Forceful and pungent in its treatment of conventional orthodoxies—a solid starting point for readers thinking about building...
Legendary startup icon and venture capitalist Thiel and Masters reveal how they succeed with startups and why business school graduates most often do not.
Known as a co-founder of Paypal and early investor in Facebook and SpaceX, billionaire Thiel and his former student, Masters, are not offering tips on becoming superrich. Surprisingly, they are contemptuous of finance, which they call “the only way to make money when you have no idea how to create wealth.” They offer an older model of business based on the potential earnings foreseeable as a by-product of the transformations associated with leaps in technology into unserved spaces in human activity. Paypal and Facebook are good examples. The authors distinguish their own thinking and methods from the orthodoxies of the financial and business communities. Lively and often acerbic, Thiel and Masters leave many of today's business shibboleths trashed along the way. They are unabashed proponents of monopoly to control and secure profit for reinvestment, and they assert, agreeing with thinkers like Walter Lippmann, that “[c]apitalism is premised on the accumulation of capital, but under perfect competition all profits get competed away.” In their view, monopoly is how technological innovators successfully change the rules with order-of-magnitude improvements instead of incremental advances. Thiel and Masters provide rules of thumb and case studies drawn from experiences, all bound up with their radically different business methods and practices. Their views on viral marketing and the importance of sales will be of interest to aspiring entrepreneurs, as will their dismissal of current ideas of market and technological disruption. They don’t hide their dislike of the use of stock options as incentives for business leadership.
Forceful and pungent in its treatment of conventional orthodoxies—a solid starting point for readers thinking about building a business.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8041-3929-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Crown Business
Review Posted Online: Aug. 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2014
A random walk through the entrepreneurial outskirts of postindustrial commerce and show biz with a tour guide whose spiel has a nasty edge to it. Drawing on stories he has reported as a CBS TV correspondent, Geist (Little League Confidential, 1992, etc.) offers a discontinuous series of short takes on offbeat enterprises that have yielded the venturesome Americans who launched or embraced them modest amounts of fame and fortune. Cases in point range from the leading breeder of racing pigs through the inventor of the car- crushing leviathans known as monster trucks and Florida's top vendor of recycled golf balls to the two struggling illustrators who created Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Covered as well are the proprietors of nail-care salons, traffic-safety schools, and the seemingly endless parade of lurid talk shows on daytime television, plus the resourceful aerospace engineer who first thought of blasting bullet holes in wearing apparel as a lucrative fashion statement. In most instances, unfortunately, the author goes beyond poking gentle fun at his subjects and their antics; indeed, he invariably holds them up to gratuitously savage ridicule. Nor can Geist resist any opportunity to show what a clever fellow he is, even when a straightforward account of junk entertainment like ``American Gladiators'' could speak for itself. All too often the effect is akin to the tedious pall cast by a stand-up comic who, bedazzled by his own wit, can't bear to leave the stage. While the author closes with backhanded homage to Judge Roy Hofheinz (builder of Houston's pace-setting Astrodome), a start-to-finish audit of his other vignettes reveals that they reach no particularly startling conclusions about the latter-day US or any other substantive matter. Sporadically amusing but wholly dispensable.
Pub Date: Nov. 9, 1994
ISBN: 0-399-13883-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1994
A timely, comprehensive, and often interesting argument that the most pressing issue the Middle East faces is not land and borders but rather the supply and distribution of the region's water. A soil scientist with extensive consulting experience throughout the world, Hillel (Plant and Soil Science/Univ. of Massachusetts, Amherst; Out of the Earth, 1990) reveals how, in one of the world's most strategic and parched areas, ecological considerations, particularly concerning water supplies, may influence geopolitics as much as summit meetings, police forces, and arms build-ups. Hillel focuses on the region's four great rivers: the Nile, the Tigris, the Euphrates, and the Jordan. He shows how a 1967 dispute between Israel and Syria over water rights was a contributing cause to the Six-Day War; how Iraq and Syria nearly came to blows with Turkey in 1990 over distribution of water from the Euphrates; and how there has been considerable tension between Jordan and Saudi Arabia over an aquifer (a water-bearing layer of permeable rock and a rare geological feature in the arid Middle East) from which both desert kingdoms draw. Hillel also suggests ways that nations can avoid disputes through intercountry and regional agreements, and he proposes various means of increasing water supplies and assuring effective use—e.g., desalination, cloud seeding, drip irrigation, and improved transmission (pipeline leakage wastes fully half the water intended for some Middle Eastern cities). This is an impressively interdisciplinary study that combines insights from geology, archaeology, etymology, biblical and other ancient Near East studies, modern history, soil science, agronomy, ecology, and contemporary political analysis. At times, Hillel floods the reader with highly technical data that will interest only hydrologists or other specialists. Generally, however, this is a clearly written, often colorful, accessible, and useful work of regional studies.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-19-508068-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1994
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