A page-turning, lesson-rich account of how—and how not—to build a business empire.
An irreverent memoir by the founder of GrubHub.
A scrappy rural Georgian who came to the big city as a whiz-kid coder, Evans is a technolibertarian without the right-wing baggage. One takes him at his word that a job must reward the soul as well as wallet, and one feels for his youthful captivity working in one soulless enterprise after another. It was in such a cubicle farm that he cooked up the idea of GrubHub, a natural outgrowth of his longtime familiarity with the food-delivery business: “Being raised the youngest, feral child of a single mom, we were on a first name basis with the Domino’s driver.” Coming up with the name of the company was one hurdle fairly easily solved in brainstorming. Figuring out how to make the thing work was quite another, with all sorts of hidden-trap challenges: How to recruit restaurants for his delivery service? How to charge for it? Evans isn’t much for metrics and certainly not for business plans—as he counsels, defying the business-school received wisdom, “Just start. Make the thing. Sell a customer. Start.” The author is full of practical advice, including a rueful observation about the drawbacks of his hard-charging nature, as when he tried to acquire a competitor by ridiculing him. It was a definite nonstarter that led him to conclude, “Running a business is dangerous business.” There are even some funny moments, such as the author’s observations on the pecking order of the Goldman Sachs team that came to pitch him on running an IPO. Getting a multibillion-dollar business off the ground, Evans observes, was satisfying but only a temporary plug for his hunger—his “hanger”—to isolate a problem or need and then fix it with the power of the market, which has launched him on his latest adventure.
A page-turning, lesson-rich account of how—and how not—to build a business empire.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-306-92553-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Legacy Lit/Hachette
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2022
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.
A decidedly warts-and-all portrait of the man many consider to be America’s greatest writer.
It makes sense that distinguished biographer Chernow (Washington: A Life and Alexander Hamilton) has followed up his life of Ulysses S. Grant with one of Mark Twain: Twain, after all, pulled Grant out of near bankruptcy by publishing the ex-president’s Civil War memoir under extremely favorable royalty terms. The act reflected Twain’s inborn generosity and his near pathological fear of poverty, the prime mover for the constant activity that characterized the author’s life. As Chernow writes, Twain was “a protean figure who played the role of printer, pilot, miner, journalist, novelist, platform artist, toastmaster, publisher, art patron, pundit, polemicist, inventor, crusader, investor, and maverick.” He was also slippery: Twain left his beloved Mississippi River for the Nevada gold fields as a deserter from the Confederate militia, moved farther west to California to avoid being jailed for feuding, took up his pseudonym to stay a step ahead of anyone looking for Samuel Clemens, especially creditors. Twain’s flaws were many in his own day. Problematic in our own time is a casual racism that faded as he grew older (charting that “evolution in matters of racial tolerance” is one of the great strengths of Chernow’s book). Harder to explain away is Twain’s well-known but discomfiting attraction to adolescent and even preadolescent girls, recruiting “angel-fish” to keep him company and angrily declaring when asked, “It isn’t the public’s affair.” While Twain emerges from Chernow’s pages as the masterful—if sometimes wrathful and vengeful—writer that he is now widely recognized to be, he had other complexities, among them a certain gullibility as a businessman that kept that much-feared poverty often close to his door, as well as an overarchingly gloomy view of the human condition that seemed incongruous with his reputation, then and now, as a humanist.
Essential reading for any Twain buff and student of American literature.Pub Date: May 13, 2025
ISBN: 9780525561729
Page Count: 1200
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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