The author Jason Calacanis seems to be a kind of “celebrity Angel Investor” in Silicon Valley, most famous for being on of the original Angel Investors of Uber. He started out as a blogger, founded some companies and then decided to become an early stage Angel Investor.
Who doesn’t like to own a stock which increases by a factor of 100 ? The introduction of the book promises that it will tell the reader all he/she needs to know about 100 baggers and that anyone can invest in them.
Ben Horowitz these days is known best as co-founder of Venture Capital firm A16Z or Andreessen & Horowitz. He is also famous for being an early employee of Netscape and founder of a company called Loudcloud and then Opsware which he sold to HP for 1.6 bn USD.
Almost a year ago, I reviewed the excellent book “Digital Gold” which covered the story of Bitcoin from its beginnings.
Back then I said the following:
I have absolutely no clue what a fair price of a Bitcoin might be. But I believe that in order to have value it has to be widely used and not just to speculate on an increase in value. Personally I would never “invest” in Bitcoin as for me, an investment needs to produce cashflows.
Well, this was (so far) one of my weaker calls. Back then in September 2016, Bitcoin traded slightly below 600 USD, at the time of writing, the price has went up almost 8 fold to 4500 USD per Bitcoin (at the time of writing).
Book review: Attack of the 50 foot Blockchain
Ted Seides, the author of this book came to some fame because of his 2007 bet with W. Buffett where he claimed that he could pick 5 (hedge) fund-of-fund managers which would outperform the S&P 500 over the next 10 years. He already admitted to have lost before the 10 years end.
“Great by Choice” seems to be the most recent book (2011) from management “guru” Jim Collins. Similar to “Built to last” he focuses on companies that have achieved great success. However in “Great by Choice” he includes a certain twist: He looks at 8 pairs of competing companies which more or less had the same starting point, but where one of them became super successful and the other not.
He then tries to work out why the successful ones were successful. The pairs are as follows:
Flight Centre, the Australian based travel company is a company which is on 2 to do lists of mine: The Australian list as well the travel series list. By chance I discovered that there is a book about Flight Centre. I decided to kick-off the analysis with this book review as part 1 of a Flight Centre analysis.
The book covers the complete story of Flight Centre and its founders from the start in 1973 until 2013 and was written by an “insider”, a former employee who worked as head of the UK operations.
The author of the book is Nils Kröner, a German who among others worked as consultant at McKinsey, at Barclays and for AKO capital before he became professor.
The book has been written following the big financial crisis and starts with a review about what went wrong in general.
Then he introduces the “7 deadly sins of banking” that contributed in his opinion to the banking crisis which are:
As I currently own a 5% poisiton in (special situation) Biotech company Actelion, I thought it makes sense trying to learn at least a little bit about Biotech.
By chance I came across the book “Genentech – The Beginnings of Biotech” which recounts the history of Genetech from the very early beginnings in the 1970s until the company went public in October 1980.
“A man for all markets” was a book I was eagerly waiting for. Although not as famous as other financial gurus like George Sorros or Warren Buffett, Ed Thorp in my opinion beats most of them when it comes to actual achievements. Among other things he
value and opportunity 