a difference...

The Long 20th Century

The Long Twentieth Century

The Long Twentieth Century is more than its name describes, a very long and detailed economic history of not just the 20th Century but global Western capital of four eras: Venice/Genoa, Dutch Empire, British Empire, United States. TL;DR, with an emphasis on the don’t read… the interesting part of this book isn’t the 20th Century nor the Long 18th Century either, as both of those...

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