Latest Posts

• Book of the Week: A Random Walk Down Wall Street

  This week I read A Random Walk Down Wall Street by Burton G. Malkiel. This book first came out in 1973 and gets revised often to reflect current information. The latest is the 11th edition (2016), the book I read was the 10th edition (2011). This book is still relevant 40 years later. I can summarize the book in one statement. Index funds are better than trying to invest in individual securities or actively managed funds. This is one of my favorite investing books. Malkiel explains things so plainly that it should be accessible to all audiences. Part 4 of the book gives practical advice for investors.

• Book of the Week: What Every Real Estate Investor Needs to Know About Cash Flow... And 36 Other Key Financial Measures

  This week, I read What Every Real Estate Investor Needs to Know About Cash Flow… And 36 Other Key Financial Measures by Frank Gallinelli, Columbia professor and founder of realdata.com, founded in 1982. Another real estate with a ridiculously long title. I picked up this book to go through the math needed to evaluate whether or not a property will make a good investment. The book is separated into two parts. The first part is 100 pages of content and the rest of the book goes through 37 different calculations. Most of those calculations are basic like how to calculate compounded interest. The Four Ways to Make Money in Real Estate There are only four ways to make money in real estate.

• Book of the Week: The Wall Street Journal Complete Real-estate Investing Guidebook

  This week I read The Wall Street Journal Complete Real-estate Investing Guidebook by David Crook after I was unsatisfied with The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide to Real Estate Investing. These books have long titles. It is hard to find a good real-estate investing book, because seems everyone is trying to cheat you out of your money like Donald Trump. The Wall Street Journal is reputable, even though the author’s last name is Crook. This book was published in 2006, before the housing crash, which makes some of the sections of the book interesting. Like how you can get a mortgage with no money down or even get a mortgage for 125% of the value of the property. I found the tax laws I was looking for in this book, but I still want more detailed cash flow analysis to see which real estate projects will be profitable. Real Estate Secrets Making money in real estate comes down to four secrets.

• Book of the Week: The Ultimate Beginner's Guide to Real Estate Investing

  This week I read the The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide to Real Estate Investing from biggerpockets.com. I was looking for more information about real estate investing before the next bust. I need a list of tax breaks and the math needed to evaluate investments. Didn’t find that in this guide, but it serves as a starting point. The book has links to biggerpockets blog posts which go more in-depth on specific topics. Why Real Estate? First question and most important. Why would I care about real estate if I do passive investing with the Unconventional Success Portfolio? The two most important things about real estate for me are

• Book of the Week: The Achievement Habit

  I was listening to the Stanford Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders podcast and they had on this old fart that I really liked. Turns out he wrote a book, so this week I read The Achievement Habit by Bernard Roth, d.school founder and mechanical engineering professor. This book contains things that Roth has learned throughout his years of teaching. It complements everything I know about and have read very nicely. I really liked the book. Enough to make it worth owning. The book has “your turn” exercises, which are probably modeled after exercises he does in his classes. I advise you to do them. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CR8LQTfLvfw&w;=560&h;=315] After reading this book and The No Asshole Rule, it seems that if you’re a professor for a long time, you eventually will make someone cry.

• Book of the Week: Words and Rules

  This week I read Words and Rules: The Ingredients of Language by Steven Pinker. Pinker examines how language and the mind works by examining regular and irregular verbs. On this journey, you learn about how scientist measure activity in different regions of the brain, how children learn language, different linguistic theories, what we can learn from neural network models and just generally about things you take for granted. As a person who works with language, I wish I read this book earlier. Words and Rules A word is a memorized association between a sound and a meaning. Rules are productive, symbolic and combinatorial. It doesn’t specify specific things, but how you bring together different kinds of things. You can combine things in any number of ways as long as they follow the rules. There are 6.4 trillion five-word sentences. Not all of them make sense, but you can generate them all based on your words and rules. The rules let you compute the meaning of a combination from the meaning of the words and how they are combined. Sentences are created by taking a set of memorized words), applying rules that combine words and parts of words into bigger words (morphology) and using rules that combine words into phrases and sentences (syntax).

• Book of the Week: Smarter Faster Better

  This week, I read Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Product in Life and Business, by Charles Duhigg, the author of The Power of Habit. I think everyone wouldn’t mind being smarter, faster and better. The books describes concepts related to being smarter, faster and better, but I didn’t come away with concrete things I need to do to make myself better. It was more about how to think about things. Charles found 8 key concepts repeated in his learnings on productivity. Each chapter describes a concept and jumps between a few stories.

• Book of the Week: Programming Interviews Exposed

  I gave advice to someone seeing an internship to read Programming Interviews Exposed and Cracking The Coding Interview, but I confess I haven’t read those books myself. This week, I read Programming Interviews Exposed to see if I gave bad advice. Personally I hate coding interview questions, but they seem to be the norm if you’re looking for a software engineering job. The only way I can keep it from being the norm is by building a successful software company that doesn’t use these type of coding interview questions. In Silicon Valley, monkey see, monkey do. This is another book that takes an effort to be inclusive and not assume that all programmers are male. Isis Anchalee and Tracy Chou would be proud. The first part of the book describes the job hunt in general, which is great if you’re a new graduate, because you have no idea what to expect and have no idea of what to do. Each chapter on questions first covers the topic before diving into the questions. This gives you the opportunity to learn about the topic. Each question is followed by a detailed solution. List of Topics

• Book of the Week: The Special Operations Nutrition Guide

  I’m about half way through with my navy special warfare training program and started hitting some of the minimum requirements. Hopefully by the end of the program I’ll hit all the minimum requirements across the navy seal physical screen test. I’m starting to feel that my body is not keeping up with training. This keeps me from getting better every day. I was advised to read The Special Operations Nutrition Guide by someone else doing the program. The guide is well-written and starts with an executive summary highlighting all the important points. You probably want to read the executive summary and the 1st half of the guide. The 2nd half of guide is specific to special operation forces. Carbohydrates One of the keys to nutrition is balancing energy intake with energy expenditures. You need to take your age, weight and activity level into account when determining your energy requirements. Running a marathon can easily double my energy requirements for the day. Carbohydrates (CHO) are not bad. Eating more CHO than you need is bad. There are also some CHO than are worst than others like trans fat. The usual CPF (CHO: Protein: Fat) breakdown should approximate: 55% CHO, 20% Protein and Fat 25% in terms of calories.

• Book of the Week: The No Asshole Rule

  It started with an article in Harvard Business Review and ended up as a book, The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t. Tons of people wrote to Bob Sutton about their own personal asshole stories. Turns out there are a lot of assholes in the world. I aspire to smart enough to be one. Bob has been known to be an ass and make women cry. Assholes Before you start talking with assholes, we need to precisely define what is an asshole. Some people can be assholes, but some people are assholes. Asshole Test Test One: After talking to the alleged asshole, does the “target” feel oppressed, humiliated, de-energized, or belittled by the person? In particular, does the target feel worse about him or herself? Test Two: Does the alleged asshole aim his or her venom at people who are less powerful rather than at those people who are more powerful?

• Book of the Week: Understanding Wood

  After reading The Fine Art of Cabinetmaking I knew I had to learn more about wood. This week I read Understanding Wood: A Craftsman’s Guide to Wood Technology. After reading all these books about woodworking, I realize that you need long periods of time to do anything with wood. Jimmy Carter had to retire first before deeply immersing himself in woodworking. Woodworking is a way of life. A way of life I will have to wait till later in life to pursue to the fullest. I can probably start with planting some trees now. This book has more than I would ever want to know about wood. Purchase Understanding Wood from Amazon.com or check it out from your local library.

• Book of the Week: The SaaS Startup Founder's Guide

  This week I read The SaaS Startup Founder’s Guide from Salesforce (CRM). It’s free and Salesforce has almost a $50B market cap, so I figured it was worth a read. I was worried it was full of Salesforce propaganda, but it was good since it covered something I know very little about, how to build a sales team. Many companies are portrayed as overnight successes in the media, but that is usually far from the truth. Slack was actually founded in 2008. It usually takes at least 7 years to get to an IPO. Consumer internet companies can become huge in 2 years. 2 years is the amount of time to just get a SaaS company off the ground. Should I Start a Saas Company? Here are three questions to ask yourself.