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The fourteenth book in my quest is Crush It! by Gary Vaynerchuk. I know I said that I was going to read fewer business books, but I actually finished this book a couple weeks ago so this doesn’t count.

Now, I’ve actually read this book twice so I’m clearly a big fan of it. Gary V, as he is more commonly known, started working at his father’s liquor store after graduating from college and ended up starting www.winelibrary.com, which does many millions in business annually. He also started the video blog www.winelibrary.tv where he talks about a few different wines every couple days if you want to get a better feel for his, very large and unique, personality.

On the surface, his book is another one of those “how to do what you want and be rich” offerings, but it’s actually a lot better than that. He doesn’t try to sell you anything, he gives some good information for people who are unfamiliar with the newer marketing channels out there, and he’s very honest about how much work doing something like this is going to be. But what I think people can really get out of it is the inspiration that comes from someone with Gary’s passion.

While I love most of what he talks about (being more open than you think you should be online, building your network of people, leaving a lasting legacy being more important than short term gains) he and I have very different views on analytics. Gary’s more of a “gut-feel” kinda person and uses statistics very rarely. I recognize his point to some extent, especially when it relates to how easy it is for some people to get discouraged when they don’t get a lot of traction initially. However, numbers do mean something and if you are measuring the right things (and identifying those is the hard part) you really can run a business much better.

That’s one of the few major disagreements I had, but as a stat guy I have to make sure people get my side of the story too!

I’ll leave you now with my favorite passage and a good piece of advice.

That doesn’t mean you should do anything to earn a buck, but neither should you walk away from dollars if you don’t have any. Too many people think they’re big shots when they’re nothing in the grand scheme of things. Don’t drink your own Kool-Aid, it will negatively impact your business decisions. Even if your ambitions are huge, start slow, start small, build gradually, build smart. The money will be there, and more importantly, so will the opportunities.

Buy Crush It!

I’m a huge soccer fan.  I’m probably in the top 0.03% of MLS fans, so much so that I created an Elo Rating system for MLS teams.  I made the ESPN broadcast and US Soccer highlight reel while sitting front row with 27,000 of my closest friends in Nashville at the US/Trinidad World Cup Qualifier (5:30 in the video, that’s us leading the U-S-A chant).  I took a Wednesday off work last summer to go watch USA beat Spain and then watch Steve Nash’s Showdown in Chinatown.  I traveled on a couple trains from NYC to Philly for the Gold Cup semifinal against Panama.

So it should go without saying that I’m super pumped about the World Cup starting in a couple weeks.  If you’re looking forward to it as well, then I think you should find the 50 minutes you’ll need to watch this documentary, One Goal USA.  It’s one of the best sports documentaries I’ve ever seen, and way beyond anything soccer-related out there.  The first part starts with the US’s game in the Confederations Cup against Spain and follows the team and the fans through games at Mexico, vs. El Salvador, at Trinidad and Tobago, at Honduras and vs. Costa Rica.

Huge thanks to Ashwin Chaudhary, Jon Korn, Steve Mack, Ken Eaken, and Raj Makhija for making this amazing film.  Also, big shout out to Brent Gamit and Jason Endres, who feature prominently in the movie and made my soccer watching experience in NYC all that much better.

For book 13 I went back to William Goldman, author of the 5th book I read, for Which Lie Did I Tell: More Adventures in the Screen Trade. It’s the same format as the first book with a bunch of stories about his experiences writing Hollywood screenplays and some advice for people who want to write.

While I have no desire to write screenplays for a living, one of the things I really like to read about is how people create. The way their minds work is just fascinating to me. I think a lot of my non-fiction readings for the next few months are going to shift from business-oriented topics to profiles of creative people across all walks of life (music, movies, art, software, etc). One of the entries I’m most excited about is Mark Twain’s autobiography, the first part of which is scheduled to be published this November.

The story that really got me interested in pursuing this so much more was Goldman’s dealings with Clint Eastwood while making Absolute Power. Eastwood apparently runs one of the most efficient operations in Hollywood when he’s doing a movie. Everyone he works with has been with him for a long time, knows their job, is really good at it, and works hard. It isn’t so much that these are novel ways to do business (they aren’t) but how impressive it is that he’s able to do what no one else in the movie business apparently is. He works in such a different way and it ends up producing great movies like Unforgiven, Mystic River, Million Dollar Baby, and more.

The behind-the-scene gossip in the book is as awesome as you’d expect, but there were also a lot of worthwhile little tidbits to take away. With that in mind, I’ll leave you with this quote from Eastwood about how he chooses who to work with. I think it’s pretty applicable to a lot of work situations.

I like working with actors who don’t have anything to prove.

Buy Which Lie Did I Tell: More Adventures in the Screen Trade

Hulu made some noise recently about it’s new freemium pricing strategy. Under this new plan, the most recent 5 episodes of shows would be available for free, just how it is now. However, if you wanted to see older episodes you could sign up for a $9.95/month subscription and see those as well.

This isn’t a bad plan for a couple reasons. First, it doesn’t alienate current users because it keeps the free experience virtually unchanged. If they had done something where they charged you to make a playlist of videos or charged for all episodes of popular shows that would have been a TERRIBLE idea. Users would’ve revolted. Second, the freemium strategy works when implemented correctly. Dropbox, Evernote and Pandora are some good case studies to look at for that.

However, in typical big media company fashion (Hulu is owned by the major TV networks), they think that the content is their most valuable asset. That’s wrong. Way wrong.

By far the best thing they have going for them is their player. It is head and shoulders above every other online streaming resource out there. The quality is great, the queuing features are amazing, and all of the controls just make sense. Also, and this is the big one for content producers, the ads work despite ad blocking software.

Assuming you have adblock installed in Firefox (and if you don’t go do that now), go watch an episode of The Daily Show real quick on the Comedy Central site. See those ads? Yeah, didn’t think so. That’s terrible for the advertisers and, in time, for the site. Viacom pulled Daily Show and Colbert Report from Hulu so they wouldn’t have to split ad revenue, which made up for a smaller audience. However, if the advertisers ever wise up they’ll realize that a lot of people aren’t seeing any ads and that will hurt the rates Viacom can charge.

With this is mind, why doesn’t Hulu license out it’s software to sites like www.thedailyshow.com and www.colbertreport.com? It would be 10x the viewing experience of most inpage streaming services, and would assure that all advertisement gets through. Charge a yearly fee or take a smaller percentage of ad sales (since there is no infrastructure cost for Hulu here) and boom, everyone wins.

At the end of every semester a handful of students from the Georgia Tech MBA program go down to New Orleans and volunteer with the St Bernard Project. This organization works to rebuild families’ houses in Orleans and St. Bernard Parishes. It takes about $15,000 and 12 weeks of volunteer work for each house, but they’ve grown from serving one house at a time when they first started to having 50 houses under construction and 279 completed.  It’s a great group of people doing amazing work.

I have wanted to go on this trip for a while, but had conflicts each of the three times previous.  Fall semester first year was a family trip.  Spring semester first year I was interviewing with Flat World Knowledge for my internship.  Fall semester this year I was on one last trip with Dave before he left the country again to go see Georgia Tech in the ACC Championship Game.  This semester, I made a point not to have anything else that could conflict with the trip.  Both my parents went to Tulane, my grandfather taught there for 15 years, my mom and aunt both spent more than a few years living there, and I’ve visited a ton of times.  It just felt like the right place to give back to.

This trip we worked putting up insulation and drywall on the Meshell House.  You can check out some of the pictures on the St Bernard Flickr account, or just see the two that matter (me holding up drywall with my shoulders and our pyramid) below.

So go to the webpage, check it out, sign up to volunteer, or maybe even donate a couple bucks to help this group keep it up.

Yup, that’s right, another review of two books at once.  This time it’s The Blue Sweater by Jacqueline Novogratz, CEO of The Acumen Fund, and The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid by C.K. Prahalad (who just passed so RIP CK).  Like before, this is because I had to read the books in tandem.  In fact, I had to write a short paper comparing the two books’ strategies for building value within the poorest areas of the world; so if you’re interested in that check out the pdf linked at the bottom.

Let’s start with The Blue Sweater.  I first heard about this book when Fred Wilson reviewed it in February.  He called it “a terrific book” and I second that.  I loved Jacqueline Novogratz’s stories about investing in businesses in Rwanda (before the genocide), Pakistan, and India among other places.  It is inspirational to see the difference that one person can have on the life of so many by giving them a way to provide for themselves.

Since very few of you are actually interested enough to go read my paper, let me summarize something here instead: I strongly dislike charity.  I think that it serves a very important role in giving immediate aid to those who are in need, and it does it very well.  No amount of investment or teaching is going to get medical supplies to Haiti right now or feed the starving people in sub-Saharan Africa.  However, at the same time, none of those people’s children are going to live a better life than their parents if nothing is done to fundamentally change the way that they live.  Charitable donations are not a sustainable option for the economic growth that can make these problems obsolete.

Anyway, enough of that.  I really enjoyed reading The Blue Sweater and greatly admire the work that Novogratz did and still does.  Her model of mixing philanthropy and capitalism will get your brain churning about different ways to help people.

The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid is a little different.  This book is about how multi-national corporations can sell to the poorest 20% of the world and still make money doing it.  Now, before you go getting all appalled that a company would dare to profit off the poor, let’s think about this a little more.  If the option is to wash your clothes in filthy river water and spread bacteria and disease, or buy a 10-cent laundry detergent specialized for your conditions that will clean your clothes are you really being exploited?  When a company like Hindustan Unilever (the Indian branch of Unilever) creates a program that employs over 1-million local women to act as sales people to their communities, are the poor worse off because they are buying goods they wouldn’t usually?  I would argue no, but you are free to disagree.

This book has a very good formula for how a company should go about redesigning its business practices to market to the people in these poor areas and is supplemented by interviews and case studies in the back (including one with Novogratz and The Acumen Fund).

I think that everyone should read The Blue Sweater to get a good idea of what is going on out there and some of the mechanisms smart people are coming up with to help the poor.  If you read that book and get really interested in exploring ways to help the poor more, check out The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid.

And yes, here’s my paper: http://www.f2f2s.com/SocialEntrepreneurship.pdf