I’m reading The Big Rich about the oil boom in Texas and like it. I also liked Barbarians at the Gate about how private equity got created and how deals went down.
Less interested in people and character studies. More interested in the mechanics of how things that we take for granted actually got built and what the world they were made in was like.
So is starting a tribute rock band an ok alternative to reading books?
That might depend on how you feel about 'Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981-1991', which is a book about bands starting.
Creating an account to post this and this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42612506, what's the game plan?
Trying to pollute HN like TLAs did 4chan or just a misfiring brain?
I'll call it aaron695s adage, it's now impossible to tell mental illness and TLAs apart on the internet.
Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longitude_(book)
Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38840.Boyd
1) Realizing that he was better at something than everyone else around him.
2) Figuring out what it was that was making him better.
3) Reducing it to practice, so it could be taught to others and refined to become even better.
Amazing story.
Just different technology/hardware/timescale
Same workplace problems, personality types, company politics, etc...
Did not expect to find it so relatable in 2024
In the book, Tracy Kidder writes repeatedly about how Data General (the company at the heart of the book) is proud of its austerity. It doesn't pay well. It's proud of having an ugly, austere, warehouse-like building. It puts its critical engineers in the windowless basement of this building. Kidder is describing a world that's very far from the FAANG of today, at least were compensation is concerned.
I'd rather have a small room with silence than work in a well lit factory with tons of noise like this: https://static.independent.co.uk/s3fs-public/thumbnails/imag...
There isn't any dividers or other stuff that blocks noise.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Soul-New-Machine-Tracy-Kidder-ebook...
I liked it enough that after I listened to it on Audible I went out and bought a hardback version to re-read. That almost never happens.
I have to think of what Shackleton, as a leader (boss), was going through and with uncertainties abound.
28 people who he hired based not only on capability alone, but also for crew (team) fit.
He apparently cared deeply for them, and they in-turn cared for one another.
They managed to work together in the harshest of environments. They all made it.
That in and of itself, is a remarkable feat.
Every crew member was fully informed that they were more likely to die than survive the journey – before even sending in their applications.
And Shackleton is dead since long, so you can't cancel him anymore.
At least according to https://www.amazon.com/Scott-Amundsen-Last-Place-Earth/dp/03...
https://www.abebooks.com/products/isbn/9788282350105?cm_sp=b...
Came here to say that Amundsen is a great example of someone who did hard things and made them look easy. Nansen also. And Shackleton, although he didn't make them look easy...
Basically everything written by Roland Huntford about polar exploration is great inspiration. The Last Place on Earth covers Amundsen and Scott (the latter who did difficult things and made them look hard and died.)
How about consistently competing at fighting video-games at the highest level in the world for more than 30 years?
"The Will to Keep Winning", by Daigo Umehara. He was the first Street Fighter 2 player to reach the top (being considered either the best player or top 3), and he was able to stay at the stop since then. No other video-game player has ever been so consistently good as Daigo. He may not have won many EVO or Capcom Cup titles, but he has always stayed at the top. And he's the protagonist of Evo Moment 37.
Also, his story is good. The book may make you cry. And it's a very short book.
10/10 book.
Another is Where Wizards Stay Up Late by Katie Hafner on the early days of the Internet [2].
[1] The Art of Doing Science and Engineering:
https://press.stripe.com/the-art-of-doing-science-and-engine...
[2] Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins Of The Internet:
https://katiehafner.com/books-new/where-wizards-stay-up-late...
It’s interesting to read how many individuals contributed in all sorts of important ways in the history of computing.
"A history of the photocopier offers a portrait of reserved physics graduate Chester Carlson, who invented the copier to ease his job as a patent clerk and who saw his marketing efforts daunted by numerous rejections, before the head of Xerox research recognized the machine's potential. "
Liftoff : https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/53402132-liftoff
Re-entry : https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/205309521-reentry
Both have very high ratings on Goodreads.
If you don’t want examples then all you need to know is velocity. The Y Combinator people call it doing things that don’t scale. Here is how it works for absolutely anything:
1. Get the right tools in place. This is an intrinsic capability set you have to build. People tend to fail here most frequently and hope some framework or copy/paste of a library will just do it for them. Don’t be some worthless pretender. Know your shit from experience so you can execute with confidence.
2. Build a solid foundation. This will require a lot of trial and error plus several rounds of refactoring because you need some idea of the edge cases and where you the pain points are. You will know it when you have it because it’s highly durable and requires less of everything compared to the alternatives. A solid foundation isn’t a thing you sell. It’s your baseline for doing everything else at low cost.
3. Create tests. These should be in writing but they don’t have to be. You need a list of known successes and failures ready to apply at everything new. There are a lot of whiners that are quick to cry about how something can’t be done. Fuck those guys and instead try it to know exactly what more it takes to get done.
4. Finally, measure things. It is absolutely astonishing that most people cannot do this at all. It looks amazing when you see it done well and this is ultimately what separates the adults from the children. This is where velocity comes from because you will know exactly how much faster you are compared to where you were. If you aren’t intimately aware of your performance in numbers from a variety of perspectives you aren’t more special than anyone else.
People who accomplish hard things are capable of doing those because they didn’t get stuck. They had the proper tools in place to manipulate their environment, redefine execution (foundation), objectively determine what works without guessing, and then know how much to tweak it moving forward.
One answer to that question might be character. Angela Ducksworth has a book called, "Grit". It is a lot like character study, which the OG explicitly expressed their disinterest for. My intuition is no matter how well you can describe the steps for success, success is not replicable. If true, that would explain why there are hundreds of self books, thousands of coaches, and only a handful of people who can consistently excel.
Having said that, I hesitate to say that there are only a few people in the world who are exceptional due to a constraint I would describe as "genuine article". How depressing a thought that would be.
Carpe diem! Floor the gas pedal, and see how fast you can go. Maybe you'll break all expectations and fly into space.
Your argument is good if you just follow it to the obvious (if inconvenient) conclusion. Despite so many people “having the answers,” no one can replicate it reliably. And even the ones who can likely wouldn’t be able to if you removed capital from the equation. The clear explanation is: luck.
But of course luck tends to strike when you’re working hard and consistently, so it’s not totally out of one’s hands.
The biggest single discriminator that the Y Combinator people talk about, which I agree with, is doing the right things first without regard for scale. Most developers will immediately jump to some framework so that they can prop up some web app in the shortest time and immediately go into promotions and then struggle with scale when they need to scale.
I had this big app that tried to solve for full decentralization of universal file system access from a browser. I wrote my own end-to-end test automation tool and focused all my energy on software execution performance. These things allowed me to prove out new ideas and identify regression in about 8 seconds on a single machine or about 2 minutes on 5 machines talking to each other. Most people won't invest in that. I could perform a massive refactor across dozens for files and hundreds of lines without regression in about 2 hours. At work, at that job at that time, I spending more than 2 weeks for tiny refactors that were littered with regressions and having to clean up other people's messes.
Worse, is that most people recognize when they are not performing well, especially if it is anywhere from 10-100x less well. The normal go to place is either sympathy or an echo chamber. High performers don't do that. They aren't trying to impress people with their awesomeness or seeking sympathy when it falls apart. They just build what they need at great expense because its something they can have that others won't have.
In House on Fire, William H. Foege describes his own experiences in public health and details the remarkable program that involved people from countries around the world in pursuit of a single objective―eliminating smallpox forever.
Undaunted Courage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undaunted_Courage
This is about doing something extremely hard with a huge amount of unknowns, and the type of person it takes to succeed.
How Big Things Get Done https://www.amazon.com/How-Big-Things-Get-Done/dp/0593239512
This is about project planning and has plenty of real examples and case studies.
The Education of Cyrus by Xenophon https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-the-education-of-cyrus-b...
This is the best book on leadership and teamwork that I've ever read. You can read this review instead but get a copy of the actual book, too, it's wonderful.
Dealers of Lighting Xerox Parc and the dawn of computer age by Michael A. Hiltzik. If you're interested in knowing where the PC as we know it today originated from.
Others have already suggested The Dream Machine which was a book that once started I couldn't stop reading and finished it in about a week.
Edit: Maybe not exactly the book that you might be interested in but I read Mindstorms by Papert and I think his work on education through the use of computers was groundbreaking. Very interesting book.
https://www.royalmint.com/shop/books/Newton-and-the-Counterf...
Excellent book about Isaac Newton's role in solving the great recoinage crisis.
The Man Who Discovered Quality by Andrea Gabor is an interesting story of W. Edwards Deming, the American who revolutionized post-WWII Japanese manufacturing with statistical approaches to reducing variance.
Issac Newton by James Gleick conveys what it was like for Newton to essentially invent modern physical science in a pre-scientific world.
Dreaming In Code by Scott Rosenberg is a good counterpoint to inspiring tech origin stories: legendary coders coming together to build an amazing product and… basically failing.
Describes how Maurice Hilleman invented 40 vaccines, including for eight of the most common diseases in the US, over a 36 year career at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center and Merck & Co. His vaccines are estimated to save 8 million lives each year.
the mechanics of how things that we take for granted actually got built and what the world they were made in was likeJust for a perspective on how abundant and readily available that information had become in academia a few decades later.
This is an incredibly long biography of a man who figured out how to build an urban empire. While he wasn't an "entrepreneur" per se, he figured out how to generate huge amounts of revenue via tolls/bridges, how to manage and manipulate public policy, and how to attract the best urban planning talent.
... and you can then read about how it all fell apart.
Regardless of your opinion on Robert Moses / NYC, it's an incredibly fascinating read or (~90-hour) audio book.
Caro does an amazing job writing in an engaging, compelling way about topics that would otherwise feel dry coming from a different writer.
i look forward to getting into his LBJ books in the future.
I'd tried applying memory training lessons from this book a few years ago and written about my experience: http://web.archive.org/web/20210301185111/https://ppsreejith...
It is a little shocking just how recently this happened (the very first experimental loads were in the 1950s), and that the standard of shipping before containers was for longshoremen to literally hand carry boxes of stuff onto ships and stuff them just anywhere. You would be stunned to realize just how new and unused the piers of San Francisco really are, because they were built with massive government subsidies at exactly the wrong time.
The book covers the courageous people involved, the political and economic impacts, and how the industry truly found its footing prioritizing absolutely reducing operational costs over all other concerns (like delivery speed).
It also offers a very interesting perspective on the fears of the AI/automation craze, like, what happened to whole towns of dock workers who used to manually pack goods in round-hulled ships and got replaced by a single machine moving a container on a flat ship.
Still, I'm not sure it's exactly "people who did hard things" as much as the story of decades-long incremental changes brought by a bunch of people.
Fantastic book. Particularly the impact it had on the vietnam war, and the role the battles between rail + trucking played in driving containers.
When the heavens went on sale, by Ashly Vance, is pretty good. It details the early days of the space start-ups other than spaceX
The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley is also pretty good, describes the crazy days of early paypal.
Someone already mentioned Liftoff by Erig Berger. Starting a private space company is probably as hard as things get, and it describes the early days pretty well
My favorite book of this type by far.
An amazing book.
These guys went through quite some hardships to define the length of a meter. Good read!
Amazing book about the grain markets and how they have changed over the last 40 years.
"Once shadowy figures, grain merchants have now come out of the shadows. Almost everything that you eat or drink today will contain something bought, stored, transported, processed, shipped, distributed or sold by one of the seven giants of the agricultural supply chain. The media often refers to them as the ABCD group of international grain-trading companies, with ABCD standing for ADM, Bunge, Cargill and Dreyfus. The acronym, though, ignores the other three giants of the food supply: Glencore, COFCO International and Wilmar. Together, they handle 50 percent of the international trade in grain and oilseeds. In this book’s series of exclusive and unprecedented interviews, CEOs and senior traders from these seven giants describe in their own words how the agricultural markets are changing, and how they are adapting to those changes."
The Secret Life of Groceries: The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket By Benjamin Lorr https://shepherd.com/book/the-secret-life-of-groceries
Five years of research really explains large swaths of our food system and how it changes what we eat.
You might like these as well:
The best unexpectedly enthralling books about seemingly boring things https://shepherd.com/best-books/good-books-about-seemingly-b...
The best books that make sense of how globalization broke down, and what happens next https://shepherd.com/best-books/globalization-breaks-down-wh...
*Features The Big Rig, a book about the American trucking industry and it's breakdown
Some good ones in there :)
Today, you just put up with inferior tomatoes in the winter and be annoyed about it.
The logistical complications of worldwide produce supply chains and your local supermarkets are really, really nuts.
Even in rural and developing regions, there are grocery stores, just not as fancy. I tried to find numbers, but it was hard to find the right source for that.
Anyone living in an urban area would have access and that is 60% of the global population. Plus, rural areas in the USA, Canada, Europe, Mexico, etc etc have access to one.
Only about 25% of the population are engaged in subsistence farming at this point.
And the fresh fruit and veggies are crazy. Blueberries in December? How and why are we doing that :)
Many people's favorite line from it:
> It is, of course, extremely toxic, but that’s the least of the problem. It is hypergolic with every known fuel, and so rapidly hypergolic that no ignition delay has ever been measured. It is also hypergolic with such things as cloth, wood, and test engineers, not to mention asbestos, sand, and water-with which it reacts explosively. It can be kept in some of the ordinary structural metals-steel, copper, aluminium, etc.-because of the formation of a thin film of insoluble metal fluoride which protects the bulk of the metal, just as the invisible coat of oxide on aluminium keeps it from burning up in the atmosphere. If, however, this coat is melted or scrubbed off, and has no chance to reform, the operator is confronted with the problem of coping with a metal-fluorine fire. For dealing with this situation, I have always recommended a good pair of running shoes.
https://en.scribd.com/document/647918681/The-Voyage-of-Franc...
https://www.candicemillard.com/river-of-doubt.html
Covers Teddy Roosevelt's Amazon expedition. To the comment about "weren't people living in the Amazon" - read the book. The Brazilian government was scouting and mapping the terrain for the project of connecting the coasts with telegraph lines. This was uncharted territory and the chance of not returning was high.
I cannot recommend enough.
There were tribals in the area but it wasn't mapped.
It's a good read from a leadership perspective. The "leader" of the expedition (Vilhjalmur Stefansson) abandoned his crew in the middle of the frozen arctic seas and went off the hunt caribou and meet his secret inuit wife. The book portrays him as being completely irresponsible and interested only his own glory and fame (and money)
Meanwhile, the captain of the ship (Robert Bartlett) walked for 700 miles from where they were stranded and then started a rescue mission from Alaska which saved some (though not all of the crew). He's portrayed as a real hero in harsh circumstances.
The whole expedition was named after the flagship. The Karluk (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_voyage_of_the_Karluk). They had two inuit families with them during the trip including their kids. It was funny to see how the inuit kids would play in the snow and have fun while the "explorers" were all but dropping dead. The youngest child was aged 3 at the time. She passed away finally in 2008 at the age of 97.
When the Americans finally stepped in 15 years later, they too made the mistake of appointing bureaucrats to run the project. The result was a shambles. Eventually President Roosevelt simply ignored Congress and appointed an individual to run the project. He was a railroad engineer named Stevens. Stevens was the first to realize that the real logistical problem to solve was not actually digging up the dirt, but disposing of it. The French had famously used steam shovels to dig the canal as fast as possible, just as they had in Suez. But once the dirt was loaded into train cars and carted away from the dig site, they used teams of men with shovels to empty them. Stevens calculated how fast the dirt would need to be loaded and unloaded, and set up a system of trains that could carry any quantity of dirt any distance, while loading as quickly as possible at the dig site and unloading it just as quickly at the dump site. Once he knew the numbers and had the system built, he could track exactly how quickly each train was unloaded and know which teams were working efficiently and which needed training to avoid falling behind.
Another good one by the same author is _The Wright Brothers_. It’s shorter and perhaps not as detailed as _The Path Between the Seas_ (but then it only took them 4 years while the canal needed 33), but it focuses on the actual tasks undertaken by the Wrights as they developed their first few airplanes. They first used gliders to test their wings and the control mechanisms. Then they built a wind tunnel to get accurate data about the lift and drag of a wing under specific circumstances. Then they built an engine lighter than any in use at the time. They designed their own propellers too, since nobody they talked to knew how to design one. Even for boats, the engineers who designed them just used heuristics and guesses and rules of thumb rather than any scientific processes in their work. The first few propeller shafts that they built turned out not to be strong enough and were destroyed. But they were methodical and driven, so they solved each problem one at a time until they had both a working airplane and a working knowledge of how to fly it.
I consider Caro's short book, 'Working', a gateway drug for the longer books.
It helps to listen to them as audiobooks because I can play them at the gym or something or on my commute and don't have to get too focused on the details.
> a comprehensive history of man's efforts to understand risk and probability, from ancient gamblers in Greece to modern chaos theory.
In some parts it's not an easy read, but the underlying stories are very interesting.
I would say “Absolute Zero and the Conquest of Cold” would be a fitting match.
The history to get to absolut zero kelvin would fit your description.
Patrick Collison (of stripe fame) put together a collection of historical ambitious projects that got done quickly, look into the biographies of people mentioned in there. https://patrickcollison.com/fast
Book about Dan Colussy, who somehow managed to rescue Iridium satellite network when it was weeks away from bankruptcy and being deliberately crashed into the ocean.
Showstopper - Windows NT
Losing the Signal - BlackBerry
Made in Japan - Sony
Piloting Palm - Palm
Sweating Bullets - PowerPoint
Folklore.org - Early Apple.
The “Mac Folklore Radio Podcast” [0]. Has a few interesting stories of people innovating and solving challenges.
"What I really wanted to do was work on computers, not apply them to problems"
I'd also recommend listening to his interviews on YouTube. There are two long interviews, one by David's Garage and the other by CHM. Both very long and inspiring so I keep going back to them when I'm driving.
It might not seem analogous, but there's a lot of parallels, i.e. you have limited air (aka runway), you need to choose the people on your expedition wisely and can't bring too many, you need to be extremely ambitious (seeking more than just touristy diving), etc.
The writing is incredible, too.
Covers the invention of radar, "big science", involvement in the Manhattan project.
https://www.amazon.com/Tuxedo-Park-Street-Science-Changed/dp...
"Insisting On the Impossible : The Life of Edwin Land (inventor of instant photography and founder of Polarioid)"
Probably one of the most brilliant commercial technology breakthroughs largely attributable to a single team and a singular vision. Steve Jobs' hero.
https://www.amazon.com/Insisting-Impossible-Life-Edwin-Land/...
for a short video version of this history, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaXKQ70q4KQ from Veritasium.
reasons for recommendation: - it's an example in the biological science, to complement the heavy representation of examples from computer science and entrepreneurship in this thread - the main character, Kary Mullis, is colorful and controversial. Not a likable individual, but nevertheless had traits (mostly an unreasonable obsession) that enabled him to make such a discovery - the discovery of high temperature tolerant enzymes predated Mullis' insight by some two decades, and it played a key role in making PCR practical and widely applicable. this is a pattern I have seen often in major inventions, which were made possible by prior discoveries (often decades old) which lay dormant until someone put everything together. This process of re-discovering the pieces and making connections is also where I think machine learning could be particularly helpful. In fact this is my main motivation for picking up this book (by online reviews, not a particularly well-written one).
I like the kind of books recommended here, but please be aware of survivor's bias (there not many books about failures! Any great recommendations? "How we could NOT get back to the moon again", "Recall: Toyota hits the breaks", "Last fag: how big tobacco lost against a Minneapolis law firm" ;-) and the fact that the winner gets to write the history. For example, next month, Bill Gates new memoir "Source Code" will come out, the first of three planned autobiographical books, and I doubt he will share with us how he strongarmed PC manufacturers into shipping Windows pre-installed in order to get the OS monopoly and other important events.
Maybe I just have a wrong view, but I don't know how to decouple from this.
That being said, luck can be engineered, to a degree:
- meeting people; networking
- having access to resources
- recognizing potential opportunities and taking advantage of them
That being said, I'm by no means "successful" but I'm also not a "failure" ... I win some, and I lose some.
Even if you move from 0 to success with a very-small positive bias on your random walk, even the lower-bound on most of the results will be increasing with sqrt(n).
Don't let randomness dissuade you from effort, even maximal effort, because every thing you can do it increase your "bias towards success" will have an effect over long time scales.
Also, start early - stretch the time scale.
There is a reason young people today feel hard work doesn't reward as much as it used to. Everything is stacked against them - from student loans to crappy jobs. SO MUCH depends on luck
Tech has often been associated with novel success. That is success by inventing or perfecting a previously underrated, underestimated or wholly invented technology.
This isn’t the only type though.
There is success through persistence. In the long run, 95% of businesses fail. Simply running a component operation that outlasts competitors in a proven market can take you very far. It’s harder than it looks. Likewise this gets little traction on most media
Then there is success by accident. The one that gets most traction in media is businesses that have some flash in the pan unexpected success. These seem to be a traditional combination of luck and persistence. Along these same lines are businesses that come to fruition during a time in which they can succeed, like TikTok and the pandemic.
Success comes from being at the right place at the right time.
Both of these statements can be true at the same time.
Not sure it'd work today, everyone and their mother seems so focus on building their "personal brand" and attaching their name to everything that it seems impossible for an author to not take credit for something that would surely make big waves.
For state level actors, sure. But generally? I don't think that's necessarily true, as long as you come up with a pseudonym that is unique, not related to anything in your real life, and you haven't already published a lot of prose under your real name.
These days you can probably do some writing pattern matching if you suspect the true name of an author but you can probably stay pretty pseudonymous unless people really want to determine a true identity. I don't have a lot of doubt I could probably publish a pseudonymous blog if I took some reasonable precautions and didn't write stuff that especially provided a fingerprint pointing to my IRL identity.
The mob is basically a corporation, held together by a charismatic CEO. In its later years, violence was (I think?) less common, so politics and deal-making became the norm. However, given the subject matter, they likely wouldn't whitewash the reality of it.
There is this podcast called Behind the bastards - in one way, it is eye opening. But it is also depressing, it does a pretty good job of shattering all our beliefs and respect for the rich and the successful.
Is it even possible today to become super successful without doing shady/unethical/illegal stuff? Everything from garden variety wage theft all the way upto buying politicians and corporate espionage?
The Jack Welch case (and I'd add Mark Hurd at HP) was an example of financial engineering looking great for a time--until it wasn't.
Most people want to be successful because success brings happiness. But there is a level of success at which happiness starts to plateau and yields diminishing returns of happiness.
How many Billion dollar businesses can we name that are run ethically? Not that many, correct me if I am wrong. I suppose at some level, profit and monopoly becomes the one and only motivation. Plus if you didn’t do shady stuff, your competitors surely would, putting you at a disadvantage.
Why else would Google drop “don’t do evil” from their principles?
If your are willing to look at capitalism and free markets objectively[1], as just algorithms rather than moral systems (i.e. private property is part of an algorithm, not an "inalienable human right"), and you realize that it isn't moral that one's share of the pie be determined by the free market, that it isn't moral that the value of a person be determined by the free market, that it isn't moral to leverage your advantage or even hard work to grab a much bigger share of the pie even as others who because of birth circumstance get the thinnest slice or no slice at all, that it isn't moral to enjoy the fruits of cheap labor do to the desperation of the aforementioned, that it isn't moral to take advantage of your other advantages birth circumstances (e.g. being born within the borders of a wealthy country that keeps out those born in poor ones) to grab more, then you will find that material success (success as defined by capitalism) that is complicit in all the aforementioned does screw someone over.
Such a person will have a different definition of success: A life of contribution to the community done out of love and morality, not a coerced transaction leveraging one's advantages against those with less.
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[1]: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" ~ Upton Sinclair
Some interesting books in this category: * Masters of Doom. It’s about John Carmack and the team that built Id Software * Einstein. By Walter Isaacson, author of the Jobs biography. Einstein’s 4 papers are one of the most unexpected, ground breaking discoveries in history * Houdini!!! Tells the story of the escape artist and magician, and exposer of psychics. * The Double Helix * Stress Test. By Tim Geithner who pulled the world out of the financial crisis * Man’s Search for Meaning. Surviving and finding meaning in a concentration camp
It was against my ethics but we sent a round of unsolicited emails to about 10,000 people in Brazil to launch a voice chat service circa 2001. It must have been a really good list (and a different time and place) because we had close to a 40% response rate. (Later we got a list that was so bad some of the emails didn't have '@' signs in them!)
There's that famous story of how reddit was initially populated with fake users too.
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I've never been able to enjoy that Viktor Frankl book, Man's Search for Meaning ,since I read an essay that pointed out how pernicious it was that postmodern people like to fantasize that everyday life is like a concentration camp -- paradoxically that fantasy undermines Frankl's own thesis
I recently read an account of a 14 year old girl (a demo that is vulnerable to Franklism, I had one in an acting class I was in) who said she thought about the Holocaust (survived by some ancestors she'd never met) every day and experienced it as a trauma. If that's what it means to "remember the Holocaust" we might be better to forget. We hear the refrain that "it must never happen again" but it happens over and over again routinely
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide
and if that memory makes us think it is a memory and not an ongoing crime, it is part of the problem and not part of the solution. You can take your own experiences of your group being persecuted and apply that to justice universally (Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner gave their lives together with African-American James Chaney in 1964 to fight racism in the U.S. South) or you can use it as an excuse to commit similar crimes (kill and displace civilians) against other people. It's your choice.
This one is rather famous for Watson's minimization of the role Rosalind Franklin played in the process of discovering DNA, and Watson himself later acknowledged his mistakes in doing so (though he never corrected them).
I prefer the French approach to take care of aristocrats.
PS : Those wars started because the assembled aristocracy of f europe jumped the reforming nation.
You can acknowledge that the values the revolution promoted are good, aristocratic rule needed reform, while still being clear that revolutions are not a peaceful thing, especially not for poor or marginalised groups. 50.000 people executed is quite some birthing pains…
I know so much more now about the figures behind the rise of the fascism before the end of WW2 because of this podcast.
Of course, you don't want to leave a trail of bodies in your wake but Life's not a bowl of cherries and taking a Pollyanna approach to business won't get you very far.
Whats the shady ruthless stuff from Google? They've obviously started running their business differently after the easy growth went away, but I've never heard anyone be like: they made me pee in a bottle because going to the bathroom was too much time off the line.
Mind you that only includes the most high profile (and known) stuff. Plenty of skeletons still in the closet
No I don’t think it is - and I would argue it never was - for me it is morally reprehensible to be a millionaire.
But then again humans are complex creatures and who is without fault may throw the first stone
This is very cynical - but also freeing - when accepted. Do you think the yatch, billions, beautiful wife is worth your integrity? You decide.
There is a reason you have to have licenses to braid hair, cut nails, etc(and charge for it) in many US states for instance. It's not a simple license like a food worker has to do. It's much more involved.
I mean if someone is going to mess with my hair, do a manicure or pedicure they should know the basic hygiene things much like a food worker has to do. I'm good with that. Why do they need more than that? It's not because we as a society actually care that much about a person that can't braid hair trying to charge for it. It's because all those beauticians want to limit their competition.
OK rant over for the day.
It's been a while since I've read it, but off the top of my head: most successful founders are older than you probably think, have less industry experience than you probably think, start (like nVidia) with more competitors than you think, but (to your other point) are more likely to have more entrepreneurial experience than you think (even very young famous founders like Zuckerberg or the Collisons had another venture before the one that made them very well known).
Honestly I found Super Founders kind of dry, but it's one of the only data-driven books about what differences exist between founders of businesses with exception outcomes vs founders with less successful outcomes that I've read.
I've been on a somewhat James Burke binge for the last 6 months or so. For the ones who don't know, Burke write books and makes TV shows talking about inventions/technology and how they're all connected, often by chance and randomness.
And the amount of discoveries we (humanity) made by pure luck/chance/coincident is incredible. So many things we find vital today can be summed up to be discovered when someone was bored and was randomly messing around with stuff, or they tried to do something that would never have worked, but accidentally did X and noticed something strange.
Just a random example I can recall: In 1928, Alexander Fleming was researching influenza when he noticed that some mold had accidentally contaminated his petri dishes. Looking into it further, he noticed that the mold seemed to be killing the bacteria. Because of that, this particular species of mold became world famous ("Penicillium notatum") and Penicillin became the world's first antibiotic :)
Microsoft has been crucial into bringing compute in people's homes, the evolution of video gaming, the internet etc.
They fluked a lot, they used their advantageous position like most companies try to, but assuming that we would have gotten better alternatives is not a given.
Also, in hindsight was IBM wrong to bet on Microsoft? They sure have done multi hundred billions $ together.
And it's naive to assume that other companies wouldn't have used the same tactics that Microsoft did.
[0]: https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/448140/the-bill-gates-proble...
I guess my best example is Netflix’s “I forgot to return Apollo 13 to blockbuster and ended up starting one of the most prominent tech and entertainment business”, even though that random event is total bogus.
It’s a good story that helped Netflix get stories in the news.
As test pilots they were extremely competent technicians obviously, but they were expected to develop in novel individual domains to solve previously unexplored problems. By the end of gemini the first two dozen astronauts were each among a handful of world experts in their focus: things like orbital rendezvous mechanics, navigation, interface design, biomechanics of flight, radio telemetry. The program wasn't built for them to fly, to a huge extent they guided how it was built.
It sounds like you want second hand accounts of the events or groups that occurred around "hard things". Like a description of NASA going to the moon, but not the accounts of a particular astronaut.
What is a "hard thing"?
It's a great reality check, poking into human nature, morality, suffering, all with real life examples and littlz tolerance for bullshit without delusion of grandeur.
https://www.harpercollins.com/products/across-the-airless-wi...
He also wrote a book on the interstate highway system called The Big Roads which was interesting but not as much of a page turner.
- someone who got lucky
- someone who invested an unfathomable amount of time to their craftsmanship or to their beliefs
Of course it is not black and white, and even luck mostly requires hard work in the first place, which I admire (and if you find your luck - hold to it!, nothing wrong with that), but you get the gist. I guess that in other words what I am saying is: beware of the survivorship bias on the left side of this spectrum.
--
Finally, the book: "The story of my experiments with Truth", Ghandi. Definitely belongs to the "work hard" extremity and a very interesting read; but I don't want to create an impression that I find it special in any way because of my above comment, it is just one of the latest I have read, consider the two comments unrelated.
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Knowledge:_How_to_Rebuild_...
I didn’t love the writing, but thought Skunkworks was full of good stories.
It is a little more character study but Dealers of Lightning is a good one.
I also enjoyed The Idea Factory.
And last, a little off the path of making things but Endurance was a good read.
Gamasutra used to offer these amazing post mortems written up by game developers after shipping a product. Often recounting all their failures and how they still shipped.
* "Billion Dollar Loser" by Reeves Wiedeman (WeWork)
* "Bad Blood" by John Carreyrou (Theranos)
* "Losing My Virginity" by Richard Branson (his failed projects)
* "The Hard Thing About Hard Things" by Ben Horowitzhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man's_Search_for_Meaning
Everyone should read this at least twice in their lives.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/apr/22/primo-levi-aus...
It was great read until he leaves Microsoft.
It is a history of Land and Polaroid, together with a detailed, insider's view of the long-running litigation between Polaroid and Kodak (the author worked at the firm which represented Polaroid on the case).
One of the things I found most interesting was just how much Steve Jobs was inspired by and copied Edwin Land.
The place was wild. Land had been dead for a few years when I got there, but they still employed his driver. My recollection is that the driver brought in donuts once per week. The place felt like an upscale hotel with laboratories in it. And $$ was no object. Need a $40k laser? Just write the requisition.
Looks like it was fully taken over by Harvard (at the time it was only peripherally associated).
Another funny Land story... My postdoc advisor was a faculty member at another university in the 1970s and Land and his entourage were there visiting various labs. My advisor thumped Land on the chest and said that he liked his shirt. According to my advisor, Land's handlers were visibly upset, but Land appreciated being treated like a regular human.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endurance:_Shackleton%27s_In...
It's a story of the most incredible leadership during spectacular difficulty overcoming multiple seemingly impossible things.
The Wager- a book about a ship by the same name which wrecked in the Drake Passage.
Eccentric Orbits - about the Iridium constellation.
The Great Bridge by David McCullough - goes into a pretty good amount of detail in the engineering and sub-problems of construction of the Brooklyn Bridge.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3648638-the-biography-of...
c.f.,
_Tolbert Lanston and the Monotype: The Origin of Digital Typesetting_ by Richard L Hopkins
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17140645-tolbert-lanston...
For background on how difficult/apparently impossible this was, see the story of Mark Twain's investment in a typesetting machine:
https://twain.lib.virginia.edu/yankee/cymach6.html
One of the more memorably moments of my life was visiting a local newspaper back when they were still setting type using a Linotype machine --- it's just incredible to watch one (or the competing Monotype) work.
If I could, I'd have a Monotype machine in my shop along with a printing press, but first I'd need a shop, rather than a workbench at one end of the basement laundry room...
It's my understanding that for a long while, the U.S. Patent Office refused to consider patents for intermittent windshield wiping mechanisms because none of them worked --- the actual story of the invention is far more sordid:
https://thehustle.co/windshield-wiper-inventor-robert-kearns
For us folks interested in computers, there is of course Charles Babbage who tried and failed, yet still managed to create many of the concepts underlying our modern computing devices.
While the story of a team, Tracy Kidder's _The Soul of a New Machine_ is a classic which I would highly recommend:
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/7090.The_Soul_of_a_Ne...
and for a more recent spin on things, look at the folks who crashed and burned such as Jerry Kaplan:
These two things are inseparable.
None of this hagiographic bollocks.
Story of the survivors of a sunken whale ship after a sperm whale attack. A source of inspiration for Moby Dick.
In the Heart of the Sea by Nathaniel Philbrick
In 1893, Fridjtof Nansen set sail in the Fram, a ship specially designed and built to be frozen into the polar ice cap, withstand its crushing pressures, and travel with the sea’s drift closer to the North Pole than anyone had ever gone before. Experts said such a ship couldn't be built and that the voyage was tantamount to suicide.
This brilliant first-person account, originally published in 1897, marks the beginning of the modern age of exploration. Nansen vividly describes the dangerous voyage and his 15-month-long dash to the North Pole by sledge. Farthest North is an unforgettable tale and a must-read for any armchair explorer.