The best Business Technology Innovation eBooks: Reddit reviews

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

This book has a chapter about Eric and the struggles he went through to get it developed. It's a great read!

IIRC the real hero of the story was his girlfriend who totally supported them both the entire period of several years while he obsessively tweaked and added new features with no clear end in sight. She worked two jobs to keep them afloat while he stayed in the house working on the game day in day out with no other steady income. It sounds like they're still together so I'm sure she's thrilled that she trusted him to pull it off now that all that hard, obsessive work has made him worth $34 million.

Beyond the usual stuff regarding Belt and Road, this is a strategic move by China on multiple accounts.

First, I highly recommend reading AI Superpower by Lee Kaifu. Look past the conspiratorial-esque title and focus on the main points that Lee makes:

• The future of an AI dominated economy will largely be built on a mountain of data. China, through sheer numbers alone, has emerged as the Saudi Arabia of data.
• China's dominance in all things data revolves around building out a robust O2O ecosystem: Online-to-Offline is a huge part of the Chinese internet, and much of that is built off the fact that most of China's data comes from mobile phones that provide its tech giants like Tencent, Baidu, and Alibaba with unprecedented amount of data that allow their analytic AI to do things that their western counterparts can't.
• China's entrepreneurial class has acquired an edge through its heavy copying: Contrary to what is normally perceived, the pervasive amount of copying in the Chinese startup scene has bred an entire generation of entrepreneurs who not only must ruthlessly copy any and all new features from their competitors but simultaneously make themselves distinctive from their competitors. This means pushing out more features through an iterative process that relies less on innovation and more on speedy results.

The article touched on the fact that India's vast population skews younger and are also more likely to make the technological leap onto mobile-first. With China being the leader in IoT (internet of things), opening a way for Indian users to provide Chinese tech giants with more data will only further cement China's position as a leader in the coming AI economy.

I've been reading and enjoying Kai-Fu Lee's punchy new book on AI and geopolitics, AI Superpowers. In essence, the book claims that China is likely to rapidly overtake the US in AI technology in the next decade.

In short, the author claims that tech-dominance in the machine learning age is a function of (1) access to lots of good data, (2) an aggressive and smart entrepreneurial class, (3) brilliant researchers, and (4), political will. It's hard to deny that - pending a new Manhattan project for AI - China owns the US in (1) and (4). China and the US are close on (2), but Lee points to China's more cutthroat markets as giving it an edge. Finally, while the US dominates in (3) for now, Lee claims that the recent advances of ML as laid down by Hinton et al. will take decades to implement, meaning that the field belongs to tinkerers rather than geniuses (for now).

I've not finished yet, but my only qualm is that the US might have political stability in its favour, for now. For all the problems America faces, they at least have a track record of muddling through relevantly similar scenarios, whereas we've yet to see what happens in China in the wake of, e.g., major growth slowdowns.

Anyway, highly recommended to all, and interested in case anyone is reading along and has thoughts. The most astonishing fact presented so far to my mind was this: "In terms of funding, Google dwarfs even its own government: US federal funding for math and and computer science research amounts to less than half of Google's own R&D budget."

Almost halfway trough "The Infinite Machine". Great book ...a must read for every ETH fan.

Get this book !!

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07X8HS2WC/ref=cm_sw_r_tw_dp_x_48QdFb4WVNMKG

(not an aff.. link)

It is interesting to read about Ensemble Studios' experience as a Microsoft Developer in Blood, Sweat, and Pixels, I reccomend it if you are interested in the topic.

There's a great chapter on Dragon Age Inquisition in "Blood, Sweat and Pixels" that covers this a bit. Probably sources from what you're talking about.

You need to do customer development, check out books like "The Mom Test" and "Lean Customer Development". But before your prospective customers will want to talk to you you need to get some credibility. Try to create some content that solves problems that they are aware of, then you'll be able to talk with them.

There's quite a few details you're missing. There's also nuance with mergers and acquisitions. They're not the same.

I read this book a few years back, which was really interesting.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00KVI76ZS/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_glt_9FFT0N90169W1V3VGEKK

All the cofounders put a lot of work into getting it off the ground - that includes musk.

It's not like PayPal was a successful business before the merger.

You might try The Infinite Machine

https://www.amazon.com/Infinite-Machine-Crypto-hackers-Building-Internet-ebook/dp/B07X8HS2WC

For a grisly dive into what happened to BTC itself long ago-

https://www.removeddit.com/r/BitcoinMarkets/comments/6rxw7k/informative_btc_vs_bch_articles/

He has written a book about game development, and it is a damn good book: https://www.amazon.com/Blood-Sweat-Pixels-Triumphant-Turbulent-ebook/dp/B01NAKSWW1/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1VIU92YP70RVK&dchild=1&keywords=blood+tear+and+pixels&qid=1610889119&sprefix=blood+tears+pi%2Caps%2C243&sr=8-1

That's not quite the case. I would recommend you give "Blood, Sweat, and Pixels" a read, it has a chapter on Destiny and if that book is to be believed then it was mostly just a mess of Bungie's own making.

Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future: Amazon

Keep it simple as you can. My suggestion is star to talk with your customer following the The Mom Test rules.

The Mom Test in a nutshell is:

• Talk with your customers about their life instead of your idea
• Ask them about specifics in the past instead of generics or opinions about the future
• Talk less and listen more

It’s called The Mom Test because it leads to questions that even your mom can’t lie to you about.

Book some videocalls with 5-10 of your customers and ask them about how they use your product in their life or if they use it for a specific use case ask questions around the use case. For example if the use case is: saving money for my next vacations, some questions could be:

• How was you last vacations?
• How did you decide where to go?
• Did you define a budget for it?
• Did you saving for it?
• How did you saving for it?
• What were the implications of that?

While you are talking with them you star to notice patterns and identify needs or pains, it is a good staring point to level up your product discovery to specific topics.

Product discovery is apply a lot of differents technies and tools to discover how to build the right product, but in the end all of them look to give you an undestanding of your customer, so talk with them is the basic for that.

IMO focus on the supply side first is great. To approach the sellers I would choose 1 or 2 platforms as sources of possible users, maybe FB Marketplace and Heyauto.

Then I would search for around 100 sellers on the platforms to contact them. For example, I would contact sellers by FB Messenger with the excuse of learning more about the business of selling used cars with a cold message like this: Hey Bob, i have seen you have a lot of expertise in selling used car and I want to learn more about it for my [insert any excuse here(podcast, homework, etc)]. Could we chat a few minutes about it?

You will need to reach 100 sellers to get 25 calls (a great conversion rate) and try not to sell anything, remember your goal is learn.

Learn more about the types of questions you should ask in the book, The Mom Test

People wonder why Elon is so hell-bent on acquiring Twitter. He told us during the shareholder meeting that it would advance his plans by 3 years.

This is consistent with what is known about how he calculates things:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00KVI76ZS/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i0

Page 188:

"Sometimes he [Elon] wouldn't let you buy a part for $2,000 because he expected you to find it cheaper or invent something cheaper. Other times, he wouldn't flinch at renting a plane for $90,000 to get something to Kwaj [Island] because it saved an entire workday, so it was worth it. He would place this urgency that he expected the revenue in 10 years to be 10 million dollars a day, and that every day we were slower to achieve our goals was a day of missing out on that money." - Kevin Brogan, early SpaceX Employee

If you’re technical:

https://medium.com/chainrift-research/mastering-ethereum-by-andreas-antonopoulos-and-gavin-wood-7d83dc88482f

If you’re after the story and history:

https://www.amazon.com/Infinite-Machine-Crypto-hackers-Building-Internet-ebook/dp/B07X8HS2WC

Unless you start digging through PC gamer archives or something like that, I don't think there's going to be much out there. There wasn't that kind of journalism back then.

Not BG related, but a good book in that area: Blood, Sweat, and Pixels

The Infinite Machine

Speaking about your business/niche specifically, you will learn more through experience than you ever will through reading or watching YouTube or taking online courses.

That said, there are a lot of skills you need as a business owner that don't have anything to do with the product or service you are selling. The one thing most new entrepreneurs don't realize is that you won't actually be spending all that much of your time doing the technical aspects of your business - or at least you shouldn't. As a business owner you also have to do the legal parts (setting up the business entity, getting insurance, navigating hiring/firing employees, etc), financial parts (setting up bank accounts, bookkeeping, reviewing financial reports, etc), advertising & marketing, customer service, even cleaning the toilets.

If you really want to change your mindset and start thinking more like an entrepreneur and less like an employee, read The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber. On the financial side of things, read Financial Intelligence for Entrepreneurs.

Without knowing more about what type of business you want to start, I really can't offer much more advice than just get started.

I really enjoyed the book Traction by DuckDuckGo founder Gabriel Weinberg. He identified 19 traction (marketing) channel strategies, and a methodology for identifying the most promising channel for your company. Mainly startup focus.

https://www.amazon.com/Traction-Startup-Achieve-Explosive-Customer-ebook/dp/B00TY3ZOMS

I can give you some tips to start. :)
From an idea to a viable business, you need to focus on refining your idea with good feedback. Asking the right question is key. If you read "The Mom Test" you will know what I'm talking about.
Your job, in the beginning, should be generating good conversation and identifying your ideal customers. This way you have enough information to help you refine your idea into something that people want/need.

If you are worried about people copying your idea which seems to be an issue I see a lot. Make your product unique to your own experience/expertise or give yourself a time frame (ex. 3 months) so you can move fast with a plan in place.

Please let me know if this is helpful.

I read this one which is considered to be the biography of Elon right now. What did I say that was wrong?

>their ability keep up pretense is waning ironically due to globalized nature of innovation and technology.

oh idk about that. Think it'll pick up pace dramatically in this direction.

Still exciting times ahead. I just hope the supply chain holds. Cause the only thing edible near me that isn't in a supermarket is the sheep at the petting zoo

Its not clear to me if you just want to do an experiment and have fun or you really want to make a successfull app/business.

If it is the latter, Eric Ries "Lean Startup" was an eye opening for me and the development of my product. Stop what you are doing and go to read that book first, or at least watch some of his talks.

>Straubel was already a cto before joining tsla

Which only proves my point further. Mr. Straubel was at Rosen Motors, a hybrid vehicle company, in 2002, just 4 years after college (according to chapter 7 of Ashlee Vance's biography of Elon Musk). He was hired as CTO just 4 years out of undergrad.

A person's capabilities and judgment are what matters, not their age or seniority.

AI SuperPowers is a good book to look at:

AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order, Lee, Kai-Fu, eBook - Amazon.com

Check out Lean Startup

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004J4XGN6/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

Super helpful book that breaks it down. I think you can get it for free on Academia.

I am still learning the promotion end myself. For starters I am trying to build a collection of listeners who become advocates. That means getting them involved. Asking their opinions. Shouting them out. Thanking them for listening. I try to use social media to create content for people - not just to ask them to listen. I primarily use Facebook, my show has it's own page, and Twitter.

Facebook is more intimate. I ask people their thoughts on the different shows and films that are out there. I engage them, etc. I use Twitter to try to build relationships with fellow podcasters and potential fans. I like to comment on and promote other peoples' shows -- stuff like that. You really have to give a lot, and you have to be genuine. People know if you're a snake trying to just promote yourself.

There is a book called, Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook amazon link it was totally worth the time to read. It explains a lot of the mistakes that people make with social media.

As for the tech-side of things --- Adobe Audition. It sucks because it isn't cheap, but it is incredible and super intuitive. I actually pay monthly for it, but will just buy it straight out soon.

When I was on a Mac I used Garage Band, and then on PC I used Audacity. Audacity isn't bad at all - but I decided to just make the move early to Audition.

THANKS for the compliment BTW. Hope you enjoyed the show.

Thanks! I'll check it out.

Right now the business is going alright. It's been a side hussle and brings in around 3-5k a month, but only leaves me a paycheck of around 750-1,250/month.

Honestly the only thing holding us back is production size and logistics. Thing is I need to buy a bigger local and get it certified, which costs more mullah that I could possibly save in the short term. . .

Here is the book in Amazon for future reference

You can use Facebook Groups or an appropriate subreddit.

But before you start interviewing, I recommend you read The Mom Test: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01H4G2J1U/ref=pe_385040_118058080_TE_M1DP

It's a great read that will help you ask the right questions. Hope this helps.