Mia Junghae Rong

The Upstarts gives you a glimpse of what it feels like being a startup like Uber and Airbnb. Best seller author, Brad Stone, artfully juxtaposed the two upstarts, narrating phases of the company growth: from a burgeoning start-up to a company, facing regulation as well as fierce competition in both domestic and international. Both are fearless and resilient. As a person who started living in the Silicon Valley in the year 2008, this book made me look back my own life journey with adopting new technology as a consumer. Hope this does the same to you.   Regulation - I think the greatest achievement of both Uber and Airbnb is that they executed despite a mountain of obstacles. Many people came up with the similar idea, but not all of them fought head-to-head the regulation and existing industry's objection like these two. It is well worth to note that both founders shared the similar philosophy in how to navigate this.  Uber had this 'Travis's Law.' Basica

It is the most entertaining and nerve-breaking book I have ever read in my entire life. Every chapter is full of evil acts. After reading this, you will still feel overwhelmed by the chills you had while you were reading. Elizabeth Holms, with her company Theranos valued at $9B in 2015, is the most audacious liar in the Silicon Valley startup history. By early 2017, the value of Theranos became zero, and in June 2018, she was indicted on federal wire fraud charges. Pulizer prize -winning investigative reporter, John Carreyrou's narration completes suspense to readers and the severity of the truth.   Evil 1: Elizabeth Holms Needless to say, or should I say needleless to say, the first person and the biggest culprit is the CEO of of Theranos. She is the world most talented salesperson. To start with, her board of directors are all-star board - Larry Ellizon, Tim Draper, Don Lucas, Henry Kissinger, William Perry, George P. Shultz to name a few. Her ability to recruit

History of Nike, the Swoosh, the sweat of Phil Knights and Nike's early members are described in this fun, genuine, riveting book. Such a great story teller, Phil Knight, takes us the early days of his journey to build Blue Ribbon, and eventually Nike till its IPO in 1979. This book will make you want to finish the book in one seating.  This book was chosen as a part of our book club meeting (ABBA - Adobe Business Book Association), I created late last year. I would not have chosen such book without this external influence. For that, I would say I was lucky!  In Shoe Dog, Phil narrates monumental events for each year chronologically. Phil's life is full of adventure from his traveling around the world at the age of 26 to the journey of building Nike that you know now. What a journey! He believes in product. He is a risk-driven. He manages his business in a way that any odd will put him under easily ('live on the float' was the term). He is eccentric. He i

It had so much nuggets of wisdom for building product and growing a company, sometimes contradictory, sometimes philosophical. I would keep this on a shelf, and take out whenever I want any directional advice. It is not a book that increases your expertise on a certain area. It will be a book to get a little glimpse about how Scott thinks about the world.  The book contains such a wide range of topics. It has three big chunk. Endure, Optimize, Finish Line. All of the messy middle - Endure, Optimize - is extremely difficult, however in my personal opinion, finishing well is the most important. How would you determine anyone being successful or failed? Abraham Lincoln failed many consecutive years prior to him becoming the US president.  Is it a middle or finish line? I'd say 'finishing well' is more important.  That said, I appreciated Scott shared the two examples of his family members about finish line. His grandfather, Stanley Kaplan, suffered from depr

How Google Works by Eric Schmidt & Jonathan Rosenberg This book is probably one of the most quickest ways of understanding how Google operates. If you want to have a glimpse of why Google is so successful, this book is for you. It also helps you to determine if you would be a good fit for Google as your employers. Are you in now?  There is no qualified people who can write a book about Google, probably just the founders, than Eric Sc hmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg. Eric is Executive Chairman of Google from 2001 to 2015 and Alphabet from 2015 to 2017. Jonathan was  Senior Vice President of Product from 2002 to 2011. These time periods marks the phase of rapid growth for Google. The company made initial public offering in 2004 and quickly became one of the world's largest media companies.    I was immediately impressed by their first chapter: How Alphabet Works . Alphabet was created in order to solve the problems they observed from being big as a company: Pr

I would like to keep/updating the ranking of all of the books I read in 2018. It forces me to think the most influential book to the least.  I hope this is a good guide to you as well.  Up-to-Date book ranking (22 books so far)  Link to the Amazon wish list http://a.co/8yfCbEY Ranking Title Author 1 The Content Trap Bharat Anand 2 Streampunks Robert Kyncl 3 The Phonix Project Gene Kim, Kevin Behr, and George Spafford 4 AI superpowers Kai-fu Lee 5 The four Scott Galloway 6 How Google works Eric Schmidt, Jonathan Rosenberg 7 Hit Refresh Satya Nadella 8 Zero to One Peter Thiel 9 Hooked Nir Eyal 10 The Industries of the future Alec Ross 11 Human+Machine Paul Daugherty, H.James Wilson 12 The Upstarts Brad Stone 13 Behind the Cloud Marc Benioff 14 Measure What Matters John Doerr 15 Swipe to Unlock Neel Mehta, Parth Detroja, Adi Agashe 16 Strategy Beyond the Hocky Stick Chris Bradley, Martin Hirt, Sven Smit 17 Move Patty Azzrello 18 Retention Point Rob

Hooked How to Build Habit-Forming Products  by Nir Eyal with Ryan Hoover A quick, simple, and decent read. If you are a marketer, designer, product manager, or entrepreneur, looking to build a product that customer love to engage, this is your book.  Can you think of any of the apps you open frequently? I would say mine are Email, Youtube, Bible app, Netflix, Words with Friends, Skimm, and Camera. This book shares the secrets into why you are hooked to those apps.  I really like this short succinct book (only 200 pages). He gives very clear frameworks and examples without going too deep into psychological theory. This book could have been a one-sitting reading, as long as time permits. Very engaging and interesting book.  Nir Eyal started this book by introducing Hook Model. Based on Hook Model, Habit Zone is reached when users access the app with enough frequency and its perceived utility is also high enough.   He then moved onto the four stages to create habitual produc

Measure What Matters by John Doerr The concept is simple: Measure what matters (Objective and Key Results). However this is a hard one to craft on your own. If you want to have a peep at how successful companies such as Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation have  utilized it, this is a great book for you.  \ OKR means Objective Key Results. Book mentions it provides following benefits: p rovides focus and commit to priority,  help aligning and connect for teamwork, t rack for accountability, and s tretch for amazing.   Companies noted in this book include Google, Intel, The Remind, Nuna, MyFutbessPal, The Gates Foundation, Google Chrome, YouTube, Adobe, Zume Pizza, Lumeris, Bono's ONE campaign.  The beauty of OKR to me was that it help avoid any arguments on how to interpret test data and be able to move fast based on the outcome of the test. For all AB tests, we want to know which one works better for the company in a long term. However, when there is a cost ass

The Phoenix Project is an essential book for any executive trying to lead the high performing company. It is a really riveting novel to look deeper into the problems we face in today's two opposite objectives from the two IT organizations: Development and IT Operations. The objective of the Development team is to keep companies remain competitive by enhancing and changing codes. That of IT Operations team is to find the stability and security by not allowing changes of the codes. DevOps, a term introduced as a solution, is the key concept to resolve the two.  This book is really similar to The Goal in that it is a novel describing the process problems and help solving them. In The Goal and The Pheonix Project both, the main character was the crucial to save the company! Bill, the newly appointed VP of IT Operations, is tasked to resolve a series of issues that are prevalent in the current organization. 1. Companies don't view IT as their core compe