Musings of an Entrepreneur

                                                 

It’s rare for nonfiction books to read like thrillers, but Gregory Zuckerman manages the feat in The Greatest Trade Ever. The book tell the story of how John Paulson realized the real estate and subprime markets were grossly inflated and how he made $15 billion in 1 year betting on a blowup, a difficult feat given how many other celebrated investors had failed trying to short bubbles.

It reads partly like a thriller, a race against the clock and other potential investors, and partly as a detective story, as John Paulson and his team work to identify when the real estate and finance bubbles will burst and how best to trade them.

Once I started the book, I could not stop reading it and spent hours after I finished it thinking about its lessons. The story resonated all the more as I also believed that real estate was inflated, had moved to renting and encouraged all my friends to sell their houses and rent instead. However, I never thought of trading my beliefs – I don’t particularly care about investing and was not exposed to real estate. The idea to use Credit Default Swaps (CDS) to limit the downside and maximize the upside was brilliant, so was the idea of shorting the financial institutions that were on the other side of the trade!

This begs the question of whether I could use CDS as some form of hedge against the world economy falling apart given my extremely bearish outlook. Food for thought…

Regardless, read the book, it’s informative and tons of fun!

Comments(0)

Open is not only the best sports autobiography I ever read, it’s one of the best biographies I ever read and one of the best books I read in the past few years!

As I am in Buenos Aires for three weeks on business, I am on a book reading binge. Open was the third book I read in three days, but the moment I started, I knew this book was going to be different and I could not put it down.

Autobiographies of famous people, mostly written by ghost writers, are usually terrible. What first struck me about Open is how well written it is! In addition, it has a raw honesty that draws you in. You feel what Andre is feeling at various points in his life – the highs and the many lows.

I am a huge tennis fan and have always been an Agassi fan and clearly remembered many of the matches he recounts which made the story even more poignant. It’s shocking to learn what it was like for him – it’s so different from what I imagined it would be. I could not fathom someone hating tennis as much as he does succeeding at it as much as he did. It’s also interesting to see how little input he had in creating his public image. He did not participate in elaborating the “Image is everything” campaign. He just said the words for the ad, not imagining the campaign would come to define him. Likewise, none of the image changes perceived by the press were orchestrated; they were just what reporters thought they noticed from the outside.

I loved every part of his book: his childhood obeying his father while fighting the “dragon”, his matches, his courtship of Stefanie, his charter school, the humbling meeting with Mandela… You don’t need to be a tennis fan to enjoy the book as his struggles are all too human with a positive wrinkle as we know the story has a happy ending.

The story is inspiring and a tribute to perseverance. Read it, you won’t be disappointed.

Comments(3)

I have a confession to make: I love chick lit and chick flicks! I suppose that beneath the hardened exterior of the busy Internet entrepreneur, I am a big softy on the inside and easily fall for cheesy, unbelievable stories of romance.

In terms of movies LOVED Serendipity, As Good as it Gets, Something’s Gotta Give, How to lose a guy in 10 days, Wedding Crashers, An Ideal Husband, Definitely, Maybe, The Devil Wears Prada, Ghost, Sleepless in Seattle, When Harry met Sally, Notting Hill, Love Actually, Shakespeare in Love, Jerry Maguire, You’ve Got Mail, The American President… I even liked more mediocre movies like The Holiday, A Knight’s Tale, It’s Complicated, Made of Honor, 27 Dresses, P.S. I Love You, Must Love Dogs, In Her Shoes, Under the Tuscan Sun…

In terms of books, I loved the original The Nanny Diaries (I did not see the movies, the reviews were just too awful), Bridget Jones Diary (including the sequel), Sex and the City (I love the TV show even more: saw every episode in order and went to the movie’s opening night!) and countless others.

As such, I was really looking forward to revisiting the The Nanny Diaries characters: Nan, the Harvard Hottie and the crazy dysfunctional Xs. The story had potential: it’s set 12 years after the original and I was looking forward to seeing how the characters have grown up and what new challenges they are facing. Unfortunately, Grayer, the little kid I adored in the original is distant and aloof, Nan has no backbone and is willing to stand and watch as bad things happen to good people and makes a dislikable heroine. Worse, the book is so poorly written that it gets in the way of enjoying the parts of the story that could resonate with me. It’s possible that the original was also poorly written (I don’t remember as it was a long time ago), but for some reason it did not bother me.

Such a disappointment. Pass!

Comments(1)

After I read a collection of Tim Hartford’s Financial Times articles in Dear Undercover Economist, it was only logical to follow up with a collection of Malcolm Gladwell’s articles in the New Yorker, especially as I truly loved his last book Outliers.

The book is a compilation of Gladwell’s favorite articles. They are split into three parts:

1. The life stories of obsessives and minor geniuses
2. Theories and ways of organizing experience
3. Thoughts on the predictions we make about people

The first part was actually the worse – Gladwell’s writing is excellent, but I just did not care about some of the stories. I loved some of the biographies as well so it made that section uneven.

The second and third sections were truly thought provoking. He covers a wide range of topics including the Enron blowup, homelessness, the Challenger disaster, how we hire people, how society should best deal with pit bull attacks.

What I loved is that most of his conclusions are counter intuitive yet logical and require thoughtful analysis.

Read the book, it will open your mind!

Comments(0)

I was already a fan of Tim Hartford’s previous books The Undercover Economist and The Logic of Life. It should not surprise you to hear that I loved Dear Undercover Economist – a collection of Tim Hartford’s Financial Times popular column where readers ask him questions on anything and he answers them through the lens of economics.

Most of his essays cover recent behavioral economics and game theory research. His quoting of Avinash Dixit fondly reminded me of his game theory class at Princeton while his recent mentions of Gary Becker and many Chicago school behavioral economists reminded me of my recent behavioral economics appreciation binge including my recent loving review of SuperFreakonomics.

If you love the genre, read the book, it’s caustic, witty, well written and supremely funny!

Comments(2)

Readers familiar with my book reviews already know of my keen appreciation for books relating to behavioral economics – including the original Freakonomics, The Undercover Economist, Predictably Irrational and many more!

SuperFreakonomics is a fantastic new entry in this line of writing. Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner cover a wide range of topics – prostitution, terrorism, apathy, altruism, hospital health outcomes, car safety and even global warming. They employ with great efficacy the same writing technique Malcolm Gladwell and Bill Bryson use in Outliers and A Short Story of Nearly Everything: they make their stories relatable and personal by detailing the lives of the people behind their analysis.

Ultimately, SuperFreakonomics is an analysis of the incentives people face and the consequences of their responses to those incentives, but what gives it such power is the story of Nathan Myhrvold, Ignatz Semmelweis, Robert McNamara and countless others.

If you read the Freakonomics blog, you might be familiar with some of the topics raised in the book, but the analysis and stories only gain from the more detailed and richer analysis in the book.

Read the book!

Comments(4)

Over 10 years ago, Bryan Ellis, one of my best friends, McKinsey alum, multi-sport enthusiast and executive extraordinaire, recommended I read the book. I was skeptical about how thrilling a climb up a mountain could truly be, regardless of how disastrous the outcome. As a result, the book sat in my ever growing “to read” pile.

I recently embarked on a month-long business trip across Europe and wanted a fun read in a compact and light form factor (I buy many used hard covers on Amazon. They are easier to hold and read, but harder to travel with. Something tells me I should get a Kindle). The old paperback version of Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer lying in the library fit the bill.

Boy was I wrong about my assessment. Jon Krakauer gives an extremely vivid and detailed account of what happened on the doomed Everest climb. The intertwining story of the characters and what they have to go through just to have a shot at climbing Everest is fascinating. I truly felt I was there and felt sorry for all the misery they were enduring!

Read the book!

Comments(6)

It’s hard to believe anyone could weave together a history of all the scientific fields – cosmology, astronomy, paleontology, geology, chemistry, physics and more! – into a compelling narrative. Somehow, Bill Bryson manages this incredible feat! I truly loved the way he ties together the history of science with the stories of the men and women behind the science.

Read the book, you won’t be disappointed!

Comments(3)

I truly loved Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book on exceptional people. He argues that the largest reason those people succeeded is not because of their specific character traits but because they successfully combine hard work (specifically 10,000 hours of deliberate practice) with the many hidden advantages, extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies provided to them.

The conclusion will not come as a surprise to most of the readers of this blog – Talent is Overrated, A Star is Made, A Star is Made – Part 2, Gladwell on Genius. However, the stories and anecdotes are so compelling, that they make the book extremely enjoyable. I am probably in the minority, but I loved the storytelling even more than in The Tipping Point (and much more than in Blink).

Read the book!

Comments(4)

Andy Kessler’s book is a fascinating and witty retelling of the story of technology of capital markets. It effectively walks you through the all the innovations that led to the technologies we now use and the capital markets and bubbles that funded them.

Along the way we become familiar with the men who shaped this history: Pascal, Faraday, Watt, Edison, Tesla, Moore, Metcalfe and many others!

It’s a quick, fascinating read I highly recommend for all!

You can buy it on Amazon or download it for free on Andy’s blog.

Comments(0)