Book Reviews

A great compliment to porter erisman’s book, but lacks much inside perspective on the company. A decent primer on Chinese tech.

More etc. than about Indonesia. I wish there were more history and macro level analysis, but the memoir format of the book was palatable.

Mystifying in the way good scifi should be. More fun to think about than it was to read, but so many good ideas! Also, the closest you’ll come to reading a book In a foreign language while still reading a book in English. Reminded me a lot of cities of salt.

This book was so bad it was good. 111 lessons about how to bullshit your way to becoming a billionaire, written in pure bullshit (空话). It’s informative to see that strong engineering, a good product, or long term vision are not the only ways to create a multi-billion dollar tech company.

tl;dr: Go watch Silicon Valley instead. First: Read this. Choice quote: “The author, however, continually expresses his disappointment for all the crassest and clueless reasons. He was only in it for the money, but he still felt that somehow, he just wasn’t getting the respect he so richly deserved just for showing up. And being a white male.” Lyons is mystified why his bosses dislike him after his public takedown of the company CEO goes viral, and tries to go over their heads with his pet project. He describes his coworkers as “beer drinking shitheads.” He plays office politics poorly, then cries to the reader when his coworkers play office politics back. ...

A good overview.

Neither about startups nor about being lean. This book should be titled ‘The Effective Organization’. Lots of really good insights in here, great terminology for the phenomenon that all organizations face (my favorite: ‘success theatre’), this should be the bible of Silicon Valley. At Facebook, I certainly find myself quoting it more than the King James Version.

I enjoyed it. Pulpy, to be sure. By this point the 30 pages of fun are familiar: action begets betrayal, begets melancholic pontification. Repeat the cycle once for each planet of the solar system, and you’ve got a fun page turner!

I liked the content. It’s better to read books by Chinese politicians than books by Americans about Chinese politicians. Zhao Ziyang seems like an older liberal mirror of Bo Xilai, both his rise and fall (well.. 下台) are illuminating into how the Communist party operates. I disliked the packaging. The mechanical translation, with phrases like “We needed to use the sharp knife to cut through the knotted hemp”, was far too literal and jarring. The editor’s notes before each section were annoying. The ordering of the book was strange.

I didn’t expect this to be a book about HR (people ops), but I still found it to be enlightening. Working at Facebook, it’s interesting to see how much of our DNA seems to have been copied directly from Google, and I think we are better for it. Whenever I bring guests from the outside in, they marvel at the completely different paradigm of silicon valley companies, and this book does a great job explaining to the outside world why we work the way we do. ...