I have a very peculiar answer. Really, really amazing nail clippers. Pay 50 bucks for them, or something. It could change your life, I promise.
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Bill Gurley
General partner at Benchmark Capital
United States · b. 1966
Business and finance
About
American venture capitalist and a long-time general partner at Benchmark, where he led or sat on the boards of Uber, OpenTable, Zillow and Stitch Fix. He previously wrote the technology newsletter Above the Crowd.
2 answers
Yes. There are three books that I’ll mention. The first one that I’ve gifted the most is called Complexity by Mitchell Waldrop, which is about the rise of the Santa Fe Institute. Even when you were talking with Haidt, I think he mentioned certain things are complex adaptive systems. They’re very hard to predict, they’re very hard to analyze, they’re very hard to understand. That’s what Santa Fe’s all about. That book introduced me to network effects. When I get to go there, I usually go a couple times a year and Mike Mauboussin’s there and Josh Wolfe’s there from Lockton. I just love the learning of things I don’t know, and just pushing my brain to go farther than I would with the normal stuff I consume. It’s beautifully written. Great writer, Mr. Waldrop. There’s a book that I happen to have right here. This book, Mr. China is fantastic. He went to China in the mid ’90s and started a fund to privatize a bunch of industries. He’s from London and got his head handed to him and survived enough to write a humorous story about it. But holy shit.
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