Books in 2017

Gazettabyte has asked various industry executives to discuss the books they read in 2017. Here, two market researchers give their recommendations.

Andrew Schmitt, founder and lead analyst of Cignal AI

I didn’t have a good year with books. I bought more than these and either didn’t read them or I lost interest. Hopefully, 2018 will be better.

A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age by Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman was a big disappointment. It is a well-researched book and has tons of great history on Claude Shannon but there was something about the writing style that made it turgid. I struggled to finish it but learned a lot about Claude Shannon, including that his home in Boston wasn’t far from mine.

The Hard Thing about Hard Things: Building a Business When There are No Easy Answers by Ben Horowitz was the year’s winner. Ben Horowitz started the VC firm A16Z with Marc Andreessen, and both worked at Netscape and later founded Loudcloud. This is easily one of my favourite management books. Each chapter of the book covers an operational topic via a narrative of experiences from the author. Examples include how to build culture and how to scale a sales organisation. The book is highly readable and enjoyable, rare for a title about management advice. Horowitz talks about another book, High Output Management by Andy Grove, which I am reading now.

I reread Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson this year for fun. Entertaining book, particularly in light of all the crypto-currency mania. It was written 18 years ago and was way ahead of its time. As William Gibson said, the future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed. Seveneves was good too (from 2015), but I sure hope that isn’t our future.

The King and Queen of Malibu: The True Story of the Battle for Paradise by David Randall is a history of the large parcel of land now known as Malibu in Southern California. One person owned it after the Spanish American war, and the book is the story of how a rapidly encroaching Los Angeles, spurred on by the automobile, led to its eventual taking by eminent domain. If you know the area and are interested in the history, it is a great book. Otherwise, it is probably of little interest.

I also read a few other sci-fi fiction books while on the road that came highly recommended (Ready Player One, Fortress at the End of Time, Blindsight) but I thought they were not that great.

Vladimir Kozlov, founder and CEO of LightCounting Market Research

I read two books in 2017 that I would highlight.

The first is War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy. 

The second is Makers and Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business by Rana Foroohar. The book offers a sobering outlook on modern economic developments and questions the sustainability of growth.