Of considerable interest to the entrepreneurially minded, with caveats.
You, too, can be ultrawealthy—if you can take your startup from zero to a billion in 60 seconds flat.
Building on a popular course at Stanford, tech-investment guru Hoffman, who co-founded LinkedIn, and entrepreneur Yeh (co-authors: The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age, 2014) note that it’s not enough to have a good idea or be first to market; a business must scale to attain maximum global market share in the just-in-time, flash-fast atmosphere of the internet. Airbnb is a great idea, for example, but what makes it really work is the ubiquity of the enterprise, so that “each additional Airbnb host makes the service a tiny bit more valuable for every Airbnb guest and vice versa.” Attaining success at “blitzscaling”—a somewhat unfortunate term, the authors allow, given the connotations of “blitzkrieg”—can involve forgetting everything that one learned at business school, to say nothing of received wisdom, but it’s what got Amazon its market dominance. Bleeding money until one attains scale invokes one of the authors’ key observations, namely that while it has some astonishing possibilities and massive payoffs, it “also comes with massive risks.” Though the authors make a few nods to playing nice in the marketplace, this is a book of which Gordon Gekko would doubtless approve. The blitzscale success of Uber may have come with unfortunate moral deficits, but the company does have “a dominant market position in the cities in which it operates,” and investors will be happy when autonomous vehicles are similarly blitzscaled so that the business of paying those pesky drivers can be dispensed with. This is zero-sum, law-of-the-jungle stuff, and readers with a low tolerance for the attendant obnoxiousness—as when the authors write approvingly of the strategy of ignoring customers at PayPal, temporary expedient or no—will want to consult Muhammad Yunus instead. Devotees of Silicon Valley, on the other hand, will eat it up.
Of considerable interest to the entrepreneurially minded, with caveats.Pub Date: Oct. 9, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5247-6141-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Currency
Review Posted Online: Feb. 22, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Career and business advice for the hashtag generation. For all its self-absorption, this book doesn’t offer much reflection...
A Dumpster diver–turned-CEO details her rise to success and her business philosophy.
In this memoir/business book, Amoruso, CEO of the Internet clothing store Nasty Gal, offers advice to young women entrepreneurs who seek an alternative path to fame and fortune. Beginning with a lengthy discussion of her suburban childhood and rebellious teen years, the author describes her experiences living hand to mouth, hitchhiking, shoplifting and dropping out of school. Her life turned around when, bored at work one night, she decided to sell a few pieces of vintage clothing on eBay. Fast-forward seven years, and Amoruso was running a $100 million company with 350 employees. While her success is admirable, most of her advice is based on her own limited experiences and includes such hackneyed lines as, “When you accept yourself, it’s surprising how much other people will accept you, too.” At more than 200 pages, the book is overlong, and much of what the author discusses could be summarized in a few tweets. In fact, much of it probably has been: One of the most interesting sections in the book is her description of how she uses social media. Amoruso has a spiritual side, as well, and she describes her belief in “chaos magic” and “sigils,” a kind of wishful-thinking exercise involving abstract words. The book also includes sidebars featuring guest “girlbosses” (bloggers, Internet entrepreneurs) who share equally clichéd suggestions for business success. Some of the guidance Amoruso offers for interviews (don’t dress like you’re going to a nightclub), getting fired (don’t call anyone names) and finding your fashion style (be careful which trends you follow) will be helpful to her readers, including the sage advice, “You’re not special.”
Career and business advice for the hashtag generation. For all its self-absorption, this book doesn’t offer much reflection or insight.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-399-16927-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Portfolio
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2014
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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