This is a good book about startups. It is good at pointing out a good number of things that I haven’t done yet and really need to do. I’ll get together with Robert tomorrow to talk about it. I also should make sure that we record more stuff about the things we are talking about. I’d say this book is worth reading for those doing their own startup.
This book didn’t have too many tips or how to’s about bootstrapping. It mainly said that it is a good idea. I admit that I shouldn’t expect much out of a 41 minute listen, but I still expected more than was delivered.
This was a very interesting book about how the mortgage backed security and credit default swaps. These methods of banking and investing were very interesting and made these huge webs of reliance. Once one part of the web broke all the others were start breaking. The idea behind these monetary devices was that if you create something and make it seem secure, but then let people know that it may not be as secure as it looks at first in the small print, you can sell it for much more than it will eventually be worth and externalize that risk. If the buyers of these items had just been people there wouldn’t have been a banking crisis, it would have just hit all the wealthy individuals that had bought them and all the people who had taken loans they couldn’t possibly pay back. This would have meant that no bailout would have occurred. Somewhere along the line the banks and investment firms thought that these investments were a great idea and that they were missing out on the money. Once that happened the market became larger and the interdependencies started to accrue. Then the monetary devices started to wilt and all hell broke loose. This makes me think that if you can create a monetary device that seems stable on the surface but is really just a front for a lot of unstable things that you can make an insane amount of money.
I love this book. It is a book that I would gladly listen to several more times, even though I understood mostly everything it was talking about. This is using applied game theory to talk about inequalities and market forces. It shows how many things that don’t make sense on a macro scale can make sense on a aggregated micro scale. It talks about how special interest groups can get really far ahead without anyone caring that they are being abused by them. It also supports the manufacturing of incentive programs in specific ways to drive the results you are looking for. I will recommend this book to many people as a way to understand game theory in practice.
The history in this book before the modern era was very interesting. It supposes that writing came about for understanding debt. Debt is more what someone is owed for their contributions than what someone owes for their usage. The later idea of debt is more modern. The creation of money in the modern world is a very interesting topic covered in this book. I think that the way they show how bubbles are created and burst from ways groups can defraud certain groups. It also points out something that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. There is a divide between those who understand and use the system that has come about, and those who choose to be used by the system.
This book wasn’t what I expected. It was much more business focused. For me that isn’t such a bad thing, as it gave me a lot to think about when/if I end up starting my own company. I did enjoy the talks about partners, employees, nepotism, networking, and marketing. I have the tendency to try to do everything myself, which is good in startup phase, but quickly dies off. The beer festivals they got going sound like a lot of fun, and I’d love to go to more festivals around here.
The application of game theory supported by this book and used in practice is something I like. I would like to learn more about game theory and how to functionally apply it. It seems to me that this is naturally synergistic with Decision Analysis. Combining the two makes for a very powerful model of how people will make decisions and how I should make decisions. Since I have extra time today I will probably look up some additional material on game theory. Reading the Wikipedia article and the links from that is a good start, but I’d like it in the form of a lecture or class if that could be found.
This book was fantastic. The author uses a lot of anecdotal evidence to support good experimental data. Some of the conclusions drawn from the data i find suspect, especially those regarding the purpose of why people were doing what they were doing, but the general indicators of human behavior are fully believable. One of the things that the book talks at length about are biases. It talks about getting used to good and bad things, and how to avoid getting used to the good and make the bad not so bad. The book also says that we should avoid making decisions when emotional, as that will form an unintentional habit of choosing that decision or ones like it when dealing with people in the future. The emotional habit experiment is one that I don’t believe to be as thorough as most of the others, but it is still directionally true. I very much enjoyed this book.
This paints a scary picture of the future of the US economy and of many other world economies, particularly of the EU. The book talks about the monetary systems of many countries, before problems, after problems, and current states. From what I understand of the book the US economy is on the edge, due to too much debt being taken on by the public sector. The public sector debt then makes private sector investment more difficult. Private sector startups are then the source of net jobs in major economies. I think that the worst things they talk about in the book won’t happen to the US primarily because we are more likely to inflate away our debt, without hyperinflation, than any of the other scenarios that are presented in the book.
It's an Exciting World 