Posts from Books

There are many themes that grace this page from time to time. Two of the most common are the rise of startup communities and the role that the Internet can play in allowing society to governing itself. And there are two books out this week that are must reads on these two topics. Further and in full disclosure, they are written by two very good friends. No conflict no interest as it were.

Let's start with Startup Communities by Brad Feld. I met Brad in 1996. He had just moved to Boulder Colorado and was going to help build a startup community there by building a market leading VC firm in Boulder. Sounds audacious? Yes. But he did it. As I was working on the same idea for the past sixteen years in NYC, I was able to watch a parallel universe forming in Boulder with Brad at the center.  In Startup Communites, Brad tells us what he's learned from that experience and how the same thing can be done elswhere. If you want to create a Boulder or NYC tech scene in your community, this is your roadmap, bible, and textbook. You can get it on Kindle today and or pre-order the book for delivery next week.

On to Future Perfect by Steven Johnson. Back in the Spring, Steven emailed me a draft of this book. I put the PDF on my Kindle and started reading. I found myself yelling Yes, Yes, Yes as I was making my way through the chapters. I know most, if not all, of the stories in this book. I have been involved in some of them and have followed the others closely. Those stories tell me that there is a "case for progress in a networked age" and Steven makes that case as only he can, by telling the stories brilliantly and then wrapping the meaning of them together in a crisp, cohesive, and easy to understand narrative that leaves you with a framework to take out in the world. You can get Future Perfect on Kindle or in hardback right now as it was published earlier this week.

The comment thread on my Get Out The Vote post a couple days ago was downright depressing and full of anger and cynicism. So for all of you and everyone else, here is a short 3 min video from Steven talking about the ideas in his book and where they are going. If you need a shot of optimism this morning, watch it.

I've been reading sci-fi and thinking about sci-fi's relationship to technology innovation. I posted last week about Twitter and the Metaverse and noted that Neal Stephenson had imagined things in the early 90s that happened almost twenty years later.

But of course it is possible that many of the things that are built by technologists are reactions to reading sci-fi and wanting to realize the fertile imaginations of sci-fi authors.

So it's not entirely clear exactly who is inspiring who. Like most things, it is likely a bit of both. Technologists create new things. Writers are inspired and create stories that reflect these emerging new technologies. Technologists read those stories and are inspired by them.

It's a virtuous circle. Technology innovation doesn't occur in a vacuum. It happens in a dialog with society. And sci-fi writers are but one example of the way society impacts technology.

I think that's one of the reasons that many of the most interesting bay area startups are choosing to locate themselves in the city. And it is one of the reasons that NYC is developing a vibrant technology community. Society is at its most dense in rich urban environments where society and technology can inspire each other on a daily basis. Steven Johnson wrote about this phenomenon in his excellent Where Good Ideas Come From.

So if you want to know what is going to happen next in the world of technology, you need to be thinking about society and where it is going, how it is interacting with technology, and how it is inspiring technologists. Which is why I am reading a lot of sci-fi this summer.

I still think of a 7" as a vinyl record for EPs and singles.

But 7" is going to start to mean someting else as I believe it is an ideal form factor for tablets.

I moved from a Kindle to an iPad for reading a couple years ago. I wrote about that at the time and explained that I preferred the backlighting and the ability to uses maps and wikipedia and such to jump out of the book and drill down on something in the book that sparks my curiosity.

Then the Kindle Fire came along and I immediately grabbed one of them. I've been reading on a Kindle Fire since it came out. I love it for reading books. But it is not a true Android tablet. It is really a Kindle with some extra stuff like a browser and some apps.

Some friends at Google sent me a Nexus 7" last week. I set it up yesterday and I've been using it for about 24 hours. So these are preliminary thoughts on it.

There is something very comforting about logging into a device with my Android/Google credentials and getting all my apps downloaded to it automatically. There is also something very comforting about getting a clean build of the most recent version of Android on a device. The Nexus 7" provides both of those comforts right out of the box.

I put a bunch of my favorite apps on the home screen:

If you look at the bottom of the home screen you'll see a yellow icon next to the Chrome browser. That is Bria, a SIP client that I have been using on my android phone. With Bria, the Nexus 7" can be a phone and I used it yesterday to make a few calls. It works great but if I really wanted to use this device as a phone, I'd want a bluetooth headphone because a 7" tablet is not ideal for talking into.

The three apps that I use a lot that aren't on my Nexus 7" home screen are Instagram, Tumblr and Kik. Instagram and Tumblr are not available on the Nexus 7". I hope these companies fix that because I would use these two apps a lot on this device to follow folks on Instagram and Tumblr. Kik only works on one device at a time so if I put it on the Nexus 7", it would stop working on my phone. So it's not on my tablet.

But the main thing I use the Nexus 7" for is reading, primarily on the Kindle app.

Reading on the Kindle App on the Nexus 7" is a lot like reading on the Kindle Fire. But the Kindle Android app is not quite as responsive as the Kindle Fire. I find that I have to be a bit more assertive with my swipes for the next page. That might be a transition thing or it could be annoying. I don't know yet. I think the features are slightly different too. But I haven't noticed anything super different between the two reading experiences.

The bottom line is that I think the 7" tablet is a great form factor and I prefer it to the iPad for a bunch of reasons. It is more mobile. It is lighter and more comfortable being held in one hand. And I like the amount of a page that is rendered on the 7" screen. It allows me to read more quickly.

The good news for iPad/iOS fans is that Apple is apparently going to come out with a 7" iPad soon. So you don't have to go Android to get the 7" experience. But if you want to try Android or you want to try a 7" experience right now, you might give the Nexus 7" a try. It's available for pre-order for $199. I don't know when it will broadly available but I suspect soon.

We talked about books last December on AVC. It was a good one.

RichardF suggested in wednesday's disqussion that we talk about books again. He's going on vacation and so am I and we both need some good books to read.

I will kick this off. I am finishing The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides. This is a book about three young adults graduating from college in the early 80s. That was me and the Gotham Gal thirty years ago. It is also a love letter to Roland Barthes and his book, A Lover's Discourse. My daughters told me to read this and I am glad I did.

Next up is Reamde by Neal Stephenson. This was a gift by AVC community member Dave Pinsen. Dave knows that much of our investment strategy at USV comes from reading Neal's books and getting a glimpse into the future. He gave me Reamde in hardback. It's over 1000 pages. I will put it on my Kindle Fire for the vacation. And I will put the hardback in my office. I prefer sci-fi over business books every day of the week.

So that's what I am reading. How about all of you? What should Richard and bring on vacation?

I've been reading The Corrections this long weekend. This book came out over ten years ago, but I'd never read it so I pulled it out of our bookshelf and cracked it open after we got off the mountain on Saturday. I hope to finish it on the plane ride home today.

The father figure in the book is Alfred. He's a railroad engineer who also dabbles in metalurgy experiments in his basement. He's a familiar character to me. My dad is an engineer and I have an engineer's brain as well. Apparently so does my friend Brad Feld.

The Gotham Gal tires of this mindset at times. She will say in exasperation "you can't solve every problem Fred." But that's how my mind works. Find problem, solve it, move one to the next one.

My engineer tendencies are reinforced by the work I do. Most entrepreneurs we back are also engineers. They find a problem and they set out to solve it. That journey is often a startup and we are along for the ride. Solving problems creates value in our business. Value creation is success. So the feedback loop is reinforcing and problem solving is the name of my game.

But the Gotham Gal is right. I can't solve every problem as much as I want to. The person or organization that has the problem has to want to solve it too. And when the will is not there, as clear as the solution is, its best to leave it alone.

I've been trying to decide what to do on the subject of online piracy. I think there are good solutions to the problem that involve technical approaches that leverage the work the technology industry has done with domain name registration and spam/virus/malware filtering. I laid them out in a discussion I participated in last week at the Paley Center. But the entertainment industry must want to solve the core problems, not just the symptoms. And it is not clear to me that the entertainment industry wants to solve the problem. So maybe I should move on.

The same is true of the companies we work with. They often have problems that can be solved, and have been solved in many other companies. But if they do not have the will to solve them, then all of our effort to address the issue is wasted. Our desire to solve the problem will simply come across as interference, meddling, or worse.

So as I move from youthful enthusiasm to elderly wisdom, one of my development goals is to supress the desire to solve every problem and focus on the ones where I can make a difference. I'm not there yet, but I'm working on it and making progress.

Related articles

• How Politicians and Engineers are different (om.co)
• Compromise vs. Problem Solving (feld.com)
• You are What You Read (inkspeare.wordpress.com)

Two weeks ago, we used Fun Friday to talk about movies to see. It was fun. And I got a list of movies to watch that will last me months and months.

In the same vein, we are going to talk about books today. Not the best books of all time (maybe we'll do that some friday), but what we are reading right now.

I'll start with my list:

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle – Haruki Murakami – This is the english translation of the Japanese original. It's a surreal story of a man's search for his cat and then his wife. I've been working on this book since the thanksgiving holiday. I hope to finish it soon. I've never read any Murakami and I've been told this is his best work. I'm enjoying it very much.

Super Sad True Love Story – Gary Shteyngart – My friend Nick Bilton told me to put this on my Kindle. It's up next after Wind-Up Bird. It's a "dystopian vision of the near future." I love reading about the future. This is going to be my kind of book.

Feeding Eden – Susan Weissman – My partner Andy's wife Susan has written a book that is available for pre-order and will come out in a couple months. The Gotham Gal has the gally. She read it over the last couple days and blogged about it yesterday. Now it's on my reading list.

Boomerang – Michael Lewis – My father in law and my brother in law both recommended this book to me recently. I like Michael's books and this is a topic – the failures of the weaker european economies – that I'm quite interested in.

I hope to get through all of these books over the next two weeks which I'll be spending on our family's annual year end vacation. If I get through all of them, I'll just reach into this comment thread for the next purchase on my Kindle.

OK, your turn now folks. Please drop links into your comments if you can find the time to do that.

I saw this picture at BGR yesterday and immediately thought "I want that."

We go back and forth in our family about Kindle vs iPad for reading. The Kindle is lighter and smaller. The iPad has a browser and other services for enhanced reading/researching as I blogged about recently.

What we all want is a hybrid of the two – a kindle that is a full blown tablet computer with a browser, apps, and an OS. It looks like Amazon is going to bring that to market this fall. I'm getting one for myself and one for the Gotham Gal. And I'm pretty sure my mom and dad are getting them too. It looks like a killer product.

I posted yesterday about highlighting and sharing quotes from books. I figured I'd make it a Kindle weekend here at AVC and talk about one other reason I love reading on an iPad and how Amazon could make it even better for me.

When I read, particularly biographies and other non-fiction, I love to hop out of the book and onto the web to get more details. I've been doing this a ton while reading Life, Keith Richard's biography.

When Keith talks about growing up in Dartford, riding bikes around the Heath, I hop out of the Kindle app and into Maps and find the map of Dartford and check out satellite views of the Heath. It's like taking a quick trip there to get some context.

When Keith talks about Andrew Loog Oldham, their first manager, I hop over to Wikipedia and get the lowdown on the guy. It makes the story more interesting to me.

When Keith talks about how beautiful Anita Pallenberg was when he met her, I hop over to Google Images and see what he's talking about. It turns a story into a movie in my mind.

Reading on an iPad via the Kindle app makes all of this pretty easy. I do it all the time. But imagine if, when you highlight something on the Kindle, you get a few more options, like Maps, Wikipedia, Images. Clicking on one of them takes you right to where you want to go. It would be killer. I hope Amazon adds this feature. I'd use it all the time.

When I read a book, I tend to do a lot of highlighting. I like to share many of them publicly on the web. I'm currently reading Keith Richard's biography Life and you can see the public sharing in action right now on my tumblog.

For years, when I came across a highlight I want to share, I pulled out my laptop and manually typed the quote into Tumblr. I do that with hardbacks, paperbacks, and the Kindle app on my iPad. It's a pain in the butt, but the desire to share the quote is such that I've been doing it.

I was with my friend Steven Johnson yesterday and he told me about a trick that is a game changer for me and maybe you too. When you are reading on a Kindle (or a Kindle app), your highlights are sent to a private page at amazon.com. The address of my page (and yours too I imagine) is https://kindle.amazon.com/your_highlights. If you have a kindle and do a lot of highlighting, go visit that page and you'll see all of your highlights.

From there, via the tumblr bookmarklet, it's trivial to share the quote on Tumblr. And so I suspect I'll be doing quite a bit more sharing as a result of this discovery.

Amazon has a gold mine on its hands but they aren't doing much with it right now. First off, they should let me make that page public or at least let me make some of the highlights public and showcase them on a public page. They should let me domain map that page so it becomes part of my social media presence. And they should let me connect that page with Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.

I'm sure I'm not the only person who does a lot of highlighting and would like to share many of the highlights with the world at large. Curation is a huge part of social media and discovery and pulling quotes from books and sharing them is a big opportunity and one that Amazon should work to unlock for us.