I am a business and technology journalist with a particular interest in mobility startups. I penned my book after purchasing an EV from startup Better Place, only to discover the company was nearly bankrupt. How did I miss that? I’m supposed to be able to do due diligence! I started writing about cars as a reporter for the Advanced Interactive Media Group. I’m a regular contributor to The Jerusalem Post and Israel21c and have also ghostwritten four business books. Before I wrote about tech, I was starting companies: My own Internet publishing startup, Neta4, raised $3.2 million in 1998. I received my B.A. in Creative Writing from Oberlin College.
I wrote...
Totaled: The Billion-Dollar Crash of the Startup that Took on Big Auto, Big Oil and the World
Uri Levine founded Waze, the GPS traffic navigation service, which he subsequently sold to Google for over $1 billion. He went on to launch Moovit (“Waze for public transportation”), which was sold to Intel—also for over $1 billion. He’s now founded a dozen companies.
I found Uri’s recommendations about how to be a better entrepreneur to be highly relevant. I wish I’d been able to read this book when I was CEO of my own startup!
Unicorns—companies that reach a valuation of more than $1 billion—are rare. Uri Levine has built two.
And in Fall in Love with the Problem, Not the Solution, he shows you just how he did it.
As the cofounder of Waze—the world’s leading commuting and navigation app with more than 700 million users to date, and which Google acquired in 2013 for $1.15 billion—Levine is committed to spreading entrepreneurial thinking so that other founders, managers, and employees in the tech space can build their own highly valued companies.
Levine offers an inside look at the creation and sale of Waze and…
If this book doesn’t sound like it’s for you, it’s time to reconsider. This well-researched analysis is all about how we’ll buy and sell cars in the future—something that nearly all of us will experience at multiple points “down the road,” so to speak. I’m not a car dealer, but I thoroughly enjoyed learning what drives the industry.
Steve Greenfield knows his stuff: His venture capital firm, Automotive Ventures, invests exclusively in mobility startups.
The future of mobility is evolving at an accelerating pace. This is most evident in the automotive retail channel, as both car dealers and automakers are experiencing an enhanced level of change.
The Future of Automotive Retail provides a framework for how these changes are impacting both automaker and automotive dealer.
The book provides a handy framework to categorize these changes across vehicle production, evolving consumer expectations, vehicle ownership, vehicle power sources, autonomy, connectivity and servicing of vehicles.
The book wraps by providing a perspective on the future of the automotive dealership, as well as some practical advice on how…
When I was deliberating over whether I could write a nonfiction business book of my own, Julia Angwin’s detailed insider story of the rise and fall of the first uber-popular social media site was my inspiration.
I loved the way she mixed deep reporting with revealing interviews to describe how MySpace changed the world—and how it was then done in that very changing world. This book never got the acclaim it deserved, but for me it was transformational.
A fast-paced and deeply reported look at the unlikely success of MySpace, the Web 2.0 phenomenon, and the drama surrounding one of the biggest deals of the Internet age. Barely funded, technologically inept, conceptually derivative, and driven by rivalries, the company that was to morph into the biggest Internet site in the world had an unlikely beginning. This is the fascinating and surprising story that includes all the elements of a great business narrative: obsessive characters from co-founders Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe to Rupert Murdock, relentless and unlikely innovation, and dizzying back room deal-making; all centered around an epic…
Long before Yuval Noah Harari became one of the world’s leading philosophers and a best-selling pundit, he was a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where his “Brief History of Humankind” was a popular course. Harari presented what would eventually become this book as a series of online videos, which is how I first experienced his work. The book is even better.
How does this relate to business and entrepreneurship? If you’re going to build a business, it's critical to understand human nature. And what better way to understand human nature than through learning how humans have behaved from the beginning of time until today.
100,000 years ago, at least six human species inhabited the earth. Today there is just one. Us. Homo sapiens. How did our species succeed in the battle for dominance? Why did our foraging ancestors come together to create cities and kingdoms? How did we come to believe in gods, nations and human rights; to trust money, books and laws; and to be enslaved by bureaucracy, timetables and consumerism? And what will our world be like in the millennia to come?
In Sapiens, Dr Yuval Noah Harari spans the whole of human history, from the very first humans to walk the…
I had to include this book in the list. It’s not a business book, per se—this is hard science fiction—but the Earth’s response to a far-off alien invasion leads to all kinds of business and technological innovation, from “hibernation chambers” to the development of spacecraft that can travel at close to light-speed.
I then went on to watch the Netflix series, but the book is the real deal. I’m a slow reader, which meant I spent at least a year reading through all three books—but it was so worth it!
Read the award-winning, critically acclaimed, multi-million-copy-selling science-fiction phenomenon - soon to be a Netflix Original Series from the creators of Game of Thrones.
1967: Ye Wenjie witnesses Red Guards beat her father to death during China's Cultural Revolution. This singular event will shape not only the rest of her life but also the future of mankind.
Four decades later, Beijing police ask nanotech engineer Wang Miao to infiltrate a secretive cabal of scientists after a spate of inexplicable suicides. Wang's investigation will lead him to a mysterious online game and immerse him in a virtual world ruled by the intractable…
When a billion-dollar electric car startup crashed and burned, global investors and average car buyers alike asked: What happened? Business and technology journalist Brian Blum reveals the answer in this in-depth expose.
Tesla may have grabbed the spotlight as a leading EV maker, but Better Place came first. The company addressed “range anxiety” by building a network of battery-swap stations—operated by robots. Yet in a few years, it was all over—the company, buffeted by internal strife, an international corporate spy scandal, the Great Recession, and technology disruptions, went bankrupt. This story of the “electric car unicorn that collapsed” is a cautionary tale, a timely case study filled with valuable lessons for entrepreneurs, investors, and executives in businesses of all sizes.
I once saw a play at the renowned Oregon Shakespeare Theatre. A play about Sor Juana. It was a good play, but it felt like something was missing like jalapenos left out of enchiladas. The play kept nudging me to look further to find Sor Juana, and so for the next five years, I did so. I read and read more. I listened for her voice, and that is where I heard her life come alive. This isn’t the only possibility for Sor Juana’s life; it is just the one I heard.
Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, this brilliant 17th century nun flew through Mexico City on the breeze of poetry and philosophy. She met with princes of the Church, and with the royalty of Spain and Mexico. Then she met a stunning, powerful woman with lavender eyes, la Vicereine Maria Louisa, and her life changed forever. As her fame grew, she dared to challenge the diabolical Archbishop once too often, and he threw her in front of the Inquisition, where she stood, alone.
Sor Juana's work is studied still today, and justifiably so. Scholars study her months on end; mystics…
This astonishingly brilliant 17th century poet and dramatist, this nun, flew through Mexico City on wings of inspiration. Having no dowry, she chose the life of a nun so that she might learn, so that she might write, so that she might meet the most fascinating people of the western world. She accomplished all of that, and more.
One day a woman with violet eyes, eyes the color of passion flowers, entered her life. It was the new Vicereine, Maria Luisa. As the two most powerful women in Mexico City, the bond between them crossed politics and wound them in…
