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I was inspired to read Venture Deals after reading Heidi Roizen’s delightful blog post about How to Build a Unicorn From Scratch – and Walk Away with Nothing. Very often a new entrepreneur will sign something eager to be finally funded without realizing all the repercussions down the line. Why sometimes it is better to raise less money at a more reasonable valuation to avoid a down round. This book covers how entrepreneurs raise money from venture capital firms and what happens behind the scenes to get the deal done. A must read if you are raising funds. Also read the errata, since there was a error on the term sheet calculations. Term sheets are complicated. The book points out a lot of things to watch out for and tells you how you should negotiate and focus your lawyers. Gender Pronouns I’ve notice a trend that more recent books use the female pronoun “her” when referring to a scientist, an engineer, an entrepreneur, etc. Brad tried writing the book with both genders, but it was confusing, so he stuck with the male pronoun. I would have just used the female pronoun if you make it a point to call it out on your book. It’s like saying, I tried and failed, but I still believe in women. Venture Capital Firm
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This book is about speculative bubbles by Nobel Prize winning Yale economics professor, Robert J. Shiller. Each new revision of the book was close to a bubble that popped. The first edition was close to the stock bubble. The second edition was close to the real estate bubble. This third edition published in 2015 has news sections on the bond bubble. Shiller is known as the great predictor of bubbles. The later edition also comments on the previously predicted bubble that popped. I expect a fourth edition that covers a new bubble with commentary on the bond bubble that popped after the release of the third edition. The book is divided in sections that talk about the structural factors, cultural factors and psychological factors to lead to irrational exuberance.
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This week, I read inGenius: A Crash Course on Creativity, because I wanted to read another book by Tina Seelig, but this one was available. I found the book fairly thin on new content, but full of stories. Stories that I have heard before and some new ones. If you already know of Tina’s creativity class at Stanford, you could probably skip this book. Innovation Engine 
The inside of the engine
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This week I read On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen by Harold McGee since it was one of the recommended books for the Harvard class about food on edx, Science and Cooking: From Haute Cuisine to Soft Matter Science. Harold McGee worked with Thomas Keller at the three Michelin star restaurant, The French Laundry. These guys know their food. The book is over 800 pages long, so I treated it as a reference book and did not read the whole thing. The Four Basic Molecules Food is made up of four basic molecules: water, lipids, carbohydrates and proteins. Water is everywhere. How things interact with water accounts for a lot of the action. How things dissolve in water and how water changes state affect your results. Lipids don’t like water and have high boiling points. Fatty food tastes better. Carbohydrates are mixed with water and show up as sugars and starches. Proteins are sensitive and change a lot depending on pH and temperature. Cooking is manipulating these molecules from their raw form into something delectable and amazing. Harvard I wonder why type of prep school student would take class on food at Harvard. It’s not likely they are going to cook themselves since they’ll be eating at fancy restaurants such as The French Laundry, which doesn’t even do your laundry for you. Some seek knowledge to impress other people rather than the pure pursuit of knowledge. This reminds me of the bar scene from Good Will Hunting and Richard Feynman talking about the name of a bird. Some people try to use their fancy pants knowledge to make others feel less about themselves, so they can feel better. I imagine having dinner with some student who took the course wanting to impress others with their knowledge. On the other hand, maybe a student of the class with pursue baking after getting degree in Applied Mathematics and Economics like Joanna Chang, who started Flour Bakery. Her cookie recipe from Flour got me plenty of compliments. I shouldn’t pick on Harvard. I sat in a seminar on BBQ at a physics conference in Texas. Good food is not reserved for the wealthy. The brisket used to be a cheaper piece of meat that was made edible by cooking it low and slow. Unfortunately, even brisket has been gentrified and now you have people like Franklin Barbecue. Before lobster was food for the poor, so there is no going back. Eggs There is a 50 page chapter on eggs. The chapter talks about the history of eggs, how eggs form biologically, different components of the egg, the chemistry inside the egg, at what temperature do different proteins in the egg solidify, egg dishes, egg safety, egg foams, egg-liquid mixtures, different ways to preserve eggs, how to tell the freshness of the egg, etc. More than what you would ever want to know about eggs. One of the most interesting things I learned is that if you cook an egg for a really long time (7 hours), the glucose in the whites will turn the egg white brown. Ramen I think the book dismissed an entire food group, instant ramen. It has one sentence about it and refers to it as Ra-men.
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Homeworld is one of my favorite computer games. It is a 3D real time strategy game set in space that won game of the year when it was released. The Art of Homeworld accompanied the recent release of the remastered version of the game. I bought the book to use as a reference for my space pirate game. Limited Resources [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BrG23qWYG4A&w;=560&h;=315] Since they didn’t have enough resources, they used animatics, which has become part of the signature style of Homeworld. An animatic is made up of hand drawn still images from the storyboard that are animated with sound and dialogue on top. The cut scenes made you feel alone on a journey in cold space. The beautiful backgrounds are also a consequence of having constrained resources. They didn’t have enough texture memory for a background, so the background is all geometry with vertices colored and positioned by hand. Making video games is about being creative and pushing as much as you can out of technology. Spaceships The most amazing part of the game is the sense of scale with the spaceships. You can zoom and track everything from individual fighters and the capital ships. During the game, you can position your fleet in 3D and take advantage of different formations. Sometimes I would just camera track a fighter during an epic space battle. Sometimes we only see the end result. This art book tells you why and how certain choices were made.
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The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty is Dan Ariely’s third book. His first book was Predictably Irrational. Most of the conclusions in the book are from studies of college students that used a math problem where cheating was possible, because the evidence of your answers are destroyed at the end of the test. It is amazing how much information you can gain by using the same experiment over and over again with small variations. Although I believe the conclusions, it still bugs me that the data is based on college studies under manufactured situations that may or may not reflect reality. There’s a chapter how on depleting your willpower will make you dishonest. If you want to know more about willpower, there’s a book called Willpower that I read a while ago. I also learned that thinking you’re wearing fake designer products will make you more dishonest. Turns out it was easier to get a fashion expert to send Dan $47k in handbags and sunglasses than going out and buying knock-offs. This book makes you about how you interact with people and how things like Bernie Madoff, Goldman Sachs and Enron occur besides people being greedy bastards. Simple Model of Rational Crime The Simple Model of Rational Crime (SMORC) has three elements
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Don’t Make Me Think, Revisited by Steve Krug is one of those books at the top of a web designers reading list. I read the latest Revisited edition published in 2014, which includes updates for mobile. He updated the book once in 2006 to make more money on royalties. This time he updated the book to reflect the changes to the web since then, which is mainly mobile. This is a good quick read for anyone who builds websites. Definition of Usability
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This week’s book is Evil by Design. The premise of the book is that for designing for humans, we should start with the seven deadly sins, which are fundamental human traits. Each chapter deals with a deadly sin and gives examples of how those sins are being used to manipulate you. After reading the book, I see evil all around me. It is the devil’s work! The Seven Deadly Sins
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The last book I read was about the power of habits. This book is about how to create habits in mostly the context of Internet companies. How to build products that cause users to have cravings like a drug addict. We all can’t sell drugs, so they next best thing is to peddle internet products. Each chapter ends with a summary, so you can get a quick read do the book just by reading a one pager for each chapter. You’re probably better off doing that. The Hook Model
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There are few of copies of The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg (Harvard MBA) around my workplace, so I decided to pick it up and read it. The book is separated into 3 parts: habits of individuals, habits of organizations and habits of societies. This was a good read. Habit Loop 
The central concept of the book is the habit loop, how it works, how you can change it and how it affects individuals, organizations and societies. The habit loop starts with a cue that makes you follow your routine until you get rewarded. That reward reinforces the loop, so that the next time you see the cue, you’ll be triggered again. This reminds me of Pavlov’s dog experiment where he conditioned dogs salivate when a bells rings by associating the bell with food then removing the food later with the dogs still salivating with no food present. Instead of dogs, this book focuses on people, organizations and societies. The Habits of Individuals Do you know why you use toothpaste? It’s because an advertiser programmed this habit into you. Toothpaste doesn’t really work. The tinglingly minty fresh taste is your reward. Toothpaste doesn’t need to do that, but it sells more when it does. Shampoo doesn’t have to lather to clean effectively, but they add stuff to make suds, because it sells more. Habits are powerful, because they create neurological cravings. Sometimes the brain reacts like it has gotten the reward already from only seeing the cue like Pavlov’s dogs. Cravings make it easier to form new habits. The Golden Rule of Habit Change
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This is another origin story book about Patagonia, a privately held clothing company that specializes in climbing equipment. The previous origin story books focused a lot of the founders, but this one focuses more on the company rather then the founder, Yvon Chouinard. The book describes how everything started from a metal shop making climbing hardware into the large clothing company it is today. Beginnings Many founders get there start by solving their own problems. Yvon liked to go climbing, but he needed equipment for it. As climbers grew dissatisfied with existing equipment, they innovated, made improvements to satisfy their own urges. They worked only as much to fund their next adventure. Selling extra hardware to friends turned into hiring friends to make more hardware. Eventually they branched out into clothing and spun out the hardware divisions. After seeing the damage their climbing equipment was doing to the rock face, they developed new pieces that were non-destructive. They quickly phased out pitons and educated customers about other ways to climb. They were unafraid to take a loss and cannibalize existing sales in order to develop something new and innovative. This started the road to trying to be a business while staying as environmentally self-conscious as possible even if it meant lower profits. Going Global
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Just for Fun is the origin story of Linux. I like technology origin stories, because they have entertaining characters and I know the ending already. Linux started out as a pet project to read email with a dial up modem as a way for Linus to learn about the 386 processor. It now runs most websites on the internet. It is best to start out and do one thing well and grow organically from there. Meaning of Life The origin story is sandwiched between two chapters on the meaning of life, which appear in the beginning and end of the book. The meaning of life is:
