Moonshot 7

The author, Michael Lewis, had the front row seat of how SBF, FTX and Alameda Research came about and how it all went down.  This book is like a shorter version of what really happened. There could easily be a second part to this book. It is indeed fascinating to understand how someone went from Zero to Billions of dollars within a few short years. And back to Zero.  The book goes into the details of cryptos, exchanges, securities, etc., but explaining in a layman kind of a way. It also goes into high frequency trading and various trading firms that one usually doesn't hear about in the headlines.  The author starts spending time with Sam Bankman-Fried and company way before it all went down. He could not have predicted how it all will turn out, but if you know his other works, this is in Michael Lewis' forte.  This may not be his best work but comparison to his previous works is also not fair. There are so many things in this book that were interesting to learn....

This book is written in such a style that it moves fast, small sub-chapters, each chapter focused on a topic from people to companies to technology to family to everything. This blog post is just a few highlights from the book that I enjoyed and want to capture for eternity. I will let everyone come to their own conclusions about his personality. My fascination is for the products, companies and brands he has built. The book obviously is a non-fiction but reads like a fiction. Isaacson had a front-row seat to unfiltered information and interviews from almost anyone who had access to Elon, present and past, including Elon. Elon doesn't sleep much, doesn't give importance to material things for himself, works seven days a week and amps things up to get things done or pushes things faster. His life reminded me of the movie 'Everything Everywhere All At Once". He creates multiple unique and disruptive companies, he has many relationships, many kids, makes decisions fast, a...

"Team of Rivals - The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln" is a #1 New York Times Bestseller by the Pulitzer Prize winner and Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin. The Steven Spielberg movie Lincoln was based on this book. I have seen Goodwin in several documentaries and shows, primarily when it is related to the US history and past Presidents. I have heard and read about this book in number blogs and articles on Medium for a long time but never got to read it. When I saw the book in my local library, I borrowed it. It took me forever to complete the book as I am practicing 'slow reading' this year. I will read a chapter and go read another book, then return to the next chapter. In some cases, I re-read multiple chapters. This was just so good that I wanted soak in the finer details. This is almost a 1000 page book. It is one of the most researched, fact-based, historical biopic that goes into depths of Abraham Lincoln's time during his first primaries through his re-e...

I listened to the Chairman and CEO of Snowflake, Frank Slootman, in the 'This week in Startups' podcast and was immediately intrigued by him.  Maybe it is the immigrant in me, maybe I share some of the ideals he shared in the podcast, but his straight talk connected to me. And many of the ideas he shared was right out of what has been in my mind for a long time I immediately put his book AMP IT UP on hold with my local library. I support my local library, but that is a totally different podcast. And got it within a few days.  The book's title is:  AMP IT UP.  Leading for Hypergrowth by Raising Expectations, Increasing Urgency, and Elevating Intensity. Frank Slootman was the previous CEO of disk storage company, Data Domain, that was acquired by EMC and now part of Dell Technologies. He was then the CEO of the service management SaaS company, ServiceNow, taking it to a $100B market value. Slootman is now the Chairman and CEO of the Data Cloud company, Snowflake, hover...

My all time favorite book is Viktor Frankl's Man's Search For Meaning. This book was recommended to me by a friend many years ago and he also gave me a copy to read. Since then I have recommended this book to almost anyone who would ask me for a book recommendation. I also noticed that this is one of the highly rated and most recommended books in many blog posts and forums on platforms like Medium and Substack. This book is the author's true life experience from the most difficult chapter in his life. This book does not fall in the category of business or leadership or fiction. Though it is biographical, it is a portion of the author's life.  The author wrote this book while in the concentration camps during World War II. While we all have ups and downs in life, and I have faced some serious hardships myself, nothing compares to the author's experience in this book. He wrote this for his own journaling and hid it while in the camps, most of it was destroyed and he h...

I have run around 100 long distances races in the past decade (I need to count all my races one of these days). Definitely over 50 races that are marathon distance or more (over 26.2 miles, varying from 50k to 160 miles). I have run the Chicago marathon since every year since 2012 (except the Covid year).  I used to follow the Hal Higdon's marathon plan when I started training for marathons. If you were a novice like me, you may have read his book or followed his free online training plans.  Hal had various plans for novice, intermediate and advanced level runners. These training plans are from Hal's experience in coaching thousands of runners and running an online forum (remember LMS or ListServ?!).  While they appeared to be customized for runners, they were basic and old school. You can get through a marathon if you follow the plan. Tens of thousands of runners have achieved their running goals through these plans. Hal Higdon's Book What was my plan?  I stoppe...