Hacker News Books

* Bad Blood - mentioned tons of times

* Billion Dollar Whale - story of the 1MDB scandal

* Black Edge - chronicles insider trading on wall street

* The Billionaire Raj - about India's income inequality and ruling oligarchy

I can hardly put it down, I highly recommend it.

Not sure what I learned other than people are carried away easily, but it was very entertaining.

The ride to the top and then rock bottom for Theranos is a wild one, and the author does a great job of not letting you put this book down once you start.

https://youtu.be/rGfaJZAdfNE?t=99

The book definitely gets it right.

1) How to change your mind
2) Bad Blood
3) Kitchen Confidential
4) I am a strange loop
5) The good mothers (about the ndrangheta)
6) Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

Every chapter you read there will be at least one "Holy shit. I can't believe someone did that" moment.

Bill Gates concurs https://www.gatesnotes.com/Books/Bad-Blood

* Masters of Doom, by David Kushner

* What Doesn't Kill Us, by Scott Carney

* Bad Blood, by John Carreyrou

* The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, by Marie Kondō

* How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big, by Scott Adams

I read a few times a week tops.

Do you have any other recommendations?

2. Bad Blood - Just started it and it reads like John Grisham

3. The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaur - Narrative about dinosaurs, I’m excited

4. Cork Dork - Great book about wine and Sommeliers

5. Waterloo: The History of Four Days - Everyone talks about Napolean’s defeat, but I honestly know nothing about it.

1. Bad Blood - John Carreyrou

2. Flash Boys - Michael Lewis

* 'Who is Michael Ovitz' by Michael Ovitz

* 'High Growth Handbook' by Elad Gil

* 'Principles: Life and Work' by Ray Dalio

* '1491' & '1493' by Charles C. Mann

> Lots of executives. Lots of advisors. High powered board. No demo. First prototype due this month.

> Uh oh.

It's like reading Bad Blood in real time.

Other than that I believe Bad Blood by John Carreyrou is possibly the best of 2018 (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/37976541-bad-blood) - mentioned in the other comment already

2. Bad Blood by John Carreyrou - Gripping prose and an altogether incredible storyline

3. It Doesn’t Have to be Crazy at Work by Jason Fried and DHH - Some great lessons in here (interspersed with other not-so-great ones) for creating a “culture of calm” within organizations

4. When The Bubble Bursts by Hilliard Macbeth - Insightful look into the fragile structure of the Canadian real estate market (a bit hyperbolic at times, though)

1) Educated: A Memoir - by Tara Westover;

2) Army of None - by Paul Scharre;

3) Bad Blood - by John Carreyrou;

4) 21 Lessons for the 21st Century - by Yuval Noah Harari;

5) The Headspace Guide to Meditation and Mindfulness - by Andy Puddicombe

- Total Recall: My Unbelievably True Life Story by Arnold Schwarzenegger

- Elon Musk by Ashlee Vance

- Bad Blood by John Carreyrou

- Kochland by Christopher Leonard

- Masters of Doom by David Kushner

I read a lot of "business consultant" books and began to be annoyed with them since many of them can be summed up by the title and the first couple of chapters.

I like the books above because they presented factual events that allow you to draw your own conclusions.

I especially like Schwarzenegger's book and Bad Blood because of their depth. It was interesting to hear about Schwarzenegger's crazy business ideas like how he became a millionaire before becoming an actor and how he bought a 747.

I found the audiobook "Master's of Doom" (book is 2003 but audiobook is newer) to be really entertaining as it was read by actor Wil Wheaton who did a great job.

2. Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter

3. The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires

4. Zero to one Peter Thiel

5. The republic – Plato

6. The Hard Thing About Hard Things, Ben Horowitz

7. The 1-Page Marketing Plan: Get New Customers, Make More Money, And Stand Out From The Crowd Kindle Edition

8. Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike

9. Never split the difference

10. The Lean Startup: How Today's Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses Hardcover

11. The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Products that Win

12. Economy course: https://www.core-econ.org/

You will be in for a ride.

One great aspect of Facebook is that Zuckerberg interviewed with the author for years and the cut into parts makes a lot of sense (Harvard and before, "Move fast and break things", Trump, aftermath).

Bad Blood by John Carreyrou about the rise and fall of Theranos is very similar feel to American Kingpin, if you enjoyed one you will probably love the other; I thought both were equally fantastic, probably my best reads of 2018.

Artemis Andy Weir
Liked it.. but liked the Martian better

Origin Dan Brown
If you are into this sort of thing.. I know his writing is not the best but I like the story

We were Yahoo! Jeremy Ring

About the rise and fall of yahoo.... some interesting stuff

1965: The Most Revolutionary Year in Music Andrew Grant Jackson
Good read.. lots of events that year

Ready Player One Ernest Cline
what is there to say....

A Frozen Hell William Trotter
About the the war between Finland and the Soviet Union

3 Kings: Diddy, Dr. Dre, Jay-Z, and Hip-Hop's Multibillion-Dollar Rise Zack O'Malley Greenburg
Like this a lot

The Outsider Stephen King
Back to classic King.. recommended

Stalin New Biography of a Dictator Oleg V. Khlevniuk
If you are interested in this character..then I recommend this

Skin In The Game Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Taleb's latest

Dead Reckoning: The Untold Story of the Northwest Passage Ken McGoogan
After watching the Terror on tv.. I had to read this

Nobu Nobu Matsuhisa
What a life, loved it

Hunting El Chapo Andrew Hogan/Douglas Century
Good read

Bad Blood John Carreyrou
WHat a messed up person and company

Tesla: Inventor of the Modern Richard Munson
This was very good

The Revenge of Analog David Sax
I liked this book a lot... maybe because I remember all these items when they existed

Tasting the Past: The Science of Flavor and the Search for the Origins of Wine Kevin Begos
If you want to learn a little more about wines and the origins..

Bag Of Bones Stephen King
One of his best

Robot-Proof: Higher Education in the Age of Artificial Intelligence Joseph E. Aoun
We all know it's coming

    - Complete Hyperion Cantos (incl. Endymion series)
    - Bad Blood (Still churning through)

Bad Blood is a fascinating read. I'm still in the first quarter, and with this density, the events are well simply amazing to put it lightly.

New Yorker article on which it is based, Bones of Contention: A Florida man's curious trade in Mongolian dinosaurs

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/01/28/bones-of-conte...

I can't resist mentioning this book. It's not fiction, but it reads like fiction - it has all the ingredients for a compelling fiction story: oversized characters, delusions of grandeur, deception, giant egos, and so much more. But it's not fiction, it's all true. Hollywood wants to make it into a movie, and when you read the book you'll know exactly why.

If you've read Bad Blood and can honestly say that the behavior of Google, Tesla, et al reaches anywhere close to the level of deceit, malice and downright sociopathy exhibited by Holmes and Balwani, I question your moral compass.

Bad Blood has not had the impact in SV that it should have. The stock market needs to crash and the myth of steve jobs needs to die :-(

What? No... it's because we'd never seen the Silicon Valley Startup Hype Machine ramped up to it's fully glory before like Theranos. Also svelte young blueeyed blondes are catnip to media, combine that with "youngest self made female billionaire" and it's mandatory reporting and guaranteed spotlight in the public eye... throwing the fact that it was all a scam and renewed interest and modern popularity with TrueCrime genre and modern scammers like Anna Delvey and Fyre Festival and .... kaboom, here we are. Didn't hurt that Bad Blood was also excellently written and well-researched. All in all an excellent story.

(It wouldn't surprise me if we eventually get a film adaptation... but those are always worse if you read the book.)

The reporter, John Carreyrou, also caught backfire from Theranos. Especially his sources whom he did try to protect but were stalked by private investigators & lawyers.

Given that Theranos didn't have a product it is only good news that they're finally dissolving. Holmes and Balwani ruled with tyranny and compartmentalisation which created a toxic work environment, but that does not mean all the employees were ignorant or stupid or into the scam; many of the employees were highly skilled and intelligent. Those who did know they didn't have a product (or that it was some dirty hack based on a different product) were manipulated by Holmes and Balwani.

I saw someone mention psychopath. I'm unsure what exactly these two people are. Sociopath, psychopath, narcissist, whatever it is; it isn't pretty.

When I read the book I was regularly reminded by Brian Krebs' "Sources: Security Firm Norse Corp. Imploding" [1]. They also had no real product and used compartmentalisation. Also well written (though way briefer).

[1] https://krebsonsecurity.com/2016/01/sources-security-firm-no...

(edit: not just having a sidegig, but being able to launch and run his startup for ~1 year while employed at Tesla)

I also have a low bar after reading "Bad Blood", the book about Theranos. One of Theranos's chief engineers, on his own time, came up with a cool idea for bike lights and ran a successful KickStarter [0]. Elizabeth Holmes' response:

> Kent told Elizabeth about his successful Kickstarter campaign, thinking she wouldn’t mind. But he badly miscalculated: she and Sunny were furious. They viewed it as a major conflict of interest and asked him to transfer his bike-lights patent to Theranos. The paperwork Kent had signed when he joined the company entitled them to any intellectual property he produced while employed there, they contended. Kent disagreed. He’d worked on his little venture during his free time and felt he had done nothing wrong. He also failed to see how a new type of bicycle light posed a threat to a maker of blood-testing equipment. But Elizabeth and Sunny wouldn’t let it go. In meeting after meeting, they tried to get him to turn over the patent. They ratcheted up the pressure by bringing Theranos’s new senior counsel, David Doyle, to some of the meetings.

Eventually Kent, the engineer, was allowed to go on leave of absence to work on his bike-light. I don't think he ever came back, and he was the guy who was the chief architect of the piece of crap that Holmes would later describe as "the most important thing humanity has ever built".

[0] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/revolights/revolights-j...

The unique feature of Holmes was that she was the first woman starting and leading a (supposedly successful) start-up. Needless to say though, it was a facade. That's saddening, but having read Bad Blood I expected nothing less but the company Theranos to dissolve.

Creativity Inc. Re-read it this year, re-inspired.

The Outsider - Stephen King.
Well written, engrossing but a typical Stephen King novel

Shoe Dog - Phil Knight.
Story of Nike. Phenomenal.

Bad blood - John Carreyrou.
Story of Theranos. Absolutely crazy read.

7 Powers: The Foundations of Business Strategy - Hamilton Helmer.
Good insights on strategy

- "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman", Richard Feynman

- "The hard things about hard things", Ben Horowitz

- "Shoe Dog - A Memoir by the Creator of Nike", Phil Knight

- "Bad Blood", John Carreyrou [about Elizabeth Holmes]

- "Trillion Dollar Coach" [about the life of Bill Campbell]

It's basically a gripping thriller set in Silicon Valley. The story focuses on what went on within the company since its inception. It's completely mind boggling how and why it all happened.

The Monk of Mokha - Dave Eggers; This seems to have been mostly under the radar but it was immensely entertaining and gives a look inside Yemen that is hard to come by. Probably my favorite book of the year.

Tailspin - Steven Brill; A look at how the split and interaction between business and government became so dysfunctional over the last 50 years. This topic has been covered elsewhere but I thought was done well.

Behemoth - Joshua B. Freeman; A history of (very large) factories.

Live Work Work Work Die - Corey Pein; A very cynical but funny look at life/work in Silicon Valley.

Two Sisters - Asne Seierstad; A story about 2 young Somalian immigrants to Norway who move to Syria to join ISIS.

Also: Bad Blood

Read in 2018 but published earlier:
Black Edge - Sheelah Kolhatkar; The Solace of Open Spaces - Gretel Ehrlich; American Cornball - Christopher Miller

* Why We Sleep: https://j11g.com/2019/05/31/why-we-sleep-matthew-walker/

* The Effective Executive: https://j11g.com/2019/03/18/the-effective-executive-peter-dr...

* High Output Management: https://j11g.com/2019/01/29/high-output-management-andrew-s-...

* Bad Blood: https://j11g.com/2019/01/21/bad-blood-john-carreyrou/

* The 7 Habits (I reread this after a long time and it still holds up!) https://j11g.com/2019/09/30/the-7-habits-of-highly-effective...

* A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again – David Foster Wallace (This is just an amazing book and became one of my all time favorites) https://j11g.com/2019/08/08/a-supposedly-fun-thing-ill-never...

Another good one that I got recently is Arabia Felix [1], a rather obscure Danish book from 1962 from NYRB. A minor classic.

I'm not a war buff by any stretch, but I can recommend Antony Beevor. Sometimes his books devolve into exhausting, never-ending play-by-plays of tank and troop movements, but both Stalingrad and The Fall of Berlin [3] and were fascinating just for his ability to conjure up the time and place. Inside the Third Reich was similarly interesting, even it's known to be a flawed narrative.

I also recently read Bad Blood, about Theranos, which was excellent. Literary-wise not quite on the same level, though.

Got any recommendations?

[1] https://www.npr.org/2017/06/17/531929925/in-the-refrains-of-...

[2] https://www.amazon.com/Stalingrad-Fateful-1942-1943-Antony-B...

[3] https://www.amazon.com/Fall-Berlin-1945-Antony-Beevor

1. Elizabeth Holmes concocted a product that defied the laws of chemistry and physics and couldn't actually be built. She refused to relax constraints like size/packaging that may have made it plausible.

2. She engaged in fraud in the hopes that eventually #1 would be solved and created a culture without transparency that further hampered the product from ever working.

This wasn't a case of a gamble that didn't pay off. This was a case of an infeasible idea, poorly executed, and compounding the issue with outright fraud. No startup advice necessary to avoid this.

I really think that she thought she could make the machines work. I think Holmes and Balwani thought that, given enough time and enough smart people they would eventually get a working version. I think they thought -- they may still think -- that it was a question of throwing more resources at the problem.

The whole thing would have lasted longer if they had not put a deadline on themselves by actually releasing it into the wild with the Walgreens deal.

Aside from being a really enthralling and interesting story about one of SV's darling unicorns, it was also really eye opening into the absurdity of the amount of money that gets thrown around willy-nilly in SV, and how the bandwagon/FOMO effect just makes it worse. I won't say anything more because it's better to just read the book, but this is one of those stories that is almost endlessly fascinating.

While the inspector could have pushed the issue, I don't think they 'failed massively'.

My point is that for every good example of a success story (about startups in this case), there's a good story of a failure. And the failures are much more than the successes. If you want to discount the failures because they don't fit your narrative, then you should equally oppose the successes when they don't fit your narrative.

TL;DR my post is a reply to a post and should be seen in that context. You've taken my post out of context; please don't do that.

Moreover, I recently read the book Bad Blood and I found it interesting to get an inside look at a startup who present themselves better than they actually are. I don't believe that part of the Theranos debacle is so uncommon. The severity and unique market though, are. And, that's actually underlined by the Twitter thread (the pictures). Another similarity is the massive quitting and burnout of quality personal, the fear of being fired and standing up, low morale. Those are, IMO, interesting similarities.

As an aside, this is always an interesting thought experiment.

I read an example in John Carreyrou's Bad Blood (Theranos expose) recently:

"Several members of the Frat Pack joined Greg and two of his colleagues from the engineering department for lunch on the big terrace overlooking the parking lot one day. A discussion about the low IQs of some of the world’s top soccer players led them to debate the question, Would you rather be smart and poor or dumb and rich? The three engineers all chose smart and poor, while the Frat Pack voted unanimously for dumb and rich. Greg was struck by how clearly the line was drawn between the two groups. They were all in their mid-to late twenties with good educations, but they valued different things."

You apparently didn't read it very well. Patients went to ERs, had drug dosages changed, invasive tests and procedures performed as a result of these results.

> It's Theranos's investors and Theranos's business partners that are mostly at fault. They didn't do their due diligence

And it's probably the FDA's fault, too, right? You know, since they should have known that a locked and partly covered side door to a lab is where the Theranos equipment really was, and that the lab they were inspecting had been carefully prepared and "sanitized" for their benefit, and Theranos hoped that if this wasn't uncovered they'd be certified based on the "prepared" lab. Balwani and Holmes forbidding anyone from using the real lab, or going through that door when inspectors were on-site was... "just hoping that it would work", not actively deceptive and fraudulent, right? What due diligence might have helped discover that?

Crashed by Adam Tooze ; history of the financial crisis, goes into more detail than most of the others

The Future of Capitalism by Paul Collier; lots of ideas on how to improve our situation, most of them are good, UK focused

Bad Blood by John Carreyrou; if you've ever been in a startup you'll recognize bits of this story, but it quickly gets out of control in novel ways. Astonishing story.

What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets by Michel Sandel

The Attention Merchants by Tim Wu

Who we are and how we got here by David Reich: ancient DNA and human history

The Book of Why by Judea Pearl; liked it but I need to reread this one a few more times to comprehend completely or go to his textbooks

Empire of Cotton: Sven Birckets; a history of the first global technology including how it made the UK & USA rich

The Away Game: The Epic Search for Soccer's Next Superstar by Sebastian Abbot

This reminds me a little of a situation at work. We have a director who everybody outside management knows he is full of sh.t. He never delivers anything and when you get the chance to talk to VP or CEO they agree that he needs to go. But then they talk to him and he always gets a second chance. This guy gets much more face time with our CEO then anybody else I know.

Bad Blood (John Carreyrou) - Story of Theranos, its founders and the conception of terrible ideas. Great record of their actions based on subjective ethics and morals, how they can lead you to going insane.

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking (Susan Cain) - Fun read for functional introverts like myself.

Stuff Matters (Mark Miodownik) - I wish every science lesson is taught like this

Em and the Big Hoon (Naresh Fernandes) - Fiction, but based closely on the author's mother, her control over the English language, poetry and the mental illness' control over her and their family here in Bombay.

Born a Crime (Trevor Noah) - A biography of the Daily Show host. He's seen a lot of terrible situations and come out unscathed!

Being Mortal (Atul Gawande) - Hospice care - all its good and bad.

A Man Called Ove - Fictional and funny book about a man with a strict code, who lost his beloved wife and still dislikes everyone.

...except when it involves investor's money.

Some takeaways after reading Bad Blood:

1. Listen to people.

2. If you're 19 with a great idea and investors willing to support it, ask for help.

3. Cumulative moral lapses will become a slippery slope.

4. If you're building something to sell to the medical industry, for goodness sake get some medical professionals in there.

5. Don't learn your leadership techniques from a Steve Jobs biography.

6. Don't sleep with someone and make them president of the company (or vice-versa).

7. Strive for diverse opinions instead of some yes men (and groupthink).

8. Fabricating results that can impact human lives will bring on the free press, the FDA, the SEC, and the FBI like a sack of bricks.

Their big mistake was trying to use the "move fast and break things" mentality in biotech. If Holmes had started an ad company instead, she'd be lauded for her entrepreneurial accomplishments instead of being under investigation by the Feds.

> ED WAS WORKING late one evening when Elizabeth came by his workspace. She was frustrated with the pace of their progress and wanted to run the engineering department twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, to accelerate development. Ed thought that was a terrible idea. His team was working long hours as it was...

> Ed pushed back against Elizabeth’s proposal. Even if he instituted shifts, a round-the-clock schedule would make his engineers burn out, he told her. “I don’t care. We can change people in and out,” she responded. “The company is all that matters.”

Carreyrou, John. Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup (p. 28). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

No patients were harmed. The only losers in this are the investors that invested in Theranos. Given that they blindly trusted the pitch, without verifying that the technology worked, that makes them very bad and unskilled investors.

Unskilled investors losing a lot of money is, in fact, a very good thing for the Silicon Valley ecosystem. It's how bad influencers are flushed out of the system.

Hyperion Cantos is written by Dan Simmons. It's 4.5 books.

  - Hyperion
  - The Fall of Hyperion
  - Endymion
  - The Rise of Endymion
  - Orphans of the Helix (a novella in the same universe)

I just finished "Bad Blood", the book on Theranos. Given that it was a fraud, it was entirely empty. But it was designed to look substantial to Stanford deans and Valley VCs. Later the target shifted to other sorts of movers and shakers, including corporate titans and political bigwigs. They all got suckered, and some of them still don't know it.

I think Instagram influencers look shallow to me because their audience is people who value different things than I do. But I don't take that as a sign that I'm somehow better. Just that I have different weaknesses.

E.g., I spent years developing NeXT software because I drank the Jobs kool-aid. I didn't do that for hard-headed business reasons; I did it because the NeXT hardware and software was incredibly cool to young me. At the time, I would have smugly defended my choice as more rational than getting starry-eyed over a celebrity. In retrospect, I was wrong. I just fell for for something tuned for my weaknesses, just like we all do.

1) if the idea is to impart all of the kinetic energy needed to get into LEO at once, on the ground, then you are talking ~17,000 MPH worth of KE (though truly, more, because of loss to drag). There's a reason why max-q is an important consideration in the design of space vehicles. The space shuttle reaches max-q at 30K feet, where the density of air is 3x less than at sea level. How do you design your vehicle so that it doesn't turn into dust when it hits 1 ATM at 17,000+ MPH?

2) the centripetal force on the vehicle, prior to launch, will be enormous. So in addition to not deforming and/or burning up the moment the vehicle hits the air, the vehicle also needs to be built sturdily enough to not get crushed while being accelerated.

I read Bad Blood a few weekends ago. Holmes hoodwinked investors who wanted to believe that a fairy tale technology could exist, by never publishing or otherwise allowing outside scrutiny of their technology. How is this company different?

This has been listed multiple times. Depicts the darkside of the startup phenomena

* Chasing New Horizons - Alan Stern, David Grinspoon

Documents the people and machine that explored Pluto

* Sunburst and Luminary - Don Eyles

History of the Apollo guidance computer software from the man who wrote it

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_cross-ownership_in_the_U...

Basically, Elizabeth Holmes wanted to be a billionaire and restore her family's fortune. She started a medical tech company but didn't include any scientists or doctors on her board. Demos and employment were tightly controlled by NDA, and structured so as few people as possible knew about the scam. Somewhere between 1-8M (10-100%) of blood tests Theranos performed on hacked machines from other companies are suspect or outright wrong. Her company rode the "unicorn" wave at just the right time to get lots of funding and publicity, even though it has been operating since 2006.

Anyone who has read Bad Blood [1] should have no doubt about this fact. They destroyed this man and lead him to suicide in order to try to save their house of cards.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Bad-Blood-Secrets-Silicon-Startup/dp/...

Everything from the tulip craze to the dotcom boom.

2) If I Understood You, Would I Have This Look On My Face? by Alan Alda

Alan Alda of MASH fame teaches you how to build more empathy and improve your communication skills.

3) Bad Blood by James Carreyou

Theranos. Enough said.

4) Directorate S: The C.I.A. and America's Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan by Steve Coll

I think of this as the last book in Coll's unofficial trilogy on Afghanistan. First up was Ghost Wars, a history of American involvement in Afghanistan from the Soviet invasion up to 2001. Second is his biography on the Bin Laden family. Last year he released Directorate S, a chronicle of American and Pakistani involvement post-9/11 primarily told through the lens of the Pakistani intelligence directorate tasked with influencing Afghanistan.

Coll has interviews with everyone from in-country CIA agents and foot soldiers who were on the ground all the way up to defense secretaries and military leaders, from both sides. An in-depth examination of what went wrong and why we're still stuck there.

5) Deep South: Four Seasons on Back Roads by Paul Theroux.

The greatest travel writer of the last half-century finally turns his attention homeward: the American Deep South. Four road trips over four seasons. He published an article in Smithsonian Magazine hitting the highlights: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/soul-south-180951861/