Latest Posts

• Book of the Week: A Guide to the Good Life

  This week I read A Guide to the Good Life by William B. Irvine, because I wanted to find out if my life is wasted or not. Doesn’t everybody want the good life? Everyone needs a philosophy for life just like they need an investment policy statement. The book says that we have historically thought of stoicism in the wrong way and they are people who actually get joy out of life. The Greeks created schools of philosophy and the Romans marketed Stoicism to make it more attractive. Ancient ascetics are like modern day homeless people or is that the other way around. If you want to modernize Stoicism, just replace the explanations that invoke Zeus with evolution and you’ll be fine. After reading this book, you can enjoy the good life as a stoic, but don’t tell anyone about it. It is easier to practice Stoicism in stealth. Stoic Psychological Techniques

• Book of the Week: The Complete Visual Guide to Building a House

  This week I read The Complete Visual Guide to Building a House, because if you have a tear down, you need to build a new house from scratch. It is useful to know what your contractor and subcontractors are doing and what needs to be done. The book is fully illustrated, enabling a person like me easily understand things. The book goes over laying the foundation, framing the floors, walls and ceiling, roofing, windows, drywalling, tiling, flooring, stairs, doors and trim. It doesn’t go over electrical or plumbing, so you’ll have to rely on your subcontractors on that. What I did learn is that there are a lot of places to cut corners. Ideally, you get a pallet of construction grade lumber and sort out the straight pieces from the bent pieces. Use the straight pieces where straightness is important and find some other place to stick the not as straight pieces. If I was lazy, I wouldn’t bother sorting the wood and use whatever was quickly accessible. There are a lot of details to get right. The book provides a good general outline of how things are done, but different regions have different building codes. There are a lot of specific details in each part of the construction process. Don’t expect to take your pickup truck to Home Depot (HD) for materials and amigos and be able to build a house after reading this book.

• Book of the Week: Once Upon a Time in Russia

  This week I read Once Upon a Time in Russia by Ben Mezrich, the author of Bringing Down the House. I’m an ant and this book tells you how the world really works. How Russian oligarchs and Putin obtained their wealth and power. What happened in Russia is playing itself out in China, where you have fortunes being made through the privatization of government-owned companies. When you have politics, companies, power and wealth, you will always get corruption. Even in the United States, you have politicians putting their children into power at drug companies to raise the prices and fleece the public. Even throw in a fake MBA degree from a college while you’re at it. The book is mainly about Boris Berezovsky, an oligarch, who put Yeltsin and Putin in power, but ultimately fell out of favor with Putin. It also details the background of Alexander Litvinenko, who was assassinated by polonium poisoning. Roman Abramovich, Boris’ protege and 137th richest person in the world, represents a contrasting oligarch who was willing to play by Putin’s rules. When the house tells you that you should cash in your chips and leave, you should do so. Or you’ll leave in a body bag.

• Book of the Week: The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up

  This week I read The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing by the amazing Marie Kondo. If you watch any videos of Marie, you’ll see why I call her amazing. She’ll change your life for the better. Marie developed her KonMari method after years of running a tidying business. Tidying is not just about making your living space uncluttered, it is about freeing your mind to focus on the things that bring you joy. As I learned in make space, people are heavily influenced by their environment. You must create an environment for people to thrive. This book is more about mindset than technique. You need to change the way your relationship with things, the final state of where you want to people and why you want to be there. Marie is not alone. Other people have reaped the benefit of tidying. James Altucher got rid of most of his possessions and found that minimalism brought him freedom and joy. A lawyer in Shanghai switched careers to run a tidying business just like Marie. Tidying Tidying is composed of two actions: discarding and deciding where to store things. You should not do a little bit of tidying every day. You should allocate time and make this a special event where you set yourself up with the proper habits. When you start tidying you should start by category and not by location. This lets you evaluate everything in that category. Discarding

• Book of the Week: Prison Ramen

  This week I read Prison Ramen: Recipes and Stories Behind Bars, because if I was going to do any recruiting, I would need to know about the most valuable commodity in the prison economy. The ramen recipes provide a backdrop to the prison stories. Prison kind of sucks, but I guess that is the point of it. If you’re not a white male drug taking athlete from Stanford, you could possible end up in jail. There are some stories from celebrities like Danny Trejo and Shia LaBeouf, who talks about his time stealing Pokemon from Kmart. I learned that sugar-filled coffee can help with heroin withdrawal. Although I’d stay away from heroin since there is not much difference between a therapeutic dose and lethal dose. If you want some booze in prison, there’s a pruno recipe too. Racism

• Book of the Week: Founders at Work

  This week I read Founders at Work: Stories of Startup’s Early Days by Jessica Livingston, founding partner of Y Combinator. I had no idea what the book was about. When I opened it up, I thought this is just a bunch of interviews, which could possibly suck. The book is actually great and I learned a lot reading this book. The book came out in 2008, so they had an interview with some guy called Evan Williams who sold Blogger to Google after running out of money and having everyone quit before having a chance to lay everyone off. You get to hear the up and down journeys of well known companies. I gave up on startups early this year, so this was a nice chance to live vicariously. Learnings Some people like to rewrite history. Turns out that Jack thought up the idea to put the Hotmail tagline on each email, not Tim Draper. I need to remember to mention it to Sabeer, the next time I see him in the restroom. Frugality is a saving grace. Steve Wozinak was good, because he didn’t have money, so he spent a lot of time trying to reduce chips and design things on paper. Being frugal is very helpful as a startup founder. It lets you survive like a cockroach. Persistence is another theme. When people say “no”, it is just the start of the negotiation. Hiring good people is important. Y Combinator does not invest in good teams without good ideas. They tried it, but have learned not to do it without a good idea. I think it works, but it doesn’t work if you only have a 3 month time frame to get things done. Investing in good teams works if given enough time. It doesn’t matter what the business plan you used to raise money, you should build what the customers value and are willing to pay for. Most ideas change and don’t survive first contact with the customer. One of the best uses of money was to buy a $15,000 espresso machine. It turned around the company, because it changed the environment. Dealing with customers is a lot about managing feelings. You want everyone to feel great using your product. Actually, people are all about feelings. They are just squishy meatbags of feelings.

• Book of the Week: Cracking the Coding Interview

  This week I read Cracking the Coding Interview by Gayle Laakmann McDowell, the founder of CareerCup. I previously read Programming Interviews Exposed. I don’t like coding interviews, but I had no idea how to answer these questions. Here are a list of things you must know according to Gayle. Data Structures

• Book of the Week: Chaos Monkey

  This week I read Chaos Monkey by Antonio García Martínez. As I read the book, it seemed so candid that it could have only been written by someone with FU money. The book was 500 page long, but it was an enjoyable read as a window into what Silicon Valley is really like. The author dropped out of a PhD in physics at UC Berkeley to work as a quant at Goldman Sachs. Afterwards he moved west to join Adchemy, a tech company. He left Adchemy to start AdGrok through the YCombinator incubator program. AdGrok was acquired by Twitter and Martínez joined Facebook pre-IPO to product manage their ads. Things happen in a flash of the eye. Startups

• Book of the Week: The Only Game in Town

  This week I read The Only Game in Town: central banks, instability, and avoiding the next collapse by Mohamed A. El-Erian. This book sort of just went through me without me absorbing anything. It feels like a brain dump by El-Erian. The chapters are really short and it doesn’t tell me anything I don’t already know. If you lived in the future and wanted to figure out what happened in the past, this might be an okay starting point, but other books go much deeper into specific subjects. The main issue is that we are going through a period of low growth, which has a lot of societal implications like inequality. If you want to read more about that, I recommend Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century. El-Erain keeps referring to a T-intersection, where things will get worst or they will get better. If that is the case, I might as well do a long straddle. Issues

• Book of the Week: How to Win Games and Beat People

  This week I read How to Win Games and Beat People by Tom Whipple, because I am tired of losing. The book is a quick read and goes through many games. It does highlight some of the mathematical results, but being a technical person, I’d rather go further in depth.

• Book of the Week: Peak

  This weak I read Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise, because I want to become an expert too just like the machine learning expert. If you do deliberate practice, you too can become an expert and gain super powers. It turns out that you can indeed learn perfect pitch and it is not an innate genetic ability. You just need to spend a year and a half at it. I’ve also learned recently that you can become as fit as a Navy SEAL by just religiously following the Navy SEAL training program. Deliberate Practice

• Book of the Week: Influence

  I was told that I can’t keep using violence to persuade people, so I read Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert B. Cialdini. You can persuade people by taking advantage of psychological shortcuts that people take when they can not assess the entire situation. Dr. Cialdini also gives ways to say no to persuasion.