Category: Technology

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BR 152: The Hard Thing about Hard Things by Ben Horowitz

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Category: 1 – Read ASAP! (All Categories are 1 – Read ASAP!, 2 – BUY it!, 3 – SHELF it, 4 – SOMEDAY it)

Comments: If you are, even in the slightest, interested in running a company of your own someday, this book is an absolute must read. This is probably the closest any book will come to being a “CEO how-to” manual.

It is a book I will revisit from time to time.

Top 3 Learnings:

1. Leadership is about 3 things – the ability to articulate an idea so people follow you (The Steve Jobs attribute), the ability to be ambitious for the team and not for yourself /to have the right kind of ambition (the Bill Campbell attribute) and the ability to achieve the results you articulate (the Andy Grove attribute) – I’ve never heard leadership spelt out as clearly.

2. The purpose of an organization chart is to facilitate communication. The closer people are on an organization chart, the more they will communicate. (Such a simple idea but one I’d never understood.)]

3. A few money quotes –

‘The amount of communication required in a relationship is inversely proportional to the amount of trust there is.’
‘Managing by numbers is like painting by numbers. It is only for amateurs.’
‘The hero and the coward feel the same. They just do different things. People who watch you judge you on what you do not what you feel.’
‘Hire for strength, not for lack of weakness’
‘Embrace the struggle and remember – the hard things will always be hard things.’

Book notes here.

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BR 151: Things a Little Bird Told Me by Biz Stone

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Comments: This book is another one of those really good books I’d recommend to anyone interested in technology. This is Biz Stone’s story and thus, in large part, his narration of important parts of the Twitter story.

It feels sincere and heartfelt and, that is, from what I’ve heard, what Biz Stone is all about.

Top 3 Learnings:

1. Opportunity is manufactured. As Biz Stone did not train in the traditional sports, he was well behind sporting level in his high school. As he really wanted to play sports, he started a high school lacrosse team. Since everyone who signed up was a beginner, he was on a level playing field and  had a great time.

2. Constraints are great. When Steven Spielberg was shooting jaws, he wanted to create a realistic model of a shark so they could film it attacking people for all the scary scenes. However, this was going to be very expensive and beyond their budget. Faced with this constraint, Spielberg had a new low budget idea – shoot it from the point of view of the shark under water.  And guess what? Way scarier!

Twitter did well with constraints as well, of course. :)

3. Pick opportunities based on what inspires you. Biz Stone lives this idea. He left university because he got an inspiring opportunity to apprentice in a creative agency. He then left Google even though he had millions of dollars worth of stock options to vest because he wanted to continue working with his former boss and friend, Evan Williams. It’s a great story and it obviously works out for him. But, the thing to note is his incessant positivity and his habit of zeroing on the things that really matter.

Book notes here.

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BR 145: In the Plex by Steven Levy

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Comments:  I really enjoyed the book. I find Google, as a company, awe-inspiring and this book gave great insight into why Google functions the way it functions by giving an insight into the genius that is Larry Page. Sergey Brin is painted as the dependable supporting act. It is a great read if you are a technology enthusiast.

We can’t all be like Larry Page. But, what I found amazing about him is that he is a learning machine. He has clearly learnt how to learn and goes on accumulating expertise and understanding of a broad array of topics. Great entrepreneurs demonstrate that ability – I’ve seen the same trend in the books about Jobs and Bezos. They were/are learning machines.

Top 3 Learnings:

1. Larry Page is exceptionally smart. That’s one of those things that just strikes you when you read this book. He is probably as high IQ as it gets and just thinks on a whole different level. To really understand Google, you have to understand Larry Page. Google is Larry Page’s machine learning project – he wants to shove as much information into this machine and then make sure they use it make humanity smarter/better.

2. Both Sergey and Larry built Google by constantly asking “why not.” Google has practically reinvented the idea of an office by making it similar to a lovely university dorm. Larry refused to have customer service staff and instead suggesting replacing it with support forums where users helped each other. They did their IPO differently, they did email differently –  by consistently asking “why not.”

3. A bit tangential – people fantasize about college drop outs who go on to become billionaires. It is telling that the billionaires who are talked about are drop outs from Harvard college (Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg), or in this case, from the top computer science P.hD program in the world at Stanford university.

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BR 143: The Everything Store by Brad Stone

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Comments: A very powerful insight into the one of the greatest entrepreneurs of this generation. It is symbolic that Bezos wanted to call Amazon “Relentless.com” because that is exactly what he is – relentless. Incredibly smart, incredibly driven, incredibly well read, and incredibly determined – a one in a billion combination.

A very inspiring story – there is a lot to learn from this book and from Bezos’ studied and researched style. I loved it. Must read for anybody interested in technology.

Top 3 Learnings
1. Bezos banned PowerPoint in Amazon’s meetings. Instead, he uses 1-6 page memos called narratives. He believes people can hide behind bullet points but it is impossible to not have clarity of thought if you are forced to write full sentences. He is absolutely right, of course. I’ve been using narratives in various projects and it means more thorough preparation than ever before.

2. As Bezos’ grandfather once taught him, it is harder to be kind than clever.

3. This learning isn’t so much from the book as much as it is as a synthesis on the man. The description that comes to mind when I think of is Bezos is “driven learning machine.” Bill Gates, Sergey Brin and Larry Page are examples. What’s amazing about these people is, aside from their penchant for learning, they are not afraid to take very big swings. It’s an awe inspiring combination and is a reminder that success isn’t a flash in the pan. As they illustrate, it’s a habit.

Book notes here

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BR 142: Hatching Twitter by Nick Bilton

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Comments: If you love technology, you will find this book very interesting. It felt a bit gossip-y in that it focused a lot more on the dynamics of a handful of people who were responsible in building Twitter. You come to learn how Twitter nearly imploded multiple times but, against the odds, survived to change the world.

Top 3 Learnings:

1. A strong board of directors is a key in every company as in life. It is very important to have people who have a long term interest in you who are then willing to call bullshit on your decisions and occasionally, guide you to move to a better place.

2. Complexity, conflict, clash of egos, etc., are not the words that come to mind when you think of the glory of a start-up’s journey to success. They’re part and parcel of the journey, however. And, it is worth remembering that no good comes without significant pain and learning. The book explores the path of these multi millionaires who all learnt some very tough life lessons in the process.

3. Twitter was founded by a bunch of geeks who saw it as a way of connecting with people. These weren’t people with strong social bonds or relationships. They understood the power of technology in helping people like themselves find connection. I thought it interesting that Mark Zuckerberg founded Facebook in the process of getting back at the girlfriend who dumped him. Scratching your own itch is a very powerful reason to build a company that changes the world.

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BR 128: Free by Chris Anderson

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Comments: Interesting book, especially for those who are interested in the impact of “free” on business and industry.

Top 3 Learnings:

1. The world is moving from scarcity to abundance in most aspects of life. As a result, the structure of the world and business has undergone a fundamental change. A 100 years ago, all the top 100 companies in the world were involved in manufacturing. Now, the percentage is down to 30%.

The moment an industry moves from transmitting atoms (boxes) to bits – free becomes inevitable. So, if the industry is competitive (and we can argue that the Internet has resulted in more competition than ever before), then prices will keep going down till it just covers cost.

2. The important thing for companies is to adapt their business model to incorporate free as an integral part of their model. Free is here to stay.

Examples –

– The popular freemium model wherein businesses give a basic product for free and charge for premium usage

– Microsoft went through the DABDA curve in its reaction to Linux operating systems. While it initially began with the lens of competition, the end result was an acceptance that there is a place for open source in the market. Small companies would rather go open source as its free while big companies would pay money to minimize risk.

– Google’s strategy for information markets – 1) take whatever you are doing, do it for free 2) hook users in and generate scale 3) charge for valuable information Search and Gmail are easy examples. Another such example is Goog-411 – free voice help which is part of Google’s investment into a voice search engine.

– Music – 90% of money is made by bands is in concerts! So digital piracy (or free) helps the band find willing fans

3. The importance of corn – rice, wheat and corn have always been considered the key crops. Rice is high on protein but difficult to grow, wheat is low on protein but easy to grow, and corn is both. Since corn is the most efficient converter of water and sun light into starch, we use corn for more than we can imagine.

More than 25% of the products in a super market are derived from corn. In fact, soaps, shampoos, toothpastes, the boxes they are packed in, and even the compounds that the super markets are built with are  based on corn. A great example of corn power is in a chicken nugget. From the feed of the chicken, to corn oil, to the golden color and smell – nearly every aspect of it is derived from corn.

The big reason corn and food have gotten expensive over the past few years is that corn began being used for the production of ethanol for fuel. This has truly tested the limits of corn.

That was a really cool insight.

(Book notes here)

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BR 112: Rework by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson

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Comments: Good book. Lots of good ideas packaged together by a team that clearly walk the talk. A nice breezy read.

Top 3 learnings:

1. Scale is optional. Everyone talks about having a big business. You don’t need to chase scale if you want to have a high quality business + a great life. (Resonates personally with my beliefs)

2. Quality is not optional. There’s a lovely story about a sandwich maker who are generally open only till early afternoon after which their sandwiches sell out. The reason for that is they are unwilling to compromise on having anything less than the first round of bread baked by their baker of choice.

3. Question a lot of the basic norms in work today. 37 Signals seem to be the anti thesis of a normal company today – they don’t work long hours, don’t do long meetings and do almost everything contrary to the norm. And it works. (Resonates fully again with my belief that we must always ask ‘why’ and understand why things are the way they are. If the reasoning doesn’t make sense, make sure we ask ‘why not’.)

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BR 108: Inside Apple by Adam Lashinsky

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Comments: I read this thanks to many favorable reviews and I walked away feeling a bit let down. I really couldn’t see what the fuss was about.

It’s definitely a very interesting book and describes the inside workings of Apple very well. Just didn’t think it was amazing.

Top 3 Learnings:

1. Integrity. And here, I refer to Apple, the company. There is a certain ‘wholeness’ to everything Apple does. And their approach to communication, design showcases this from time to time. It’s one message and it’s always well delivered. That’s very hard to do in a big company.

2. Organizing the company around functional lines wherein you don’t need to ‘move up’ to management if you want to do better.

3. Maybe the whole purpose of the status quo is to change it. Change is the only constant in nature. Apple broke all traditional management beliefs and practices and became wildly successful. The nice thing here is that they lived their mission – to change the status quo.

And, of course, it will fascinating to see how Apple fare without Steve Jobs at the helm..

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BR 97: Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton Christensen

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Comments: This is a very important book. If you have any interest in the internet/ innovation/entrepreneurship, this one is a must read.

Top 3 Learnings:

I’m going to be lazy here and link to Mark Suster’s top learnings.

This book is probably among the best books out there to understand how the internet is changing our lives.

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BR 96: Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

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Comments: This book tells the story of one of the greatest entrepreneurs of this generation complete with the many ups and downs that were part of the journey. It helped me understand what made Jobs the man he was and gave me tons of learnings along the way.

Top 3 Learnings:

I learnt that the best way to learn from books about great men is to understand their strengths. Here is a list of strengths I feel Steve GOT –

1. Relentless strength focus (resulted in someone who was not balanced by any stretch of the imagination. But bloody good at what he did.)

2. Focus on top performers – Johnny Ives is a great example. The moment he discovered Ives, he made sure Ives reported to him directly!

3. Intersection of technology and creativity – This, of course, was his speciality.

4. Balance between design and engineering – Concurrent designing and engineering meant that the teams worked with each other. And, unlike other CEO’s, he gave Design first priority over engineering!

5. Shipping – All his greatest projects involved some amount of rework. But, when they shipped, they were generally perfect!

6. Simplification and simplicity – One button on the iPhone. What more can I say?

7. Finding great talent – From Wozniak and Lasseter to Ives and Cook. A great talent spotter.

8. Understanding Technology and Art. “Art takes discipline and technology takes creativity”

9. Marketing IS the product. All his products had their marketing built in. He cared. And it showed.

10. Negotiation – I’m unsure if anyone else would have been capable of single handedly disrupting the music industry. And let’s not forget his negotiations with Disney.

11. Showmanship. In this, he was probably without peer.

12. Marketing – He learnt a lesson early from his mentor Mike Markula. A great brand must impute i.e. demonstrate it’s greatness in everything it did.

13. Understood  natural materials – Really understood the intricacies of metal, plastic and glass and applied it on the iPod, the iMac, the iPhone and in all the Apple Stores.

14. Importance of Environment – His workplaces had to be well designed. They had to present fantastic collaborative working environments. See NEXT, Pixar and the new Apple complex.

15. Surrounding himself with people that complemented him – Tim Cook was a great example. In his final act, he surrounded himself with persistent folk who managed him.

16. Saying No. How else could he simplify the way he did? He also focused Apple’s energies on few products but made them world class.

(Of course, he was not a role model for many things – e.g.: relationships, diet and the like. But, I couldn’t help marveling at the list of things he was good at.)