I’ve read a bunch of books over the past year and a half.  Here are my top 30 by topic.  I read a bunch more that in my opinion aren’t worth mentioning.

Also, I did around a thousand lessons at codeacademy.com … It’s fantastic at teaching you the basics of coding but it doesn’t stick.  Don’t expect to walk away from it knowing how to build anything.

Start Ups/Venture Capital

Rework by Jason Fried

This was probably my favorite book of them all.  37 Signals guys have a fantastically anti-tech mentality … unlike most in tech, they favor growing slow, never taking investor money, focusing on profitability, delivering simple products to markets that aren’t going anywhere … it’s brilliant.  Read it.  They also have a bunch of great video content on their website.  I blogged about it.

Start Small, Stay Small:  A Developers Guide to Launching a Start Up by Rob Walling

Really good at explaining all of the things you should think about when starting a web business … emphasizes on how much more it is than just a website.

Venture Deals by Feld/Mendelson/Costolo

This book is fantastic if you’re curious about how the VC world works, what all of these rounds of financing mean, and what are the motivating factors for all of the parties involved.

The E-Myth Revisted by Michael E. Gerber

Read this if you’re thinking of starting a business because you like doing something and you think you’d like to do it as a career.  Point is this – the fact that you like baking cakes DOES NOT mean that you should open a bakery.  They are two very different things.

http://www.forentrepreneurs.com/saas-metrics/

This post on metrics of a SaaS business is absolutely fantastic.  Highly recommend it to anyone who is thinking about starting a subscription business.

Management/Organizational Culture

Principles by Ray Dalio

I’ve read SO many books on organizational culture, how important and productive it is to have a healthy culture, and examples of companies that have great cultures.  This is the first framework I’ve seen for actually implementing a great culture.  It’s extreme, but I really enjoyed it.  Short read.

Great by Choice by Jim Collins

Exhaustive study of organizations over 10 years, what made the great ones great.  They basically prove that all organizations fell upon the same amount of luck, and it was characteristics of management that led to steady, compounding outperformance.  I wrote a blog post about it.

Pleased But Not Satisfied by D.L. Sokol

This is the guy that worked for Buffett that got in a bunch of trouble a few years back for buying Lubrizol stock right before Berkshire did.  Regardless, he has fantastic insights about management, planning, goal setting, and acquisitions/project management.

The Simple Truth by Alex Brennan-Martin

Excellent business book from the Brennan family, which owns a gourmet restaurant dynasty in the south.  Slow and steady wins the race.  Figure out what your simple truth is, get everyone on the same page to deliver it, and give them a little something extra when they think the experience is over.

Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh

Zappos went over the top and spared no expense pleasing their customers.  It worked for them.  Don’t think it would work for me, but I still liked the book.

Peopleware – Productive Projects and Teams by Tom Demarco

MUST READ if you are about to embark on a significant software development project.  Very interesting points and studies on deadlines, work environments, and relative productivity of development-type workers.  The best are 10x as good as the bad ones.  Only paid 30% more.  The key (according to this book) – they are allowed to turn off their phone and lock their office door, therefore can achieve “flow” on a daily basis.

Tribal Leadership by Dave Logan

This falls in the category of a book about culture that talks a bunch about what a healthy culture is, but doesn’t tell you much about how to build one.  Still some great reading – it will tell you how screwed you are at your current company culture-wise.

Marketing

All Marketers Tell Stories by Seth Godin

This book had a very profound impact on me as I was reading it.  Godin points out that your entire life, as someone who lives in a wealthy country, no matter who you are, is about the stories you buy in to.  What you buy, what you wear, what job you have, what you do with your free time, what religion you believe in, where you travel … the whole world turns nowadays because of marketing, whether you like it or not.  It’s short, and I’d recommend it to anyone.

The 100 Greatest Advertisements 1852 – 1958 by Julian Watkins

This was written in 1949 then updated in 1958 and dedicates a page per add with commentary.  Good copy never becomes dated.  Long form advertisements are not as popular as they once were, but you can get some excellent copywriting ideas from this book to be adapted to today.  People back then were dealing with all the same nonsense we are now that they needed solutions for.

www.marketingexperiments.com

These guys have hundreds of free webinars and studies on just about every facet of internet marketing.  I don’t think they necessarily have the answers … they are great for getting you thinking about purchase psychology and how the flow of the customer through the buying process should be online.

The 4-Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss

Good read, very interesting and non-traditional ideas about time vs money and what you should be working for.  However, he is a marketer, is trying to sell books, and makes things sound much easier than they actually are.

The Irresistible Offer by Mark Joyner

This book points out every element to creating a truly irresistible offer.  It’s basically like getting lectured about why infomercials, despite selling utter crap, make you want what you’re watching.  Short read, worth it.

Investing

Tap Dancing to Work by Carol Loomis

Every press clipping on Buffett, ever, put together by Carol Loomis, who edits his annual reports.  Great read.  I think it was probably better than the bios, as you get a couple really long bios along the way, but I didn’t read them, because I’d read so much of his other stuff. 325 pages.

The Tao of Warren Buffett by Mary Buffett

Buffett’s daughters talks about her favorite 150 or so quotes he ever said.  They are from personal experience and annual reports, mostly.

Warren Buffett’s Letters to Shareholders – 1977 – 2012

This seemed like a one-stop business school to me when I mowed through them one after another.  The amount of knowledge about different industries, securities, accounting, and general business acumen that he shares throughout the letters can’t be topped.

The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham

Buffett, and many of the other investment greats, studied under Graham.  Excellent book on value investing that will never be out of date.  The most recent version has commentary from right after the tech bubble burst in 2001.  Very, very good read.

Security Analysis by Benjamin Graham

This is a bit harder to get through than The Intelligent Investor … it’s thick, and reads like a text book.  I devoured it.  I wish I would have read it before my career on Wall St. rather than after it.

Margin of Safety by Seth Klarman

Klarman studied under Graham as well … he has identical principles.

USA Inc. by Mary Meeker

If you want to learn about how our absurdly bloated healthcare system will most certainly lead to the US selling our entire country out from under our own feet, read this book.  By the CBO’s own estimates entitlement spending + interest payments will exceed all government revenues by 2025 … in 15 years!  Healthcare is the entire problem.  It’s a disaster.

Fooling Some of the People All of the Time by David Einhorn

Fascinating book about the incompetence of the regulatory system, the lending abuse that occurred into the credit crisis, and how nothing has changed since the crisis.  Every interaction between Greenlight, the SEC, and the SBA for the entire eight years he was short the fraudulent Allied Capital.  A bit on the Lehman spectacle at the end, and how it was basically the exact same thing.

Biographies

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

Great book on the life and career of a one-of-a-kind tech entrepreneur.

Losing my Virginity by Richard Branson

Branson lives life on the razor’s edge.  Many of his decisions others would consider unsound.  He is a one-of-a-kind person and personality, and in my opinion, no one else could go about doing it quite like the way he has.  The book made me switch to Virgin Mobile.  I love how he just wrecks big incumbents in oligopic industries.

Miscellaneous

Bargaining for Advantage by G. Richard Shell

Awesome book on the science of negotiation, what type of negotiator you are, and how you should handle negotiations.

Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug

Super quick read, amazing book if you’re building a website … basically drives home that under no circumstance should your users have to think about anything at any point throughout the entire experience.  Or they will leave.

Over the past six months I’ve been reading every book I can possibly get my hands on related to starting an internet company.

Books about marketing, sales, software development, content creation, design, user interface, SEO, management, negotiation, biographies of successful tech entrepreneurs … you name it, I’ve probably read it.

Two weeks ago I was meeting the co-founders of EquaMetrics, Amir Tarighat and Chris Ivey, and one of the topics we were discussing was our values in building a business.

I was explaining to them my vision for Robly, when almost in sync they asked me, “Have you read ReWork by the 37 Signals guys?”  I said no, and they gave me one of the ten copies they had around the office to take home with me.

I read it that night in one sitting (it’s a quick, 90min max read).

What was inside was incredibly inspiring. Since I’ve started learning about the internet, there is so much about how people start and invest in companies in this space that makes no sense to me whatsoever … and these guys have had phenomenal success going about building a company in a completely “non-traditional” (for tech) way.

And it happens to be EXACTLY how I was hoping to build Robly.

This may get a little long, but I’m going to just make a list of all the pages I dog-eared.

Why Grow? 

The world glorifies large companies and pities the small ones.  However, size has nothing to do with the value of an institution, and with every expense you decide to take on, you’ll be taking on a new set of headaches.  Simple is far less stressful.

Outside Money Is Plan Z

I love this point and completely agree with it – we plan to keep Robly completely self-funded until we have come up with a customer acquisition model that is scalable at a fraction of our customers’ lifetime value.  Raising money to burn it then beg for more has never made any sense to me.

Start a Business, Not a Startup

“We’ll figure out how to profit in the future” isn’t reality, but it’s the mantra of many startups.  A business without a path to profit isn’t a business, it’s a hobby.

Building to Flip is Building to Flop

“What’s your exit strategy?” is both the worst and most universal question asked by seed investors.  Not only are the odds that it will actually get acquired completely horrendous (like 1/1000 or 1/10,000), but by building a company with the intention of getting acquired, you focus on the wrong things.

Also (and this is my favorite part), wtf are you going to do once you sell this business that you actually enjoy running?

Answer – be retired for six months and be back in the game, and when you get back in, the business you will be running probably won’t be as good as the first one.

If you manage to get a good thing going, don’t let it be the one that got away.

Less Mass

Avoid adding people, meetings, processes, fixed contracts … anything that locks you in to more complication than you currently have, at all costs.  Keep your life as simple as you can.

Be a Curator

You don’t make a great museum by putting all the art in the world into a single room.  That’s a warehouse.  What makes a museum great is the stuff that’s not on the walls.

Focus on What Won’t Change

Focusing on the next big thing is focusing on fashion instead of substance. The core of your business should be built around things that won’t change.

Interruption is the Enemy of Productivity

If you’re constantly staying late and working weekends, it’s not because there’s too much work to be done, it’s because you’re not getting enough done at work, and that’s because of interruptions.  Your day is broken up into a bunch of work moments, under siege by an addiction to communication.  It’s up to you to fight back.

Good Enough is Fine

Find a solution that delivers maximum efficiency with minimum effort, rather than flexing your intellectual muscles.

Quick Wins

Momentum fuels motivation, so focus on small victories every couple of weeks to generate entusiasm.

Go to Sleep

Forgoing sleep destroys your creativity, morale, and attitude.  However, people still develop a masochistic sense of honor about sleep deprivation.

Decommoditize Your Product

If you’re successful, people will try to copy what you do.  Make it impossible.  Make you part of your product or service… something that no one else can offer.

Underdo Your Competition

Solve simple problems and leave the hairy, difficult, nasty problems to the competition.

Don’t Confuse Enthusiasm With Priority

Enthusiasm for new ideas are not accurate indicators of their true worth.  Let your ideas cool off for a while before you invest time or resources in them.

Be At Home Good

Don’t just sell at the stores … make them love what’s inside the box once they get it home.

Out-teach Your Competition

Classic content marketing philosophy.

Drug Dealers Get It Right

They know their product is so good they’re willing to give a little away for free upfront.  They know you’ll be back for more – with money.

Marketing is not a Department

Marketing is something everyone in your company is doing 24/7/365.  Every interaction by every customer and perspective by every one of your employees … it’s the total sum of everything you do.

Hire When it Hurts

Don’t hire for pleasure, hire to kill pain, and always try to find a way around it.  When there is too much work to be done, when you can’t handle it anymore, and you notice the quality slipping.

Problems start when you have more people than you need.

Hire Managers of One

Managers of one are people who come up with their own goals and execute them.  They don’t need heavy direction.  They don’t need daily check ins.

The Best Are Everywhere

Geography doesn’t matter anymore.  Hire the best talent, no matter where it is.

Speed Changes Everything

Getting back to people quickly is the most important thing you can do when it comes to customer service.

And last but not least, Send Your People Home At 5

Workaholics often yield lousy execution (I’ve been reading this more and more).  You don’t need longer hours, you need better hours.

You shouldn’t expect the job to be someone’s entire life – at least not if you want to keep them around.

This blog post will likely be a sensitive topic for many of my Wall Street friends.

It will probably be dismissed as simple validation of the path that I’m on, bashing of my former industry, an excuse for why I couldn’t cut it anymore … or all of the above.

I came across a section of the marketing classic Positioning by Al Ries and Jack Trout that puts in to words exactly why I am doing what I’m doing professionally far more eloquently than I ever could.  I’ll try to summarize as well as I can.

Find A Horse To Ride

The First Horse to Ride is Your Company

Where is your company going?  Is your company going anywhere at all? Too many people have taken their good prospects and lock them into situations that are doomed for failure.  But failure gives us a second chance.

EVEN WORSE IS A COMPANY THAT HAS LESS THAN AVERAGE CHANCES FOR GROWTH.

(This is EXACTLY how I felt about being a capital allocator in an industry that is in the first inning of re-regulation and de-risking). 

PLACE YOUR BETS ON THE GROWTH INDUSTRIES.

‘Nuff said.

The Second Horse to Ride is Your Boss

While this admittedly doesn’t really apply since I’m now out on my own now, I did trade a boss who had some fantastic coattails for a business partner that I would bet my last dollar on … my brother, Anthony Robinson.

The Third Horse to Ride is a Friend

I’m 1000% doing this.  Thanks to all, and Josh Abramson most of all for getting this whole thing in motion.

The Fourth Horse To Ride is an Idea

One night before he died, Victor Hugo wrote in his diary, “Nothing, not all the armies of the world, can stop an idea whose time has come”.  That is a badass quote.

The Fifth Horse to Ride is Faith, and the Sixth Horse to Ride is Yourself

The author says believe in yourself like Ray Croc did, and while you can make it all by yourself, it’s really hard, so if you’re picking yourself as the horse to ride, you better be a thoroughbred.

My Key Takeaway …

Operating in contracting markets is swimming upstream.  Why not go where the pie is growing really, really fast?

It is becoming accepted by small businesses in America that bad customer reviews, in isolation, can have a severe negative impact on businesses of any kind.

The Wall Street Journal published an article today about the nature of bad reviews, the massive review sites, and “reputation management” consulting firms that have emerged to address this pain point, making such outrageous claims as “100% guaranteed elimination of bad reviews from yelp” (impossible, but bold guarantees are a very effective sales tactic).

Preventative Medicine – Collect Positive Reviews

The Wall Street Journal says businesses are expected to spend $700mm on tools to monitor customer opinions over the next 12 months, up 100% y-o-y.

As a result, “reputation management” consultants are popping up that promise to clean up bad reviews.

They can add fluff content to cram down bad reviews, but the fact of the matter is, there is a very inexpensive and automated way to insure that this will NEVER be an issue for you … by actively collecting positive reviews, using a platform like Robly.

Actively collecting real reviews will not only put a bad review in context … that bad review will actually enhance the credibility of your positive reviews.

Additionally, customers appreciate a publicly viewable response to a negative review amid many positive reviews.

There is absolutely no need to hire a consultant for thousands of dollars who promises to eliminate negative reviews, even though online reviews are the most important form of marketing.

Be preventative and avoid this problem altogether – look in to acquiring a way to automate collection and formation of a base of reviews with a platform like Robly.

One of the recent tangents I’ve gone on while trying to re-train by brain from trader to web entrepreneur has been diving deep into the fundamentals of effective copywriting.

I picked up The 100 Greatest Advertisements – 1852 – 1958: Who Wrote Them and What They Did off a link from copyblogger‘s copywriting tutorial, not actually noticing at the time that the advertisements were from 100 years ago.

I was a bit bummed when I saw the cover for the first time and realized the material was BEYOND utterly dated, until I opened to page one and saw this:

WANTED: VOLUNTEERS FOR THE SOUTH POLE

This ad was run in the london papers in 1900, and according to Mr. Shackleton, “It seemed as though all the men in Great Britain were determined to accompany me, the response was so overwhelming”.

My tone changed after reading that ad … and I realized that these were the ads that made it into the swipe files of the likes of Don Draper during the Golden Age of Advertising.

My second favorite ad from the book is Brown’s Job from 1920.  Read it now if you have 3 minutes.

Bone chilling.

I’ve been wanting to write a blog post about a book I picked up by Dan Ariely, a behavioral economics professor at Duke, called The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty.

This is the type of subject matter I think many people would find interesting but not necessarily interesting enough to read an entire book about.

I am personally interested in this subject matter because I love behavioral psychology … specifically, that in building a business you can put conditions in place that subconsciously manipulate people’s behavior and can passively encourage “doing the right thing” in many ways.

YOU ARE A LIAR

The book establishes early on that humans cheat, just about as much as they can get away with, but nothing that makes them look ridiculous.

From there, the book manipulates the participants of the study to see what circumstances causes them to cheat more or less, when compared to the baseline cheating levels initially established.

We’re not talking about the type of lying artist Shaggy was referring to in his 2001 hit “It Wasn’t Me” … we’re talking about eating a tomato out of the salad bar, moving a golf ball to get a better lie, fudging expense reports … small stuff.

A Bunch of People Lie By Just A Little Bit

In order to establish the baseline cheating level of human beings, participants were all given a series of 20 matrices and given five minutes to figure out which two rows add up to ten, paid 50c per right answer.

At the end of the test, there were two initial conditions:

1) Control Condition - five minutes runs out, you tell proctor how many matrices you solved, you get paid

2) Shredder Condition - the proctor tells you to first shred your sheet of matrices, then asks you to tell her how many matrices you correctly answered

Time and time again, shredders answered on average 6 out of 20, while control answered 4.  It wasn’t because of a few people cheating by a bunch, it was because of most people cheating by a little.

When the shredders were told that the average student answered 6 correct, the number of correct answers by the shredder condition elevated to 8 … suggesting that people will cheat, but only what is considered to be a reasonable amount.

A higher payout for correct answers DID NOT INCREASE CHEATING … when given $10 per correct answer, the shredder condition still only returned two answers higher than the control group.

A more upbeat conclusion the book came to was that people don’t actually cheat as much as they rationally should. 

Think about it in these terms – when given a chance to take $100 from your best friend’s pocket and not get caught, most people wouldn’t.

What Makes Someone Cheat Less?

The whole point of the book was not to establish that we are all liars … we already knew that.

The point was to find out once a baseline level of cheating was established, what you could do to manipulate people to cheat more or less.

Reminders - When the shredder condition was asked to spend two minutes trying to write down the 10 commandments (irrespective of their religion), cheating was eliminated

Pledges - When the school’s honor code was said to be applied to the shredder condition’s experiment, cheating was eliminated

Supervision - When A STRANGER was observing the entire process start-to-finish of the shredder condition’s work, cheating was eliminated

Signing At The Top of A Document - Two A/B tests were done signing a document at the top vs the bottom, one with 20k applicants about milage driven on an insurance form, the other with expense reports.

The drivers who signed at the top drove 2,400 miles less (10%), with expense for travel reimbursement, sign-at-the-bottom were an average of $9.82, sign at the the top were $5.27.

So … What Will Make Someone Cheat More?

Non-Monetary things - people are more likely to steal coke from a fridge than the equivalent value of the coke in money

Conflicts of Interest - a dentist is more likely to give expensive and unnecessary treatment to a patient if he has just bought an expensive machine

One Immoral Act - once someone has cheated a little, they tend to just keep cheating, since they’ve already done the wrong thing.  He did a very interesting experiment with fake Chloe sunglasses … people who were told they were wearing fake sunglasses (they were real) cheated more than those who were told they were wearing real sunglasses

Creativity - People who identified themselves as creative in a personality test cheated more on average

Watching Others Behave Dishonestly

A Culture That Gives Examples of Dishonesty

Collaboration - When cheating can benefit two parties, it escalates

You Lie To Yourself

I loved the experiment in which students were given the opportunity to cheat on a math test,  and cheated.

1) Control Condition - asked to predict how they would do on the next test

2) Certificate Condition - given a diploma reminding them of how well they did on the test, even though it was a false achievement

The certificate group guessed that they would score higher on the test than the control group … even when an additional layer was added to the experiment where they were financially compensated for guessing the right number of questions they would answer!

Takeaway – people can easily be fooled into thinking they are more able then they actually are.

In Conclusion, A Graphic About Golf

Everyone cheats at golf (obviously).  Here are the results of a 12k golfer survey – it’s hysterical, and represents perfectly all of the conclusions this book came to.

If you made it this far, I’m shocked.  You might be as curious about the subject matter as I am.  If that’s the case, pick up the book!

Two Mondays ago, I wrote a blog post about purchasing facebook stock.

That day CNBC ran a headline stating facebook would disappear in 5 to 8 years, after the stock had sold off 40% from its post IPO highs.

I have always loved trading sentiment … while admittedly a highly speculative move, sentiment seemed to be negative enough both in the press and anecdotally among friends in the investing community that I deemed it to be worth a shot from the long side.

FB has rallied 18% since the June 4 close – as I write it just touched $32.  Ringing the register.

That was the pop I was looking for.

I just finished a book recommended to me by Josh Abramson called Great By Choice by Jim Collins and Morton T. Hansen.

They spent 9 YEARS putting together case studies on companies they called 10X-ers … companies that weren’t merely successful or got by, but outperformed their industries by at least 10X from 1972 – 2002.  They published the book in 2011.

They looked at 14 organizations across 7 different industries, a 1911 expedition to antartica, and a basketball team.  The 10X-ers are below:

They proved that the 10X-ers were NOT:

• More creative
• More visionary
• More charismatic
• More ambitious
• More blessed by luck
• More risk seeking
• More heroic
• More prone to making big, bold moves

The 10X-ers WERE:

• Fanatically disciplined - growing consistently, not erratically … they used a metaphor of a 20 mile march … good or bad, rain or shine, these companies would do what it took to march exactly 20 miles per day (metaphorically), no more no less
• Empirically Creative  – the metaphor here was first bullets, then cannonballs.  If you are at sea and a hostile ship is bearing down on you, rather than taking all your gunpowder and firing a cannon ball at it and very likely missing, fire tiny bullets, see where they land, calibrate the shots as you go, then as you are confident the next shot will hit, fire a cannonball.
• Productively Paranoid - the metaphor was an antarctic expedition that actually happened, where one party survived and discovered the south pole, while the other froze to death.  The survivor, Roald Amundsen, in years before the journey, prepared with intensity for the journey by living with eskimos observing how they behaved/dressed/moved/etc in arctic environments, by experimenting with his body to see what unknown sources of energy he could find.  The other was totally unprepared.  They experienced equal ratio of good/bad weather days, equal conditions, one made it, one did not.
• A Leader With “Level 5″ Ambition - This is a coined term from the authors’ last book Good to Great describing leadership with a powerful mixture of personal humility plus professional will.

What was strange to read due to their data set (1972-2002) was that Microsoft was the 10X-er and Apple was the lame duck … in their defense, they did recognize that Steve Jobs got in there and turned the whole thing around.

It was a fascinating book backed by a ton of hard data … I’d encourage anyone who is running or building a business to read it.

THIS ARTICLE screams buy FB stock to me.

From my experience trading in what were many cases really nasty fundamental stories/price action, when you start seeing these types of articles with a stock down 40% FROM ITS HIGHS OF TWO FRIDAYS AGO, generally speaking it’s time to buy some.

I bought half a position at 27.34.  We’ll see how it does.  I want to grow it to a 100% position down another 20pct, will add bits and pieces as we move long.

I was quite surprised to run across a hard sell on customer reviews while reading SEO for 2012 by Sean Odom and Lynell Allison.

Here’s what they had to say:

“If you break it down, there are four types of businesses on the web:

• Businesses that get most of their business from referrals and could care less about reviews
• Businesses that get most of their business from referrals, get online reviews and think that nobody reads them or even cares about them
• Businesses that think reviews are important and work hard to get as many as possible
• Businesses that try to get reviews and don’t get very many

The types that rely heavily on referrals and ignore reviews don’t realize that some time in the next year or two someone is going to write something about them online and there is a very good chance it’s going to be negative … if the first thing that shows up for your brand name or your website’s domain name is negative, you are potentially in a very bad spot.”

Let’s not dress this up.  If something bad comes up when someone searches for your business, YOU ARE SCREWED.

Why?

According to a survey done by BIGresearch, 92% of US adults do online research before making an offline purchase.

Thankfully, there is a very easy way to make sure this is never an issue.

Actively solicit customer reviews, and use a platform that facilitates this and makes it consume as little time as possible.

Negative comments will not only become unnoticed and irrelevant, they will actually enhance the credibility of your positive reviews.

So go forth and get reviews … and steer clear of the gimp!!!