Latest Posts

• 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.

• Book of the Week: Narconomics

  Jesus told me to read Nacronomics: How to Run a Drug Cartel to learn more about the business. This book looks at the drug smuggling industry through the eyes of an economist. I learned that there are 3 types of countries. Countries that produce drugs, countries that traffic drugs and countries that consume drugs. You can think about cocaine grown in Colombia and consumed in United States via Mexico. Persuasion

• Book of the Week: Dataclysm

  This week I read Dataclysm by Christian Rudder, because the OkCupid blog, OkTrends, is probably the best example of content marketing with big data. You may wonder why would you need to read the book, if you’ve already read the blog posts. Rudder redid the analysis with new data to double check his previous work and took data from sources other than OkCupid to talk about what brings us together, what pulls us apart and what makes us who we are. You may hear individual anecdotes of racism, but when you aggregated lots of data together, insights rise above the noise. You can actually say something about people. He covers linguistics, employment, beauty, sexuality, race and also the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory. You get a lot more than just data about dating from the book.

• Book of the Week: Rocket Surgery Made Easy

  This week, I read Rocket Surgery Made Easy, because I want to go to Mars like Elon Musk. Steve Krug is better known for Don’t Make Me Think, a book about usability of websites. If you’re someone reading this book, it usually means you don’t do any usability testing, so it all rides on you to start doing it. Usability Test But I have web analytics, why do I actually need to talk to people? Doesn’t my web analytics tell me what people are doing on my site already? Aside from most web analytics being difficult to use, they only tell you what happened and not why. The why is what is important. A lot of time on a page is usually good unless they spent time on that page, because they were confused. Facilitator

• Book of the Week: Systematic Trading

  This week I read Systematic Trading by Robert Carver after being introduced to his blog about Investment Idiocy. He also has a public journal on elitetrader detailing his 84.9% profit since April 2014 trading futures. The book is a little dense and you should be ready to get the spreadsheets out.