529 products in Books, Music, Movies & TV

One of Silicon Valley’s most successful angel investors shares his rules for investing in startups. There are two ways to make money in startups: create something valuable―or invest in the people that are creating valuable things. Over the past twenty-five years, Jason Calacanis has made a fortune investing in creators, spotting and helping build and fund a number of successful technology startups―investments that have earned him tens of millions of dollars. Now, in this enlightening guide that is sure to become the bible for twenty-first century investors, Calacanis takes potential angels step-by-step through his proven method of creating wealth in venture capital: startups. As Calacanis makes clear, you can get rich―even if you came from humble beginnings (his dad was a bartender, his mom a nurse), didn’t go to the right schools, and weren’t a top student. The trick is learning how angel investors think. Calacanis takes you inside the minds of these successful moneymen, helping you understand how they prioritize and make the decisions that have resulted in phenomenal profits. He guides you step by step through the process, revealing how leading investors evaluate early-stage companies, calculating the risks and rewards, and explains how the best startups leverage relationships with angel investors for the best results. Whether you’re an aspiring investor or a budding entrepreneur, Angel will inspire and educate you on all the ins of outs. Buckle up for a wild ride into the world of angel investing! * Angel Investing 101: Learn the step-by-step process for evaluating new ventures, calculating risks and rewards, and spotting the technology startups that can generate massive wealth. * Silicon Valley Secrets: Get an insider’s guide to how the best angel investors think, prioritize, and make the decisions that result in phenomenal, life-changing profits. * Mastering Deal Flow: Discover how to get access to the best deals and how the top founders leverage relationships with their investors for the best results, even if you didn’t go to the right schools. * Startup Valuation: Understand the difference between pre-traction and post-traction companies, what determines a seed round valuation, and when to double down on your winners.

In The Fiat Standard, world-renowned economist Saifedean Ammous applies his unique analytical lens to the fiat monetary system, explaining it as a feat of engineering and technology just as he did for bitcoin in his global bestseller The Bitcoin Standard. This time, Ammous delves into the world's earlier shift from the gold standard to today's system of government-backed fiat money—outlining the fiat standard's purposes and failures; deriving the wider economic, political, and social implications of its use; and examining how bitcoin will affect it over time. With penetrating insight, Ammous analyzes global political currencies by analogy to bitcoin: how they're "mined" whenever government-guaranteed entities create loans, their lack of inherent restraints on inflation, and the rampant government intervention that has resulted in heavy, devastating, and persistent distortions to global markets for food, fuel, science, and education. Through these comparisons, Ammous demonstrates that bitcoin could be our next step forward—providing high salability across space, just like the fiat system, but without the unchecked fiat-denominated debt. Rather than a messy hyperinflationary collapse, the rise of bitcoin could look like a debt jubilee and an orderly upgrade to the world's monetary operating system, revolutionizing global capital and energy markets.

Real-world advice on how to be invisible online from "the FBI's most wanted hacker" (Wired). Be online without leaving a trace. Your every step online is being tracked and stored, and your identity literally stolen. Big companies and big governments want to know and exploit what you do, and privacy is a luxury few can afford or understand. In this explosive yet practical book, Kevin Mitnick uses true-life stories to show exactly what is happening without your knowledge, teaching you "the art of invisibility" -- online and real-world tactics to protect you and your family, using easy step-by-step instructions. Reading this book, you will learn everything from password protection and smart Wi-Fi usage to advanced techniques designed to maximize your anonymity. Kevin Mitnick knows exactly how vulnerabilities can be exploited and just what to do to prevent that from happening. The world's most famous -- and formerly the US government's most wanted -- computer hacker, he has hacked into some of the country's most powerful and seemingly impenetrable agencies and companies, and at one point was on a three-year run from the FBI. Now Mitnick is reformed and widely regarded as the expert on the subject of computer security. Invisibility isn't just for superheroes; privacy is a power you deserve and need in the age of Big Brother and Big Data. "Who better than Mitnick -- internationally wanted hacker turned Fortune 500 security consultant -- to teach you how to keep your data safe?" --Esquire

TIME-TESTED, ROCK-SOLID ADVICE THAT HAS CARRIED THOUSANDS OF NOW SUCCESSFUL PEOPLE UP THE LADDER OF SUCCESS IN THEIR BUSINESS AND PERSONAL LIVES A classic book that gave birth to the self-help industry, How to Win Friends and Influence People is a phenomenal bestseller, having sold over 15 million copies worldwide and still going strong. It has been translated into 31 languages and is on Time magazine's list of 100 most influential books of all time. Dale Carnegie offers practical and proven advice on how to deal with people and understand them in order to get along well with them to make your life more rewarding. Carnegie believed that financial success, to a very large extent, depends on 'the ability to express ideas, to assume leadership, and to arouse enthusiasm among people.' He teaches these skills through fundamental principles of dealing with people so that they feel important and appreciated. He also details techniques for handling people without making them feel manipulated. This book will teach you how to: ●Think new thoughts, get out of a mental rut, acquire new visions and discover new ambitions ● Increase your popularity and make friends quickly and easily ● Increase your influence, prestige and the ability to get things done ●Become a better speaker and a more effective conversationalist ●Avoid arguments and keep your communication smooth and pleasant Carnegie illustrates his points with anecdotes of historical figures, leaders of the business world, and everyday folks. One of the world's best-known self-made billionaire, Warren Buffett, has said that this is the book that changed his life.

An inside look at modern open source software development and its influence on our online social world. Open source software, in which developers publish code that anyone can use, has long served as a bellwether for other online behavior. In the late 1990s, it provided an optimistic model for public collaboration, but in the last 20 years it’s shifted to solo operators who write and publish code that's consumed by millions. In Working in Public, Nadia Asparouhova takes an inside look at modern open source software development, its evolution over the last two decades, and its ramifications for an internet reorienting itself around individual creators. Asparouhova, who interviewed hundreds of developers while working to improve their experience at GitHub, argues that modern open source offers us a model through which to understand the challenges faced by online creators. She examines the trajectory of open source projects, including: * The GitHub platform for hosting and development * The structures, roles, incentives, and relationships involved in open source projects * The often-overlooked maintenance required of its creators * The costs of production that endure through an application’s lifetime. Asparouhova also scrutinizes the role of platforms like Twitter, Facebook, Twitch, YouTube, and Instagram, which reduce infrastructure and distribution costs for creators but which massively increase the scope of interactions with their audience. Open source communities are increasingly centered around the work of individual developers rather than teams. Similarly, if creators, rather than discrete communities, are going to become the epicenter of our online social systems, we need to better understand how they work—and we can do so by studying what happened to open source.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * MORE THAN ONE MILLION COPIES SOLD “A provocative read...There are few tomes that coherently map such broad economic histories as well as Mr. Dalio’s. Perhaps more unusually, Mr. Dalio has managed to identify metrics from that history that can be applied to understand today.” —Andrew Ross Sorkin, The New York Times From legendary investor Ray Dalio, author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Principles, who has spent half a century studying global economies and markets, Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order examines history’s most turbulent economic and political periods to reveal why the times ahead will likely be radically different from those we’ve experienced in our lifetimes—and to offer practical advice on how to navigate them well. A few years ago, Ray Dalio noticed a confluence of political and economic conditions he hadn’t encountered before. They included huge debts and zero or near-zero interest rates that led to massive printing of money in the world’s three major reserve currencies; big political and social conflicts within countries, especially the US, due to the largest wealth, political, and values disparities in more than 100 years; and the rising of a world power (China) to challenge the existing world power (US) and the existing world order. The last time that this confluence occurred was between 1930 and 1945. This realization sent Dalio on a search for the repeating patterns and cause/effect relationships underlying all major changes in wealth and power over the last 500 years. In this remarkable and timely addition to his Principles series, Dalio brings readers along for his study of the major empires—including the Dutch, the British, and the American—putting into perspective the “Big Cycle” that has driven the successes and failures of all the world’s major countries throughout history. He reveals the timeless and universal forces behind these shifts and uses them to look into the future, offering practical principles for positioning oneself for what’s ahead.

The bestselling citizen’s guide to economics  “Thomas Sowell is the nation’s greatest living economist.” —American Spectator     Basic Economics is a citizen’s guide to economics, written for those who want to understand how the economy works but have no interest in jargon or equations. Bestselling economist Thomas Sowell explains the general principles underlying different economic systems: capitalist, socialist, feudal, and so on. In readable language, he shows how to critique economic policies in terms of the incentives they create, rather than the goals they proclaim. With clear explanations of the entire field, from rent control and the rise and fall of businesses to the international balance of payments, this is the first book for anyone who wishes to understand how the economy functions. Drawing on lively examples from around the world and from centuries of history, Sowell explains basic economic principles for the general public in plain English.  

A trio of experts on high-tech business strategy and innovation reveal the principles that have made platform businesses the most valuable firms in the world and the first trillion-dollar companies. Managers and entrepreneurs in the digital era must learn to live in two worlds the conventional economy and the platform economy. Platforms that operate for business purposes usually exist at the level of an industry or ecosystem, bringing together individuals and organizations so they can innovate and interact in ways not otherwise possible. Platforms create economic value far beyond what we see in conventional companies. The Business of Platforms is an invaluable, in-depth look at platform strategy and digital innovation. Cusumano, Gawer, and Yoffie address how a small number of companies have come to exert extraordinary influence over every dimension of our personal, professional, and political lives. They explain how these new entities differ from the powerful corporations of the past. They also question whether there are limits to the market dominance and expansion of these digital juggernauts. Finally, they discuss the role governments should play in rethinking data privacy laws, antitrust, and other regulations that could reign in abuses from these powerful businesses. Their goal is to help managers and entrepreneurs build platform businesses that can stand the test of time and win their share of battles with both digital and conventional competitors. As experts who have studied and worked with these firms for some thirty years, this book is the most authoritative and timely investigation yet of the powerful economic and technological forces that make platform businesses, from Amazon and Apple to Microsoft, Facebook, and Google all dominant players in shaping the global economy, the future of work, and the political world we now face. Supplemental enhancement PDF accompanies the audiobook.

In responding to the financial crash of 2008, both the Bush Administration and the Obama Administration have relied on prescriptions developed by John Maynard Keynes, the most important economist since Marx. But should we be relying on Keynes? What did Keynes actually say? Did he make his case? Hunter Lewis concludes that he did not. If Keynes was wrong then so are the economic policies of virtually all world governments today.

Widely respected and admired, Philip Fisher is among the most influential investors of all time. His investment philosophies, introduced almost forty years ago, are not only studied and applied by today's financiers and investors, but are also regarded by many as gospel. This book is invaluable reading and has been since it was first published in 1958. The updated paperback retains the investment wisdom of the original edition and includes the perspectives of the author's son Ken Fisher, an investment guru in his own right in an expanded preface and introduction "I sought out Phil Fisher after reading his Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits...A thorough understanding of the business, obtained by using Phil's techniques...enables one to make intelligent investment commitments." ―Warren Buffet

An eccentric classic of Zen poetry When Zen master Ikkyu Sojun (1394-1481) was appointed headmaster of the great temple at Kyoto, he lasted nine days before denouncing the rampant hypocrisy he saw among the monks there. He in turn invited them to look for him in the sake parlors of the Pleasure Quarters. A Zen monk-poet-calligrapher-musician, he dared to write about the joys of erotic love, along with more traditional Zen themes. He was an eccentric and genius who dared to defy authority and despised corruption. Although he lived during times plagued by war, famine, rioting, and religious upheaval, his writing and music prevailed, influencing Japanese culture to this day. "Ikkyu scandalized the Zen community of his day and is likely to scandalize some readers even now—his short poems are simultaneously bawdy, abrupt, vulgar, and reverential... It is impossible not to love the velocity and variety of his verse."—The Philadelphia Inquirer "Stephen Berg is exactly the right poet to have translated these poems."—Hayden Carruth, The Hudson Review "A deeply sensual man, Ikkyu had little patience for the fussiness of monastic life and ritual... What is especially appealing about Ikkyu's poetry is the way his sensuality infuses his Zen sensibility."—American Book Review Stephen Berg (1934-2014) was the founder and editor of American Poetry Review. Also available by Stephen Berg Steel Cricket PB $16.00, 1-55659-075-X • CUSA New & Selected Poems PB $12.00, 1-55659-043-1 • CUSA

Høsten 2008 holdt deler av det internasjonale finansmarkedet på å kollapse etter en enorm gjeldsboble forårsaket av det tradisjonelle bank- og finanssystemet. Omtrent på samme tidspunkt som det tradisjonelle systemet brukte skattebetalernes penger på å kjøpe finansforetakene fri fra deres egen hensynsløshet – holder en mystisk skikkelse under pseudonymet Satoshi Nakamoto på å utvikle et pengesystem som skal revolusjonere måten penger fungerer på. Den 3. januar, 2009 skrus Bitcoin-nettverket på – og over ti år senere fortsetter nettverket å operere sømløst tross gjentatte erklæringer om at Bitcoin-boblen har sprukket. På tross av alle medieoppslag, er det stadig flere som fatter interesse for Bitcoin som fenomen - og nettverket er sterkere enn noen gang før. Hvorfor eksisterer Bitcoin fremdeles? Og hvorfor kommer Bitcoin tilbake hver gang «boblen» sprekker? Et nødvendig utgangspunkt for å forstå Bitcoin - er å forstå det som penger, og skal vi forstå Bitcoin som penger - må vi forstå hva penger er for noe. I denne boken gir forfatteren en grunnleggende introduksjon til hva penger er, hvilke funksjoner penger har, og et kort innblikk i pengenes evolusjon. Ved å kategorisere Bitcoin som penger vil mange av diskusjonene rundt Bitcoin også bli tydeligere for deg som leser. Du vil få et innblikk i hva Bitcoin er - og hvilke problemer det kan bidra til å løse. «Bitcoin er harde penger» er en introduksjonsbok til deg som har fattet interesse for Bitcoin, og som er klar for en videre reise ned i kaninhullet. Utover å forklare hva Bitcoin er, vil du som leser få et innblikk i de ideologiske idéene som Bitcoin bygger på. I en verden som preges av rekordhøy inflasjon og innskrenking av personlig frihet – har behovet for et frivillig alternativ aldri vært tydeligere. Vi ønsker deg en god reise.