25iq

My views on the market, tech, and everything else

A Dozen Things I’ve Learned from Jenny Lee about Investing and Business

Jess Lee is an investing partner at Sequoia Capital and the former chief executive officer of Polyvore (a fashion web site allowing users to create shareable collages of clothing and interior designs). Before being CEO at Polyvore, Lee was a Product Manager at Google. She started her career at Google by working on the shopping engine Froogle before becoming product manager of Google Maps. The first phase of a startup’s development is about proving “the […]

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Secrets of Sand Hill Road (Venture Capital and How to Get It) — Know Venture Capital Before You Get Married to a Venture Capitalist

Scott Kupor’s new book Secrets of Sand Hill Road is a bottom-to-top explanation of venture capital and other aspects of growing a business intended for founders, board members, employees, investors, venture capitalists and people who are curious about this investing approach. Writing a book that is interesting to an expert, but informative for a novice, is not an easy task. I think about this challenge every time I write a […]

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50 Cent versus Kanye: Should Fiddy have used the Objectives and Key Results (OKR) system?

In interviews leading up to the September 11, 2007 release date of his album entitled Curtis, 50 Cent said publicly that he would retire from the music business if Kanye’s album Graduation sold more copies during the first week. The question this 25iq blog post will attempt to answer is: Could Fiddy have obtained a better result if he had adopted the “Objectives and Key Results” (OKR) system at the […]

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Execution is Everything

  I have wanted to write a review of John Doerr’s book Execution is Everything since it was first published five months ago. Some of you are probably saying right now: “That’s not the name of his book!” This is true, but I decided to write this post as if the book had another title to attract a different audience that might not otherwise read the book. Many people who […]

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Lessons from Annie Duke (Author of “Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All the Facts”) 

Annie Duke received an NSF Fellowship to attend graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania to study cognitive psychology. Because she missed the job market one year due to a stomach ailment that put her in the hospital, she decided to try to make some money by playing poker until the next academic hiring season. This detour resulted in her acquiring 20 years of experience in the real-world behavioral laboratory […]

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Lessons from Howard Marks’ New Book: “Mastering the Market Cycle – Getting the Odds on Your Side”

Howard Marks is co-chairman and co-founder of Oaktree Capital Management, an investment manager with more than $120 billion in assets under management. How smart is Marks and how sound is his judgement? Charlie Munger once said:  “I probably know Howard Marks as well as I know anybody and he is a very smart man….[For example] you have to believe in the tooth fairy to believe [Bernie Madoff] was having those figures […]

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Lessons from Scott Belsky’s Book “The Messy Middle”

Scott Belsky is Adobe’s Chief Product Officer and Executive Vice President, Creative Cloud. He co-founded Behance in 2006 and served as CEO until it was acquired by Adobe in 2012. He is the author of Making Ideas Happen and his new book is The Messy Middle. “We love talking about starts and finishes, even though the middle stretch is the most important and often the most ignored and misunderstood. We don’t […]

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Business and Investing Lessons from Caddyshack

  There are certainly some people who don’t know that Caddyshack is a 1980 comedy movie directed by Harold Ramis and written by Brian Doyle-Murray, Douglas Kenney and the director Ramis. These people also may not know that the four biggest stars in the movie are Bill Murray (Carl Spackler), Chevy Chase (TyWebb), Rodney Dangerfield (Al Czervik) and Ted Knight (Judge Smails). Carl Spackler:  This crowd has gone deadly silent, […]

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Risk, Uncertainty and Ignorance in Investing and Business – Lessons from Richard Zeckhauser  

  Richard Zeckhauser is an American economist and a Professor of Political Economy at the Kennedy School at Harvard University. Charlie Munger has said about him: “The right way to think is the way [Harvard Professor Richard] Zeckhauser plays bridge. It’s just that simple.” “Smart people make these terrible boners. …Well maybe a great bridge player like Zeckhauser [doesn’t], but that’s a trained response. The list of his published work […]

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