Voice of FinTech: Summer 2021 book tips!

Hope you are well and safe! In the second season of the Voice of FinTech, we featured many guests who authored amazing books and we often asked guests for the book tips. We also chatted on Clubhouse about inspirational books on entrepreneurship, leadership, management, investing, FinTech, Tech. Here is the summary - Voice of FinTech 2021 summer book tips list! If you have more great tips or comments on these, don’t hesitate to e-mail us at [email protected].

• The most often recommended by our podcast guests: The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers. A truly great book by Ben Horowitz! Yes, it’s tempting to read only about hockey sticks and amazing riches, but often there are near-death experiences you need to overcome as a founder. How to get out of the hole and turn around a near-bankrupt business into a unicorn? This book is one of the few that gives you a realistic preview of being an entrepreneur - extremely useful!
• Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know about the People We Don’t Know. Why are we so bad at judging people in person? Most people, including world leaders or judges or trained investigators, are hopelessly bad at “reading” people in person, explains Malcolm Gladwell. Why then you often hear at virtual conferences: “Let’s soon meet in person”? Do investors need to feel guilty when they cannot meet founders in person and overcompensate by excessive Zoom calls?
• No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention. A collaboration between Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix and Erin Meyer, an INSEAD Professor and an expert on a company and business culture, studying the culture of Netflix! Can no vacation and no expense policy work? It’s even a listed company! Well, no rules don’t mean anarchy or literally no rules. Read more or listen to an audiobook — how to run a company in a modern way! The New York Times bestseller.
• No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram. Winner of the 2020 Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award. It’s based on countless interviews of insiders from Instagram and Facebook, giving you a peek into what’s it’s like to build a unicorn with 13 employees and try to keep it intact within Facebook. Worth a read (or a listen) from Sarah Frier for sure!
• The End of Procrastination: How to Stop Postponing and Live a Fulfilled Life. I guess we all know some procrastinators and occasionally, it may be us! Petr Ludwig shares many practical tips on getting out of the vicious cycle of procrastination and finally getting something done!
• The Future of Finance: The Impact of FinTech, AI, and Crypto on Financial Services. I spoke to Henri Arslanian about crypto, digital assets, blockchain and how it is all changing the world of Finance as we know. This book is essential for your understanding of what’s coming! A great foundation before you can deal with bits and pieces on these topics in the media. You can also listen to what Henri had to say about it here.
• Where to Play: 3 steps for discovering your most valuable market opportunities. Last year, Marc Gruber explained on our podcast how his book complements the Lean Startup framework by helping you find the best markets and opportunities before getting lean:)! Easy to follow (and use!) diagrams included.
• The Currency Cold War: Cash and Cryptography, Hash Rates and Hegemony (Perspectives). We also spoke to Dave Birch on the podcast about his fondness of digital currencies, going back decades, and where he thinks this will lead. Is cash still going to be the King in the future? You can also listen here.
• The Rise of Technosocialism: How Inequality, AI and Climate will Usher in a New World Order. Brett King, founder of Moven and #1 FinTech podcast in the world, wrote a book about technology that will radically change society as we know it today. It is being updated for the impacts of the pandemic. Coming soon! Listen to what Brett told us about this here.
• Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking. How to perfect your “gut” feeling so it produces better results… Gut feeling is not necessarily irrational, nor it’s a gift possessed by a few. It can be trained, apparently! Again, by Malcolm Gladwell.
• Banking on it: How I disrupted the industry. Anne Boden’s story about how a woman in her 50ties, very much part of the banking establishment, started a mobile-only bank in the UK to great success. You will find many inside stories about well-known FinTech entrepreneurs too.
• Singapore: The FinTech Nation by Varun Mittal, EY EM FinTech leader who spoke about entrepreneurship and innovation with Angela Conroy on the podcast.
• Never Split the Difference: Negotiating As If Your Life Depended On It: it’s never a bad idea to refresh and hone your negotiating skills!
• The Organizational Analytics - a free e-book by Prof. Puranam from INSEAD who spoke live on the Voice of FinTech: Live Speaker Series about Data-driven changes to Org Design.
• Guns, Germs and Steel: A short history of everybody for the last 13,000 by Jared Diamond, Pulitzer Prize winner and named one of TIME’s best non-fiction books of all time. Jared Diamond puts the case that geography and biogeography, not race, molded the contrasting fates of Europeans, Asians, Native Americans, sub-Saharan Africans, and aboriginal Australians. What do you think?
• The Man Who Solved the Market, shortlisted for the FT & McKinsey business book of the year. The story of Jim Simmons’ Renaissance hedge fund.
• The Secret of Silicon Valley, Sara Palmbush interviewed Eva Schram, a Dutch journalist based in the Bay Area, who co-authored this book on the Voice of FinTech, about what made this part of the world such a hub for innovation.
• On my shelf, the next one to do: Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade. The author of the legendary bestseller Influence, social psychologist Robert Cialdini shines a light on effective persuasion and reveals that the secret doesn’t lie in the message itself but the key moment before it is delivered.
• A book tip by Ripple’s James Wallis: CORE: How a Single Organizing Idea can Change Business for Good. Listen here to what James said about why this book resonated so much with him.
• Simple ideas are sometimes the best, explained Lianna Brinded from Yahoo UK here. Her favorite book: The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger.
• Recommended books by Foraus think leaders Fabian Ligibel and Nadir Franca: People, power and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent by Joseph E. Stiglitz, Development as Freedom by Amartya Sen or The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths or Value of Everything: Making and taking in the global economy by Mariana Mazzucato and also discussed Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty.
• You cannot have a business book list without Warren Buffet. Here is ours, a classic - Essays of Warren Buffett!
• Barbarians at the Gate: a favorite of our guest Lawrence Lee (and mine!). Also, look for the HBO TV adaptation - very, very entertaining!
• Trillion Dollar Coach by Eric Schmidt, former CEO and Chairman of Google, about coaching lessons of Bill Campbell, a football coach whose mentoring of some of our most successful modern entrepreneurs has helped create well over a trillion dollars in market value.
• Intelligent Investor - a classic text by Benjamin Graham, updated for the current times, about long-term investing.
• Bloomberg by Bloomberg, Who is Michael Ovitz? Memoir - the autobiography of the co-founder of Creative Artists Agency, High Output Management by Andrew S. Gore, former Chairman and CEO of Intel.
• Delivering Happiness, by late Tony Hsieh, founder of Zappos. How to build a billion-dollar sales e-commerce business and try to find the balance between chasing profits and life?
• The Inner Game of Tennis: The Classic Guide to the Mental Side of Peak Performance: the mental guide for professional and amateur tennis players as well entrepreneurs - it’s all in your head!

Stay safe and enjoy!

Kind regards,

Rudolf Falat