10.15.2013

Recommended Consumption: Mid-October 2013 edition

Being a goof in Las Vegas this past weekend.

Short Reads:
  • The Guardian's Voices of Finance series. I clicked through almost all of these in an hours-long binge. Really confirms a lot of my suspicions about the banking industry lifestyle; somewhat vindicating some career choices I made coming out of undergrad. My favorite interview is this one. Don't miss the comments on the bottom.
  • Create something every day.
  • Smells Like Middle-Aged Spirit: The High School Reunion. Moving and well-written. 
  • What's wrong with the modern world, by Jonathan Franzen. JF comes off long an old fogey in this piece, but he's undoubtedly correct about a large number of things. One of the things that makes cultural self-criticism so difficult is that your own culture (and Franzen is specifically talking about the technological first-world here) is largely invisible to you. The ways in which our society is different from others -- or blatantly destructive -- can be hard to detect without broader experience and perspective.
  • When a Crop Becomes King, by Michael Pollan. This guy is so good at turning societal assumptions on their head (just like the Franzen piece above). Killer quote: "Add to that all the corn-based animal protein (corn-fed beef, chicken and pork) and the corn qua corn (chips, muffins, sweet corn) and you have a plant that has become one of nature’s greatest success stories, by turning us (along with several other equally unwitting species) into an expanding race of corn eaters."
  • Startup Metrics for Pirates, by Dave McClure. I'm a sucker for a good pirate pun.
  • There’s a .00006% Chance of Building a Billion Dollar Company: How This Man Did It. The math in this article is dubious (read: stupid) but I still love the concept of taking on a difficult & unglamorous niche and exploiting it.
  • The 10 Stealth Economic Trends That Rule the World Today. Illuminating.

Long Reads:
  • Power Systems, by Noam Chomsky. A requisite lefty tome of corporate-bashing. Really thought-provoking and awesome. Much like the Franzen and Pollan pieces, the main function of this writing is to get the reader to reconsider his/her positions on things that are largely invisible to most people. In this case, that would be: how much power do multinational corporations wield, are they truly a force of good in the world, and how is government compelled to support these interests? There are just as many books out there attacking this position as defending it, but as somebody with an undergraduate business degree and employed by a Fortune 100 company, I could use a little more of Chomsky's perspective.
  • Rework, by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, aka the 37signals guys). This was recommended to me by Mike and Zal who said it just might be the best business book they've ever read. While I thought it was a little airy and reductionist at times, overall it didn't disappoint. Their main thesis is that you can build a sustainable business without outside capital, a fast-growth philosophy, lots of employees, a physical office, or really anything that people assume is required for Silicon Valley-style software companies. If the focus is firmly on the customer, then everything else is secondary, and optional. This is a product management book, really.

From Afrojack's set at XS. The guy to his right is Mario Lopez. Weird, I know.

Listens:

Views:

DO NOT WATCH UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES:

Consume me!:
  • I'll be in Detroit & Ann Arbor from this Thursday 10/17 through Monday 10/21.

And now, your moment of Zen:

Klegg, BotRob, Max
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