The Third Wave: An Entrepreneur's Vision of the Future


Steve Case - 2016
    At the time, only three percent of Americans were online. It took a decade for AOL to achieve mainstream success, and there were many near-death experiences and back-to-the-wall pivots. AOL became the top performing company of the 1990s, and at its peak more than half of all consumer internet traffic in the United States ran through the service. After Case engineered AOL’s merger with Time Warner and he became Chairman of the combined business, Case oversaw the biggest media and communications empire in the world. In The Third Wave, which pays homage to the work of the futurist Alvin Toffler (from whom Case has borrowed the title, and whose work inspired him as a young man), Case takes us behind the scenes of some of the most consequential and riveting business decisions of our time while offering illuminating insights from decades of working as an entrepreneur, an investor, a philanthropist, and an advocate for sensible bipartisan policies. We are entering, as Case explains, a new paradigm called the “Third Wave” of the internet. The first wave saw AOL and other companies lay the foundation for consumers to connect to the Internet. The second wave saw companies like Google and Facebook build on top of the Internet to create search and social networking capabilities, while apps like Snapchat and Instagram leverage the smartphone revolution. Now, Case argues, we’re entering the Third Wave: a period in which entrepreneurs will vastly transform major “real world” sectors like health, education, transportation, energy, and food—and in the process change the way we live our daily lives. But success in the Third Wave will require a different skill set, and Case outlines the path forward. The Third Wave is part memoir, part manifesto, and part playbook for the future. With passion and clarity, Case explains the ways in which newly emerging technology companies (a growing number of which, he argues, will not be based in Silicon Valley) will have to rethink their relationships with customers, with competitors, and with governments; and offers advice for how entrepreneurs can make winning business decisions and strategies—and how all of us can make sense of this changing digital age.

The Origin of Wealth: Evolution, Complexity, And the Radical Remaking of Economics


Eric D. Beinhocker - 2006
    How did this marvel of self-organized complexity evolve? How is wealth created within this system? And how can wealth be increased for the benefit of individuals, businesses, and society? In The Origin of Wealth, Eric D. Beinhocker argues that modern science provides a radical perspective on these age-old questions, with far-reaching implications. According to Beinhocker, wealth creation is the product of a simple but profoundly powerful evolutionary formula: differentiate, select, and amplify. In this view, the economy is a "complex adaptive system" in which physical technologies, social technologies, and business designs continuously interact to create novel products, new ideas, and increasing wealth. Taking readers on an entertaining journey through economic history, from the Stone Age to modern economy, Beinhocker explores how "complexity economics" provides provocative insights on issues ranging from creating adaptive organizations to the evolutionary workings of stock markets to new perspectives on government policies. A landmark book that shatters conventional economic theory, The Origin of Wealth will rewire our thinking about how we came to be here—and where we are going.

The Fourth Turning: What the Cycles of History Tell Us about America's Next Rendezvous with Destiny


William Strauss - 1996
    With blazing originality, The Fourth Turning illuminates the past, explains the present, and reimagines the future. Most remarkably, it offers an utterly persuasive prophecy about how America's past will predict its future.Strauss and Howe base this vision on a provocative theory of American history. The authors look back five hundred years and uncover a distinct pattern: Modern history moves in cycles, each one lasting about the length of a long human life, each composed of four eras--or turnings--that last about twenty years and that always arrive in the same order. In The Fourth Turning, the authors illustrate these cycles using a brilliant analysis of the post-World War II period.First comes a High, a period of confident expansion as a new order takes root after the old has been swept away. Next comes an Awakening, a time of spiritual exploration and rebellion against the now-established order. Then comes an Unraveling, an increasingly troubled era in which individualism triumphs over crumbling institutions. Last comes a Crisis--the Fourth Turning--when society passes through a great and perilous gate in history. Together, the four turnings comprise history's seasonal rhythm of growth, maturation, entropy, and rebirth.The Fourth Turning offers bold predictions about how all of us can prepare, individually and collectively, for America's next rendezvous with destiny.

A History of the United States in Five Crashes: Stock Market Meltdowns That Defined a Nation


Scott Nations - 2017
    Only billionaire J.P. Morgan was able to save the stock market.Black Tuesday (1929): As the newly created Federal Reserve System repeatedly adjusted interest rates in all the wrong ways, investment trusts, the darlings of that decade, became the catalyst that caused the bubble to burst, and the Dow fell dramatically, leading swiftly to the Great Depression.Black Monday (1987): When "portfolio insurance," a new tool meant to protect investments, instead led to increased losses, and corporate raiders drove stock prices above their real values, the Dow dropped an astonishing 22.6 percent in one day.The Great Recession (2008): As homeowners began defaulting on mortgages, investment portfolios that contained them collapsed, bringing the nation's largest banks, much of the economy, and the stock market down with them.The Flash Crash (2010): When one investment manager, using a runaway computer algorithm that was dangerously unstable and poorly understood, reacted to the economic turmoil in Greece, the stock market took an unprecedentedly sudden plunge, with the Dow shedding 998.5 points (roughly a trillion dollars in valuation) in just minutes.The stories behind the great crashes are filled with drama, human foibles, and heroic rescues. Taken together they tell the larger story of a nation reaching enormous heights of financial power while experiencing precipitous dips that alter and reset a market where millions of Americans invest their savings, and on which they depend for their futures. Scott Nations vividly shows how each of these major crashes played a role in America's political and cultural fabric, each providing painful lessons that have strengthened us and helped us to build the nation we know today.A History of the United States in Five Crashes clearly and compellingly illustrates the connections between these major financial collapses and examines the solid, clear-cut lessons they offer for preventing the next one.

The Money Hackers: How a Group of Misfits Took on Wall Street and Changed Finance Forever


Dan P. Simon - 2020
    Have you ever “Venmoed” someone? Do you think of investing in Bitcoin--even though you can’t quite explain what it is? If you’ve deposited a check using your iPhone, that’s fintech. And if you’ve gone to a bank branch and discovered it has been closed and shuttered for good, odds are that’s because of fintech too.The Money Hackers focuses on some of fintech’s most powerful disruptors--a ragtag collection of financial outsiders and savants--and uses their incredible stories to explain not just how the technology works, but how the Silicon Valley thinking behind the technology, ideas like friction, hedonic adaptation, democratization, and disintermediation, is having a drastic effect on the entire banking and finance industry. Turn to this remarkable new guide to: Feel empowered with the knowledge needed to spot the opportunities the next wave of fintech disruptions will bring. Understand the critical pain points that fintech is resolving, through a profile of the major finsurgents behind the disruption. Topic areas include Friction (featuring founders of Venmo), Aggregate and Automate (featuring Adam Dell, founder of Open Table and brother of Michael Dell), and Rise of the Machines (featuring Jon Stein, founder of robo-advisor Betterment). Learn about some of the larger-than-life characters behind the fintech movement. The Money Hackers tells the fascinating story of fintech--how it began, and where it is likely taking us.

Die with Zero: Getting All You Can from Your Money and Your Life


Bill Perkins - 2020
    You worked hard, saved your money, and looked forward to financial freedom when you retired.   The only thing you wasted along the way was…your life.  Die with Zero presents a startling new and provocative philosophy as well as practical guide on how to get the most out of your money—and out of your life. It’s intended for those who place lifelong memorable experiences far ahead of simply making and accumulating money for one’s so-called Golden Years.   In short, Bill Perkins wants to rescue you from over-saving and under-living. Regardless of your age, Die with Zero will teach you Perkins’ plan for optimizing your life, stage by stage, so you’re fully engaged and enjoying what you’ve worked and saved for.   You’ll discover how to maximize your lifetime memorable moments with “experience bucketing,” how to convert your earnings into priceless memories by following your “net worth curve,” and find out how to navigate whether to invest in, or delay, a meaningful adventure based on your “spend curve” and “personal interest rate.”   Using his own life experiences as well as the inspiring stories and cautionary tales of others—and drawing on eye-opening insights about time, money, and happiness from psychological science and behavioral finance —Perkins makes a timely, convincing, and contrarian case for living large.

Start Late, Finish Rich: A No-Fail Plan for Achieving Financial Freedom at Any Age


David Bach - 2005
    Now you, too, can ramp up the road to financial security with David Bach's inspiring, proven, and easy-to-follow "catch up" plan, which tailors his "Finish Rich" wisdom to those who forgot to save, procrastinated, or got sidetracked by life's unexpected challenges.In a swift, motivating read, David Bach gives you step-by-step instructions, worksheets, phone numbers, and website addresses--everything you need to put your "Start Late" plan into place right away. You will learn that even if you're buried in debt, there's still hope. You can spend less, save more, and make more--and it doesn't have to hurt. With America's best-loved money coach at your side, it's never too late to change your financial destiny.

The Spatial Web: How Web 3.0 Will Connect Humans, Machines, and AI to Transform the World


Gabriel Rene - 2019
    Blade Runner, The Matrix, Star Wars, Avatar, Star Trek, Ready Player One and Avengers show us futuristic worlds where holograms, intelligent robots, smart devices, virtual avatars, digital transactions, and universe-scale teleportation work together perfectly, somehow seamlessly combining the virtual and the physical with the mechanical and the biological. Science fiction has done an excellent job describing a vision of the future where the digital and physical merge naturally into one — in a way that just works everywhere, for everyone. However, none of these visionary fictional works go so far as to describe exactly how this would actually be accomplished. While it has inspired many of us to ask the question—How do we enable science fantasy to become....science fact? The Spatial Web achieves this by first describing how exponentially powerful computing technologies are creating a great “Convergence.” How Augmented and Virtual Reality will enable us to overlay our information and imaginations onto the world. How Artificial Intelligence will infuse the environments and objects around us with adaptive intelligence. How the Internet of Things and Robotics will enable our vehicles, appliances, clothing, furniture, and homes to become connected and embodied with the power to see, feel, hear, smell, touch and move things in the world, and how Blockchain and Cryptocurrencies will secure our data and enable real-time transactions between the human, machine and virtual economies of the future. The book then dives deeply into the challenges and shortcomings of the World Wide Web, the rise of fake news and surveillance capitalism in Web 2.0 and the risk of algorithmic terrorism and biological hacking and “fake-reality” in Web 3.0. It raises concerns about the threat that emerging technologies pose in the hands of rogue actors whether human, algorithmic, corporate or state-sponsored and calls for common sense governance and global cooperation. It calls for business leaders, organizations and governments to not only support interoperable standards for software code, but critically, for ethical, and social codes as well. Authors Gabriel René and Dan Mapes describe in vivid detail how a new “spatial” protocol is required in order to connect the various exponential technologies of the 21st century into an integrated network capable of tracking and managing the real-time activities of our cities, monitoring and adjusting the supply chains that feed them, optimizing our farms and natural resources, automating our manufacturing and distribution, transforming marketing and commerce, accelerating our global economies, running advanced planet-scale simulations and predictions, and even bridging the gap between our interior individual reality and our exterior collective one. Enabling the ability for humans, machines and AI to communicate, collaborate and coordinate activities in the world at a global scale and how the thoughtful application of these technologies could lead to an unprecedented opportunity to create a truly global “networked” civilization or "Smart World.” The book artfully shifts between cyberpunk futurism, cautionary tale-telling, and life-affirming call-to-arms. It challenges us to consider the importance of today’s technological choices as individuals, organizations, and as a species, as we face the historic opportunity we have to transform the web, the world, and our very definition of reality.

The Dark Net: Inside the Digital Underworld


Jamie Bartlett - 2014
    A world that is as creative and complex as it is dangerous and disturbing. A world that is much closer than you think.The dark net is an underworld that stretches from popular social media sites to the most secretive corners of the encrypted web. It is a world that frequently appears in newspaper headlines, but one that is little understood, and rarely explored. The Dark Net is a revelatory examination of the internet today, and of its most innovative and dangerous subcultures: trolls and pornographers, drug dealers and hackers, political extremists and computer scientists, Bitcoin programmers and self-harmers, libertarians and vigilantes.Based on extensive first-hand experience, exclusive interviews and shocking documentary evidence, The Dark Net offers a startling glimpse of human nature under the conditions of freedom and anonymity, and shines a light on an enigmatic and ever-changing world.

The Smartest Money Book You'll Ever Read: Everything You Need to Know About Growing, Spending, and Enjoying Your Money


Daniel R. Solin - 2011
    Now Solin offers the smartest guide to money management and financial planning yet.From managing your debt, boosting your savings, and owning (or renting) a home to buying insurance, maximizing investment returns, and retiring when you want to, The Smartest Money Book You'll Ever Read is your road map to financial freedom-and to enjoying yourself along the way.

21 Lessons: What I've Learned from Falling Down the Bitcoin Rabbit Hole


Gigi - 2020
    Like many others, I feel like I have learned more in the last couple of years studying Bitcoin than I have during two decades of formal education. The following lessons are a distillation of what I’ve learned. First published as an article series titled “What I’ve Learned From Bitcoin,” what follows can be seen as a third edition of the original series. Like Bitcoin, these lessons aren’t a static thing. I plan to work on them periodically, releasing updated versions and additional material in the future.Bitcoin is an inexhaustible teacher, which is why I do not claim that these lessons are all-encompassing or complete. They are a reflection of my personal journey down the rabbit hole. There are many more lessons to be learned, and every person will learn something different from entering the world of Bitcoin. I hope that you will find these lessons useful and that the process of learning them by reading won’t be as arduous and painful as learning them firsthand.

Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics


Richard H. Thaler - 2016
    Thaler has spent his career studying the radical notion that the central agents in the economy are humans—predictable, error-prone individuals. Misbehaving is his arresting, frequently hilarious account of the struggle to bring an academic discipline back down to earth—and change the way we think about economics, ourselves, and our world.Traditional economics assumes rational actors. Early in his research, Thaler realized these Spock-like automatons were nothing like real people. Whether buying a clock radio, selling basketball tickets, or applying for a mortgage, we all succumb to biases and make decisions that deviate from the standards of rationality assumed by economists. In other words, we misbehave. More importantly, our misbehavior has serious consequences. Dismissed at first by economists as an amusing sideshow, the study of human miscalculations and their effects on markets now drives efforts to make better decisions in our lives, our businesses, and our governments.Coupling recent discoveries in human psychology with a practical understanding of incentives and market behavior, Thaler enlightens readers about how to make smarter decisions in an increasingly mystifying world. He reveals how behavioral economic analysis opens up new ways to look at everything from household finance to assigning faculty offices in a new building, to TV game shows, the NFL draft, and businesses like Uber.Laced with antic stories of Thaler’s spirited battles with the bastions of traditional economic thinking, Misbehaving is a singular look into profound human foibles. When economics meets psychology, the implications for individuals, managers, and policy makers are both profound and entertaining.

Set for Life: Dominate Life, Money, and the American Dream


Scott Trench - 2017
    By layering philosophy with practical knowledge, Set for Life gives young professionals the fiscal confidence they need to conquer financial goals early in life. Accumulating a lifetime of wealth in a short period of time involves working harder and smarter than the average person, and Set for Life demonstrates how to do just that―from zero savings to five figures, then to six figures, and finally to the ultimate goal of financial freedom. Wealth isn’t just about a nest egg, setting aside money for a “rainy day,” or accumulating an emergency fund. True wealth is about building out a Financial Runway―creating enough readily accessible wealth that you can survive without work for a year. Then five years. Then for life. Readers will learn how to: • Save more income―50+ percent of it, while still having fun • Double or triple your income in three to five years • Secure “real” assets and avoid “false” ones that destroy wealth

Choose FI: Your Blueprint to Financial Independence


Chris Mamula - 2019
    And then, there are three suburban dads just trying to make the world a little bit better. Meet Brad Barrett and Jonathan Mendonsa of the award-winning Choose FI podcast and Chris Mamula of the popular blog “Can I Retire Yet?”. They have walked the talk and now want to share their knowledge with you. Together, these three regular guys will show you how they did something extraordinary. They are all financially independent and doing meaningful work that fulfills them. All three left their corporate 9 to 5 jobs and are reaping the benefits of extra time with their families. Mirroring the format of the popular Choose FI podcast, this book pulls from the collective knowledge of those who have decided to build a lifestyle around their passions instead of allowing their finances to dictate their future. These stories demonstrate universal principles, giving you the opportunity to pick the elements that are the most applicable to your financial situation and “choose your own adventure.”FI or Financial Independence is the new debt-free and getting back to 0 is just the beginning of a wonderful journey. Whether you have mountains of debt now or are recently debt free and wondering what to do next, Choose FI : Your Blueprint to Financial Independence will give you the information to guide your next move.

You Need a Budget: The Proven System for Breaking the Paycheck to Paycheck Cycle, Getting Out of Debt, and Living the Life You Want


Jesse Mecham - 2010
    A guide based on the tenets of the award-winning financial platform, "You Need a Budget," argues that a well-planned budget does not involve deprivation and counsels readers on how to prioritize financial goals, reduce stress through strategic cash flow allocations and meet the challenges of unplanned expenses.