Learning database

Why do some companies trade at 10x revenue multiples and others, well, don't? Gurley, of Benchmark/Uber fame, analyses 10 key factors: Sustainable Competitive Advantage (Warren Buffet's moat); The Presence of Network Effects (Amazon, LinkedIn, Facebook etc); Visibility/Predictability (i.e. Salesforces' beautiful subscription revenue, as opposed to one time / episodic recruitment fees); Customer Lock In or High Switching Costs; Gross Margin Levels; Marginal Profitability; Customer Concentration; Major Partner Dependencies; Organic Demand vs Heavy Marketing Spend (i.e. WhatsApp having to stop customer sign ups with no marketing VS selling $1 for $0.90 and watching growth skyrocket)

This is hands down my favourite PG essay, which I first read at Uni sometime in 2018. This, coupled with Zero to One, radicalised me. What is a start-up - is a start-up just a new business? Perhaps it's just a new company that uses technology? PG convincingly argues that neither of these definitions suffice. A start-up is a company that is designed to grow quickly. Google's founders were not merely more industrious and lucky than those in the barbershop down the road. Google was different from the beginning. There are 2 constituent elements to fast growth - a) making something that lots of people want (demand, or TAM in VC parlance) and b) reaching and serving all these people (scalability). Google was not constrained by a) or b) and could serve new customers, unconstrained by geography, at practically $0 of marginal cost per new user. Start-ups at YC, the very creme of the 'born different' crop, are targeted on 7% growth rate per week. This is the only thing that matters, turning your business into a (relatively) simple optimisation problem. As Einstein knew - reportedly calling compound interest man's greatest invention - over time growth compounds: Weekly / Yearly 1% 1.7x 2% 2.8x 5% 12.6x 7% 33.7x 10% 142.0x PG captures the outsize effect this has: "A company that grows at 1% a week will grow 1.7x a year, whereas a company that grows at 5% a week will grow 12.6x. A company making $1000 a month (a typical number early in YC) and growing at 1% a week will 4 years later be making $7900 a month, which is less than a good programmer makes in salary in Silicon Valley. A startup that grows at 5% a week will in 4 years be making $25 million a month." Presuming an 8x revenue multiple - let's pretend this is a SaaS company with very high quality revenue and organic demand - that start-up would be valued at = (12 * $25m) * 8 = $2.4bn.

Ben Horowitz of a16z's slightly dated and very famous take on the distinctions between a Good Product Manager and a Bad Product Manager. In short, a Good Product Manager is the CEO of the Product and like any leader, never makes an excuse. They plan to succeed and are proactive, as opposed to spending their time on reactive, last minute firefighting. Fundamentally they have a strong business sense - both of their own company and the broader market - but focus on building their own product, not copying the competition. They know when to say no (often) and when to say yes (rarely) - and making sure that their strongest opinions are always clear and in writing.

In terms of pure application to my own life, this is one of the most valuable books that I've ever read. The book is best described as Voss, a former FBI Negotiator, taking a chainsaw to the academic discipline of negotiation. A telling an anecdote at the start tells of him competing against a bunch of Harvard Profs and MBAs in a dummy negotiation and, predictably, coming out unbested. It felt a bit like 'Screw the booksmart, the practical FBI guy is here now', which did put my guard up. I'm always wary of authors who stress how much they go against the crowd as lone geniuses - Taleb in Black Swan springs to mind - but the clear, pure applicability of his lessons do stand out. Before starting at co-hire/cord, I picked up a copy of Getting To Yes by Fisher and Ury, a famous book which argues that you need to "separate the people from the problem". Voss' thesis is that the people and the problem are inseparable - the people are the problem. A rationalist approach, ignoring the power of emotion, fails to gel with the real world. People don't make rational decisions. To be a great negotiator you need not just to account for this, but to embrace it. Listening to people, pure and simple, and incorporating Voss' many tricks (like mirroring) can enable you to settle for outsized outcomes and win the negotiation. As his title suggests, never split the difference - and for god's sake, never go first.

This is a rare beast - an exceptional business book, stocked with fun anecdotes and hard lessons, told first hand by a person who has actually built a billion dollar company. And what a person to tell the story; Horowitz is one of SV's more influential move-shakers with his partner Marc Andreessen. On a personal level, what I felt Never Split The Difference was to leading and persuading without authority, Horowitz' work is to formal power and its responsibilities, like managing direct reports and leadership teams. The narrative history of the first half, charting how Opsware pivoted repeatedly and almost crashed and burned so many times, both pre and post-IPO, is a real testament to the spirit of entrepreneurship. Horowitz encapsulates this himself. Instead of turning his nose up like many a technical founder, he ran Sales to learn how it works and only then decided to hire the right VP. It's hard to believe it all happened. There are many lessons to be gleaned in the second half - from company building to communication to culture - and useful practical elements, like a question bank for interviewing different types of candidates. It doesn't quite have the rhetorical flair of Shoe Dog and the shoehorned rap lyrics were hard to stomach, but a super valuable work nonetheless.

This is an exceptional book. Peter Thiel, of Paypal and Palantir fame, is one of the most original thinkers in Silicon Valley and is well schooled in the classics. Much of his personal philosophy comes from the Stanford philosopher Rene Girard, who argued that imitation is one of the most important driving forces inherent in human nature. We fight not because we are different, but because we are all so similar. N.B. - you can see how this philosophy suggests that Facebook, where Thiel was an early seed investor who made $100ms, might be a hit. Zero to One is culmination of the course notes put together by one of his star students - and now employee - Blake Masters, but reads like a single essay thanks to some handy editing. Following his mentor Girard, Thiel spends much of the book trying to buck what he sees as flimsy but accepted truisms and orthodoxies - undoubtedly a good trait for an entrepreneur. For example, he argues that competition is not a social good and it's far better to build a monopoly instead, a proposition that is somewhat antithetical to the American spirit! Incremental change is boring. The much lauded Silicon Valley is actually scared of grand ideas and visions; we asked for flying cars but got 240 characters and fighting on Twitter instead. Broadly speaking it's analysis of how you go from Zero to One - or from nothing to something.

Excellent summary below taken from YouTube comments; 1) listen to your customers, spend more time listen to your customers * maniacally focus on their problems * have more than a basic understanding of the customer problem (at-least have a basic sense) * you don't want to end up building products no one wants to use * example: smolt (basically, listen to your customers) 2) but also stop listening to your customers when it comes to building solutions * don't always listen to your customers * example: orab B toothbrush 3) watch the competition * surfing on product hunt, reading techcrunch does not count * they are a rich source of information, better understand customers problems * every time a company ships a feature, thats a user test I can learn from there is so much beta information and information from customers on * ex: amazon reviews: oral B information * youtube review: oral B information. it has 11K views. and comments. more comments on fact that you can't replace battery 4) don't watch the competition * stop worrying so much about what the competition is doing, in our tech bubble in our echo chamber, we froth ourselves to be in the race to implement that new technology. * is that "new feature" that your competition released REALLY what your customers need? * the competition is made up of people just like you and me. and they've got the same challenges as you. * Last MTP (mind the product talk) in London all about how structure of human brain and cognitive biases make it impossible to make good decisions * if the competition creates something that really works with their customers and it works for them, don't be afraid to take that idea though! 5) be a thief * you don't have to come up with ALL the ideas, your job as a product manager is to solve your customers problem so take ideas from other products/services and make it your own 6) get paid * most of us as PMs are working on a commercial endeavor but will the CUSTOMER pay for this feature? * ask them what's their willingness to pay * example: Evernote; in search of profitability it changed the way people use it products. internet lost its mind. not because they hate evernote but really because evernote was charging for some features that were previously free. they decided to solve "THEIR" problem but not their "CUSTOMERS" problem. * issue 1: 60mb? what is that? why is that? * issue 2: charge for features that were previously free * issue 3: 1gb limit? how would i know if i reached that? * issue 4: access notebooks offline: not quite something i'd pay for because i might have internet access everywhere * issue 5: customer service feature? why charge consumers for basic customer service? * issue 6: evernote press release saying "they're trying really hard" * so make sure have enough value, or create enough value for your customers to pay you 7) stop worrying about getting paid * we're business-casing the soul out of our product. we're elaborating every feature release with business cases and these arduous processes and not only it slows us down but creates a culture of small incremental thinking for small incremental gains. * when dave started as PM, he started as functional product manager. but now we have to look for their social needs, emotional needs, trusts. they want to feel connected, want entertained, they want to cheer for us. trust isn't build on megabytes. trust is built on understanding that we know who they are and that they believe that we have their best interest in our heart, we make them feel like a tribe * example: mondo * feature: freeze a card (defrost a card). it didn't take much, but it made users chuckle * example: true jerky * feature: put dental floss. did it increase their cost? yes. but it made user SMILE * example: pagerduty * feature: on call when your site goes down in the middle of the night: they really understood that. so they recorded these hilarious ringtones when "sh*t" happens so they recorded these quartet taking basic IT issues. it makes people smile. how do you put an ROI on that? * jeff atwood tweeted about it, appealing to your customers social and emotional needs than just functional needs 8) Speed Up! * value is destroyed through inaction. as product managers we understand how many $ it takes, the cost it takes, how many story points it takes, but we need to GRASP is the cost of inaction 9) cost of delay * we put off making decision for many reasons. every-time you put off making a decision, you are destroying value. the features and the products we ship have a limited shelf life and the longer it takes them to get to market the less value they have. so every-time you're thinking of putting off that decision, you're destroying value. every time you are leaving a question that someone has go unanswered, you're killing value. * of course, there are all kinds of reasons why we put off making decisions. not having enough information, not knowing who the decision maker * example: we haven't been able to get hold of a meeting room! 10) Say No * as product managers we don't say NO enough. it's one of those things that is so powerful. our job is hard. we got lots of stakeholders, lots of people happy. this isn't about making people happy. this is about making CUSTOMERS happy. * examples: * ceo asks for feature because he thinks is cool: no * sales rep asks for feature for one customer: no * you say no because you're thinking you're protecting the team. your job is to protect the customer * you say no because you don't like the person who requested it 11) don't be a visionary * you are not an oracle. so do the hard work, grind it out. * products don't need visionaries, they need product managers who are obsessed with understanding the customers problem and solving it. so don't be a visionary, be a product manager 12) don't confuse yourself with your customers * you are not your customer. you may use your product, but you are NOT ALL your customers 13) be dumb * always advocate for the customer and bring your customers perspective to the product

Does Matt Clifford ever say anything boring? Apparently not

Exceptional on macro tech trends and big moves in regulation

A lengthy and insightful essay by Ben Casnocha, Reid Hoffman's one time Chief of Staff cum consigliere. He meditates on what it means to be a 'right hand man' - how do you optimise the time and power of someone exponentially more impactful than yourself, in a world with so many options and therefore trade offs? Saying "no" frequently is the short answer. This is not a role for someone with a huge ego - despite so much of it involving ego management - and you'll need to takes hits from the flak of other important people, like Steve Ballmer's presser in Ben's case. Other themes include decision-making and biases, persuasion (in the context of powerful people) and incentives. A really interesting read that could only be improved by being a little less 'Silicon Valley' and a little more biting - if Shakespeare heard a friendship being described in terms of "data points" he would turn in his grave!

Stewart Butterfield, the bohemian founder of Slack, is one of my favourite CEOs and is nothing if not original. (It's pretty nerdy to have favourite CEOs, right?). See his resignation letter from Yahoo, lamenting their move away from 'tin mining', here. Originally named Dharma by his hippy parents, Stewart fits into the Reid Hoffman model of an entrepreneur - insightful and reflective, not domineering and narrowly technical - having studied philosophy at Cambridge. Here he sets out his vision for Slack, one of the great 'pivot' stories. Butterfield throws down the gauntlet - they are not here to sell a specific feature. They are not even here to sell a piece of software. And they are definitely not here to sell saddles. The only real direct measure of innovation is a change in human behaviour - and Slack sell innovation. They sell the sum of all their parts; an experience, or more specifically organisational transformation. Not a saddle, but horseback riding. To quote Butterfield: "The software just happens to be the part we’re able to build & ship (and the means for us to get our cut)." This big picture approach seems to be common amongst world class companies - think AirBnB ("Create a world where anyone can belong anywhere"). Pretentious or ambitious? It would be an interesting to see a study of whether there is real causation here (not just correlation), but then again, as Stewart says, to get big you need to think big.

The role of a PM is elusive and hard to define; different companies have very different types of people who call themselves product managers. Fundamentally, the job of a PM is the “help your team (and company) ship the right product to your users”. He splits this down and analyses this into 5 different parts - “help your team”, “and company”, “ship”, “the right product”, “for your users”. Help your team The best PMs are those who prioritise efficiently; their time is dedicated to the fringe impact tasks that help the designers/devs etc that they work with. The ‘CEO of the Product’ narrative is somewhat misleading and a bit too top down - it ascribes too much influence to the PM. Everyone needs to share in ownership of the product. Often the ways that PMs help can be inane but crucial, like making accurate meeting notes - they don’t necessarily produce any tangible artefacts for the final product. (and company) The best PMs understand the company (broader vision, strategy, competitors, origins etc) as well as they do the product. You cannot be too stuck in the technical details - business is important, too. ship A great PM needs a feel for when a product is ready to ship - you can’t keep changing and iterating pre-release, ad infinitum. When is the product ready enough? What are the key trade offs here? the right product Shipping matters, but you don’t need to ship shit. The Reid Hoffman quote here, that argues the opposite, springs to mind here - “If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too late”. Most importantly, once shipped, the best PMs can measure what is working and what is not - is the product shipped the right one? for your users The best PMs are user focused to the extreme. I liked the closing quote - “The ultimate truth is that no product will never quite be right for everyone; it’s an ongoing process of continued development and iteration to make it better. The best product managers are the ones who simply roll up their sleeves and help their team through this journey”.

Another essay on PG on how to manage time, as pure and simply as ever. His thesis is clear - there is a very different schedule for Maker's (creatives - developers, writers etc) and Manager's (important people - VCs, VPs etc). The interruption of the Maker's schedule, which relies on long period of uninterrupted, solo concentration, is disastrous and yet so common, because many presume that they work like a Manager in discrete 1 hour blocks that can be chopped and change. Lesson for PMs - protect Developer time at all costs and fight unnecessary meetings / interviews.

A super practical article on the value of feedback and how to gather it. Put simply, Rekhi argues that instead of gathering feedback from your customers sporadically, you need to build feedback collection in all of its many forms into a continuous, repeatable loop. I.e. run different processes and surveys each and every day/week/month instead of only when building a new feature or product. You can then build what he calls a "feedback river" - an open channel for anyone who is interested to get direct access to primary feedback on the product from across various channels.

Stewart Butterfield is interviewed here on Slack's launch strategy. How did they prioritise customer feedback, find their magic number, and grow so incredibly fast, despite a false start in multiplayer gaming?

A narrative history of the friendship between Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky that lead them to win the Nobel Prize in Economics ... despite not even being Economists. Lewis is great at distilling the complex research - that went on to populate Kahneman's dense Thinking, Fast and Slow - and has a real journalist's eye for the amusing anecdotes and stories that capture the wider picture. Lessons: humans (even trained statisticians) do think numerically or probabilistically; be aware of your biases and realise how fallible you are.

A short essay with some good practical advice on how to work with engineers, from the perspective of a designer and ex-Facebook PM. Always consider extreme use cases like, for example; Internationalization: what does this design look like in another language? Notably German with its layout-threatening long words? Error states: what happens when network connectivity is lost; databases crash, etc? User extremes: what does this page look like if the user using this has no information or activity? What about if the user has tons and tons of information or activity? Transitions: what is the precise way that screen A becomes screen B? Put simply, engineers are the life blood of any tech company and they (not you!) need to be accommodated to do their best work.

A super short essay by PG on what he and Y-Combinator look for in founders. He outlines 5 Key Traits (ironically Forbes made him cut one of these for the full article) - Determination, Flexibility, Imagination, Naughtiness, and Friendship. If you ascribe to the view that Product Managers are similar to Founders, in that they are 'CEO of the Product', then you should keep these in mind!

A good summary of the common descriptions of what the elusive but all important concept of Product Market fit is, drawing on Sam Altman, PG, Marc Andreessen, Sean Ellis etc and their seminal articles. This is followed by an intelligent framework for measuring PMF in a way that is quantifiable - ask your customers "how disappointed would be they be if they could no longer use your product?". If 40% or more of them say "very disappointed", you have the hit magic number. If not, then you should segment your customers and draw on the impressions of those who would be most disappointed. You can then build this metric into OKRs, Team Goals etc to constantly optimise for it.

How do you hire a good Product Manager? First and foremost you need to know what a good Product Manager is. Norton's analysis of this question is where his essay is most valuable. It's worth mentioning that Norton has since revised aspects of it in a 10th anniversary edition, like Brainteasers (thankfully for us all), which is also included in this Reading List.

Josh Elman of Greylock and Robinhood fame lays out his thesis on what makes a good Product Manager. This is mostly an updated presentation based on his famous “A PM’s Job” essay (also summarised in this Notion page, and in much greater detail). Key points; PM is a strange function; when done well, it helps companies make products much better, but when done badly, can have an outsize effect on them. The staples of a PM’s job include building the roadmap with brainstorm meetings (quarterly); articulating the roadmap constantly, like a CEO evangelises vision; hold regular product Ops meetings (weekly); act solid (see the PM’s job article); and take + share clear meeting notes.

A primer on how not to set incentives. Bad Blood for the early noughties!

Man's Search for Meaning is very harrowing but equally valuable. Frankl recounts his time as a Jewish concentration camp prisoner during WW2 in the first half, and then delves in the Psychological approach of Logotherapy - translated literally as healing through meaning - in the second. His fundamental thesis is that if humankind is given a why, they can endure almost any how.

Xerox PARC. AT&T Bell Laboratories. Both storied research labs, responsible for many of the key inventions powering modern computing, yet today near defunct and separate entities. What went wrong? Why did corporate research labs stop working as the primary model - as opposed to small start-ups / individual 'inventor' university spin offs - for innovation? Ben Southwood of Policy Exchange captures the central dilemma as this: No one is quite sure why the lab model failed. It’s obvious that a scenario where Xerox is paying scientists to do research that ultimately mostly benefits other firms, potentially even competitors that help to put it out of business, could never survive. Similarly, the tension between managing scientists with their own pure research goals in such a way that they produce something commercially viable, while still leaving them enough latitude to make important leaps, seems huge. But these problems were always there in the model. What is harder to identify is an exogenous shock or set of shocks that changed the situation that existed from the 1930s until somewhere between the 1960s and the 1980s.

Invaluable. More a tract on negotiation than a specific guide for Job Offers. Haseeb seems like a less than savoury person (his long essay on his prop trading bet, that almost killed his friend, felt surreal to read) but, if nothing else, he knows how to negotiate and analyse trade offs. Surprise surprise, he's since quit AirBnB. I thought this was particularly apt; "You probably have a friend or family member who’s infamous for refusing to take no for an answer. The kind of person who will march into a department store and bullheadedly argue with the management until they get a purchase refunded. This person seems like they often get what they want. They make you cringe, but perhaps you should try to be more like them. Rest assured, this person is actually a terrible negotiator. They’re good at being difficult and causing a scene, which can sometimes convince a waitress or shift manager to appease them. But this style of negotiating will get you nowhere when negotiating with a business partner (that is, an employer). A good negotiator is empathetic and collaborative. They don’t try to control you or issue ultimatums. Rather, they try to think creatively about how to fulfill both your and their needs."

Andrew Chen is SV's resident Growth guru and here has opened up the 80 slide deck that he used to land a job at A16z, which is in effect a bible for the metrics that he looks for in prospective companies. You can tell he graduated at the tender age of 19.

Lots of good content on Growth vs Marketing, how to structure a growth team, and why Growth has to be embedded through an organisation, instead of just letting a lone genius type go it alone.

A nice and easy summary of the rise of the Growth PM, with clear examples of different companies that have used GPM's to maximum effect

Sarah Camp of Benchmark divides start-up employees into two camps - the normal and the 10Xers aka the mitochondria, the people who may be employees but act like founders (this is not just a job; pure results focus; bar raisers). 3 strategies to attract and retain this rare group: value interviews, awareness, and breaking bands/levels to accommodate them, where necessary.

Reasonable on the need for problem discovery before pitching – although this isn't exactly revolutionary. Overreaches at times, 3/5

How to give advice - and make sure it's remembered.

A summary of Horowitz / Bezos / Grove on the importance of writing for a manager. Put simply, writing forces clear thinking, and it's far harder to successfully pretend to be something that you are not in prose compared to speech.

Articulates the idea that a PM needs to be a Shit Umbrella - protecting their Devs and Designers from the chaos that building a product involves. In the Umbrella model, you have a critical role in protecting the product, the team and your customers from often well-intentioned but harmful forces. Let's take an example. Your Talent team are filling up your Devs calendars with interviews and technical screens - when you're rushing to ship an MVP. Your Developer hours are crucial here. What do you do, given you know Devs work on a maker's schedule, but you also know that interviews are necessary to grow the company - and you can't hire without technical screens? You as the PM could put yourself forward to run the interviews, protecting your Devs and picking up the slack.

This is a tricky read but there is lots of value to be found. Chu argues that Product Management is a constant conflict between the ideal and the real - you need to come to terms with Shipping is a Feature. This proposes that because you will never be able to build a perfect product, you need to learn how best to ship your imperfect one, as customer use of this product is what really matters. Brandon Chu here proposes (amidst some dense and not very clear analogies) a framework which he names The Time Value of Shipping. This borrows from the finance concept time value of money, the thesis of which is "one dollar today is worth more than one dollar tomorrow". Let's say you earn £1 per month and want to buy a football at £12. After a year, you wouldn't be able to buy the football because of inflation - you'd need to wait until month 13. This an analogy that applies to product; Buying the football is when you ship to your customers (MVP) The price compares to the user's expectation at any given point of time You earn the sum of customer value that your team builds over time Most companies presume that customer expectation stays flat as time goes on - this is false. Because customer value increases as time goes on, delivering customer value now is worth more than delivering value later. If you deliver later, your product needs to be much better to compensate. See the graphs below for more - it's hard to explain without seeing the X/Y axis and tangents!

A 40 minute podcast in which 2 Product School employees interview Transferwise's Head of Product. He's not the most excited or animated interviewee, but there are lots of interesting points that he makes; - London PMs have performed better than SF PMs in Transferwise interviews, suggests that London has one of the best Product communities in the world - For people who want to switch into PM at Transferwise from Marketing / Ops / CS etc, they put them on Learning Courses with key skills they need to learn and projects to complete before they can switch over. - These key skills include Data Analysis (SQL) and Building Systems (basic code). PMs come from many backgrounds but he places a premium on those who have built technical products in a hands on way - They have specific questions to weed out egoists. Red flags include speaking only about themselves, as opposed to focusing on the Customer or their Team. - PMs from Amazon are the most similar to Transferwise PMs, as compared to other Big Tech cos

Quite dense and big on the jargon but very interesting. StubHub founder Jeff Fluhr argues that LinkedIn is the new Craigslist; a huge, sprawling horizontal marketplace that will, in a fit of unbundling, spawn sub-businesses which hone in on specific verticals and and win them with greater specialisation and slick customer experience. Craigslist spawned many unicorns (AirBnB, Etsy, StubHub etc) which is captured comprehensively in the diagram below.

After Zero to One and The Everything Store, this was one of the first business books that I read. It's far better interpreted as a human, 'behind the scenes' type story than as a book focused on the nuts/bolts of execution. I found I learnt far more about Amazon in Stones' last book than I did about AirBnB/Uber in Upstarts. Perhaps he would have done better just to focus on Uber or AirBnB. Still, who doesn't want to hear about how the AirBnB founders had to sell politically branded cereals - Cap'n McCains and Obama O's - before charging on to a $34bn valuation? These are the fun human stories that underpin all that comes next.

Some of my favourite business book's that I've read have been narrative histories that tell a company's founding story and early years. Hatching Twitter is no exception - I read it in 2 days. You know that when a book starts with the CEO/Founder puking into a waste basket after a brutal corporate ousting that you're in for a real story. Mark Zuckerberg's claim that Twitter is a "clown car that fell into a gold mine" does seem fairly accurate from Bilton's account. With 3 corporate oustings, terrible management and stunning egotism from a young Jack Dorsey, and anecdotes ranging from extortion by Justin Bieber to a Tequila fueled buyout attempt by former Vice President Al Gore, Twitter's story is not short on drama. The only negative of such a roller coaster is that it can become quite hard to distil any clear lessons around leadership / vision / product development etc. This is more fun polemic than academic - but enjoyable nevertheless.

A collection of interviews with famous founders like Max Levchin, Woz, Ev Williams and many more. This is very much focused on the early 2000s to before the Dot Com bubble and is quite literally just discrete interviews taped together into one book. Interesting to flick through but there's not much interpretation by Jess, who co-founded YC and is the wife of Paul Graham. Who better to interpret and analyse broader trends than someone with that storied experience? If nothing else, it's very good as a survey of how great founders had their magic moment and came up with their key idea (pre-pivot idea that is)!.

I'm a huge fan of Reid Hoffman but this book was very disappointing. He seems to stretch that definition of Blitzscaling to be so wide that it becomes somewhat meaningless. Are we talking about how to achieve Google/WhatsApp style growth here - or are speaking that something, according to Reid, even not for profit charities can do? If you're looking for the tricks of the trade, the general lessons that the greatest entrepreneurs learn and intuit, this is not the place to find them. Overall it was quite superficial and favoured platitudes over detailed analysis. I got a slight impression that Hoffman was suffering from the Halo Effect - ascribing exceptional traits to select companies in every category, just because he favoured them and they had become incredibly successful. Hindsight truly is 50:50! The main analogy which I did find valuable was Hoffman's comparison between the growth of a company and that of a historical city state. As companies grow, they transition from a "family" to "tribal" to "village" states, and so on, until the "nation" stage. Each stage has certain employees with concomitant traits that are needed - Marines to breach the enemy territory in the early days, the Army to build infrastructure and stabilise, and then the Police to sustain order and enforce the new laws. If you join as a Marine, you may very well find that by the time Police are being hired, you're no longer a good fit!

Disrupted is similar to Chaos Monkey, in that it's written in the first person and highly cynical of 'start-up world - in that sense it can be used as a foil. But that’s where the similarities end. Where Martinez is self aware enough to recognise his own immorality (or amorality?), Lyons' doesn't seem to be nearly as aware of his own flaws - nor nearly as good a writer. It's quite grating to watch him complain about the selfishness of the start-up model of 'build a company quickly and then Sell or IPO and make your millions', when his stated reason for working at HubSpot is to, well, get shares and then sell them to make lots of money. Martinez is playful and often funny - he's an arsehole and he knows it. Lyons is an arsehole too, he just doesn’t realise it. The book is filled with more lazy contradictions and logical flaws. For example he argues that much of the start-up eco-system is based not on the quality of a given product, but rather on the amount of hype you can generate - what's the point in focusing on building when you can get a ticket to Dreamforce and turn some tech bros into customer champions? But his solution for HubSpot's ailments is that they need to stop focusing on hype and instead build a better product. If building the product is pointless and it's hype that matters, why bother? He also pinpoints a select few companies that exemplify the excesses of BigTech and don't deserve their lofty valuations, like Amazon, Salesforce and LinkedIn. These are perhaps the worse examples he could have picked - far better to highlight the WeWork, Improbable's of the world than go after companies that are, with the exclusion of LinkedIn, running $10-100bns in revenue and profitable. Even LinkedIn sold to Microsoft for $26bn, and are now one of their fastest growing divisions and what is seen as a good acquisition. This book was funner to criticise than to read!

A famous philosophical precursor to lean start-up movement, which was - perhaps not by chance - started by Eric Ries, Steve's best student.

Insights into what it's like to fail (and learn) in an EF cohort

This is an exceptional interview with Daniel Ek, founder of Spotify. Much to learn on the fundamentals of time management and efficient communication (the dispersal of which is the key role of the CEO, according to Daniel). How do you run meetings? If you spend the meeting getting everyone up to speed on the topic, you've wasted your time. Instead, write a short pre-meeting brief and ensure; 1) Desired outcome is clear ahead of time 2) Various options and related trade offs are clear 3) Role of participants is clear