All Those Zeros

Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley – Antonio Garcia Martinez (Harper)

Self-admission up front- I am not a tech-weasel. I have never been an early adopter, my personal cell-phone would be considered and antique by most, I carry a Blackberry for work, and I have studiously avoided all things Facebook since 2012. I have been mildly intrigued by the so-called tech bubble and all of the acquisitions and chitter-chatter about multi-million or billion dollar deals that seem to pop up in Silicon Valley on a daily basis almost in spite of a lack of any real products being produced.

That being said, I was interested in getting an insider’s low down on the world of startups and deal making from somebody who had been there and done that. It is promised in the form of Antonio Garcia Martinez’s book, Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley. Billed as doing to the tech world what Michael Lewis’ Liar’s Poker, did for Wall Street and investment banks, in Chaos Monkeys, Martinez walks the reader through getting started in Silicon Valley and then busting out with a couple of partners to start hacking on their own project, the dash for cash and working towards the big payoff in the form of a buyout deal featuring lots of zeros.

 

Martinez comes off like a smarmy, self-important, dickhead who likes to point fingers at other smarmy, self-important, dickheads. He drops names like the Kardashian sisters drop their clothes; the problem is the folks outside the insular world of Silicon Valley don’t know who these people are much less care. Aside from high profile tech-weasels like Zuckerberg or Elon Musk, most people could pick these guys out of a lineup.

If you wade carefully through all of the name dropping and unwarranted self-importance, Martinez does drop a few crumbs of insight into the startup process. Most interesting among the crumbs is the fact that while talk of big dollar deals abounds the reality is those big bucks come with lots of strings attached, employment contracts and vesting before the big payoff comes down. Skip any of those little steps and all those zeros end up in the ether.

In end, Martinez may not reveal a whole lot of the dirt you may have been hoping for on guys like Zuckerberg other than to possibly confirm your suspicions of the Facebook founder.

Michael Hyatt – Platform: Getting Noticed in a Noisy World (Thomas Nelson)

I have a dual confession to make…I love to read books on business, leadership and marketing, but I never buy them when they are new. I am amazed the tidbits and strategy that I have picked up on over the years that I use in my own business and my “day job” but I don’t get sucked into the latest and greatest “must have” books.

Why you ask? Call me cheap, but more often than not business people jump on the latest trendy thing, rush out and buy these books, are excited to dive right in and then about 3 chapters in the brakes lock up and book ends up collecting dust on the shelf. Then six months later they get donated to a local charity sale or end up in a yard sale and that’s where I come in!

I think more often than not, these kinds of books offer great ideas, but don’t offer the easily actionable steps that allow people to put the strategies into action. And I think that is exactly what sets the latest book from best seller author Michael Hyatt apart from the shelves of other similar books.

In Platform: Get Noticed in a Noisy World Hyatt lays out an easy, step-by-step road map for building your personal brand. While many business strategy books offer lofty platitudes about process improvement and paradigm shifts, Hyatt literally walks the user through the process in a manner that doesn’t go so far as saying his way is the only way, certainly offers guidance through the process.

Hyatt further illustrates many of the steps with how he himself has not only used the process, but also made missteps and errors along the way and how to avoid the pitfalls. I found myself for the first time since college taking a highlighter to a book and keeping a notebook handy to jot down the ideas that Platform generated along the way.

When you ponder the so-called fire hose of information that we deal with a daily basis with things like: websites, blogs, Facebook, Twitter, You Tube and other social media outlets, it can seem like a daunting task to deal with all that’s involved, whether you are starting your own business, an established business or charged with marketing for a company. Hyatt helps to pare that process down to manageable bits.

He not only addresses the something to sell or say, he also tackles the development of your business or product; after all it is the foundation upon which your platform is built.

The problem I ran into during the course of reading Platform was that it generated so many good action steps that it can seem overwhelming. Hyatt does a nice job of reminding the reader that building their platform is a process and it can and should be done over the course of time. Which is why, at Hyatt’s suggestion, I now find myself using Evernote to keep track of everything that is on my plate!

I can guarantee that Platform: Getting Noticed in a Noisy World will end up on your desk for you to refer to often rather than gathering dust on your bookshelf.