

A Truck Full of Money
This book explores what happens after a successful entrepreneur sells his business. Award winning author Tracy Kidder (Mountains Beyond Mountains) chronicles the exploits of entrepreneur Paul English from his childhood through the sale of his business Kayak.com to Priceline and beyond.
Some of the lesser known practical issues of success are explored. For example, how do you give away millions of dollars? There is no shortage of people who want it. But how do you decide who gets it?

PayPal, Tesla, SpaceX, and Solar City all have one thing in common: Elon Musk. The first son of Silicon Valley has been called the “real Iron Man”, but his journey has not been easy. He had a very difficult childhood, and his life has been plagued with herculean stress. Elon remains one of the few Silicon Valley darlings to put his own money where his mouth is–as well as other people’s money, of course.
Will Elon be able to hold it all together? I think so.
Business partners do not typically sit around a campfire holding hands and singing Kumbaya. The story of Twitter’s founders is a perfect example of how partnerships fall apart, and it is full of drama. Founder Noah Glass was ousted at the very beginning of the Twitter’s incubus. Evan Williams, who initially underwrote the venture, took the CEO position away from Jack Dorsey, only to have Jack and the board remove Evan and re-appoint Jack as CEO within a few years. Without a solid business model, Twitter’s hardest challenges may be yet to come.




Compaq was the quintessential fairy tale venture capital story in which a group of young engineers quit their jobs at Texas Instruments to form a new technology company around a novel idea.
We take it for granted now that we can purchase software that will run on any machine, but before industry computer standards, software had to be designed for each type of computer. These entrepreneurs reverse engineered the IBM personal computers so all IBM software would run on portable Compaq computers with backward compatibility to older models. Compaq took on IBM and won by forming an industry coalition with other computer manufacturers and Microsoft to develop the industry standards for personal computer development.
Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike
Phil Knight’s autobiography details his career from his first trip to Japan to purchase shoes for resale in America up through his retirement from Nike several decades later. The story is plagued with terrible business and legal decisions that almost destroyed the company several times. From litigation to accounting scandals, it is hard to believe that Nike has achieved its success. Phil Knight definitely gets modesty points for owning up to his mistakes and not trying to make himself look good.

The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon
The Amazon.com story is one of iteration, learning, and improvement. What appears to be an overnight success was actually a 20-year journey with many, many failures along the way. This book makes you realize that the majority of the experiments that Amazon has tried did not work, but it takes lots of failure and experimentation to figure out what does work.
Interestingly, Amazon has reached monumental size while only generating marginal profits over the past several decades. Bezos has masterfully communicated a long-term view that is disintegrated from the pressure of quarterly earnings calls.