Download or read book Billions to Bust and Back written by Thor Bjorgolfsson and published by Profile Books. This book was released on 2014-11-27 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thor Bjorgolfsson is a self-styled adventure capitalist with an addiction to debt and an insatiable appetite for business deals who became Iceland's first billionaire. After 10 years establishing his financial empire with alco-pops and beer in the lawless 'Wild East' of newly-capitalist Russia in the 1990s, he moved on to merging, floating, spinning off and privatising businesses from Finland to Sweden, Poland, Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece and the Czech Republic. On his 40th birthday, and worth $3.5 billion, he was sitting on top of the world; only 250 people in it were richer than him. His most spectacular triumph was the takeover of Iceland's second-largest bank, Landsbanki - he had expected his investment's value to double or treble in four years, and instead it rose ten-fold. But when financial meltdown hit Iceland in October 2008, Landsbanki crashed and burned, taking Bjorgolfsson with it. Within 12 months he had lost 3.3 billion euros - 98.5% of his wealth - and was treated as a scapegoat in his native country for supposedly bringing about the disaster. Faced with appalling debts, Bjorgolfsson has made good on his promises to repay his creditors, and at the age of 47 is now a billionaire once again.
Download or read book Billions to Bust and Beyond New and Updated Edition written by Thor Bjorgolfsson and published by Profile Books. This book was released on 2024-02-15 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thor Bjorgolfsson is a self-styled adventure capitalist who became Iceland's first billionaire: by his 40th birthday he had assets of around $4 billion. Among them was investment in Iceland's oldest bank, Landsbanki - but in the 2008 financial meltdown, Landsbanki crashed, taking Bjorgolfsson with it. He lost nearly everything, yet amazingly by 2014 had made good his losses, repaid his creditors and rebuilt his empire. This new and extensively revised edition brings the buccaneering story of his extraordinary and ambitious achievements fully up to date.
Download or read book Behind the Cloud written by Marc Benioff and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2009-10-19 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How did salesforce.com grow from a start up in a rented apartment into the world's fastest growing software company in less than a decade? For the first time, Marc Benioff, the visionary founder, chairman and CEO of salesforce.com, tells how he and his team created and used new business, technology, and philanthropic models tailored to this time of extraordinary change. Showing how salesforce.com not only survived the dotcom implosion of 2001, but went on to define itself as the leader of the cloud computing revolution and spark a $46-billion dollar industry, Benioff's story will help business leaders and entrepreneurs stand out, innovate better, and grow faster in any economic climate. In Behind the Cloud, Benioff shares the strategies that have inspired employees, turned customers into evangelists, leveraged an ecosystem of partners, and allowed innovation to flourish.
Download or read book Thought Economics written by Vikas Shah and published by Michael O'Mara Books. This book was released on 2021-02-04 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Including conversations with world leaders, Nobel prizewinners, business leaders, artists and Olympians, Vikas Shah quizzes the minds that matter on the big questions that concern us all.
Download or read book The Housing Boom and Bust written by Thomas Sowell and published by Basic Books (AZ). This book was released on 2009-05-12 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explains how we got into the current economic disaster that developed out of the economics and politics of the housing boom and bust. The "creative" financing of home mortgages and "creative" marketing of financial securities based on these mortgages to countries around the world, are part of the story of how a financial house of cards was built up--and then collapsed.
Download or read book Citizen Quinn written by Gavin Daly and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2013-09-30 with total page 407 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Citizen Quinn tells the staggering story of the rise and fall of Ireland's richest man: Sean Quinn. A few years ago, Sean Quinn was ranked among the two hundred richest people in the world, with a personal fortune of some $6 billion. Today he is bust, and his businesses have been taken from him. How did it all happen? In Citizen Quinn, Ian Kehoe and Gavin Daly trace the remarkable life of the 'simple farmer's son' who made most of his money through guts and graft long before the excesses of the Celtic Tiger, who brought economic vibrancy to a depressed border region, and who then lost it all through a disastrous move into the insurance business and a multi-billion-euro gamble on the shares of the world's most toxic bank. 'Gripping and well-researched ... paints a picture of a man who is delusional about what has happened and the extent to which he is to blame' Irish Times 'For all those intrigued by by a small Cavan farmer's son came to be one of the richest men in the world, and then lost it all, Citizen Quinn is a must-read' Sunday Business Post 'The book chronicles this truly compelling story, and the story of a compelling man' Irish Mail on Sunday 'A gripping story told in language that people without an MBA can follow' Irish Independent 'A great read' Sean O'Rourke, RTE Radio One
Download or read book Devil Take the Hindmost written by Edward Chancellor and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2000-06-01 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A lively, original, and challenging history of stock market speculation from the 17th century to present day. Is your investment in that new Internet stock a sign of stock market savvy or an act of peculiarly American speculative folly? How has the psychology of investing changed—and not changed—over the last five hundred years? In Devil Take the Hindmost, Edward Chancellor traces the origins of the speculative spirit back to ancient Rome and chronicles its revival in the modern world: from the tulip scandal of 1630s Holland, to “stockjobbing” in London's Exchange Alley, to the infamous South Sea Bubble of 1720, which prompted Sir Isaac Newton to comment, “I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of people.” Here are brokers underwriting risks that included highway robbery and the “assurance of female chastity”; credit notes and lottery tickets circulating as money; wise and unwise investors from Alexander Pope and Benjamin Disraeli to Ivan Boesky and Hillary Rodham Clinton. From the Gilded Age to the Roaring Twenties, from the nineteenth century railway mania to the crash of 1929, from junk bonds and the Japanese bubble economy to the day-traders of the Information Era, Devil Take the Hindmost tells a fascinating story of human dreams and folly through the ages.
Download or read book VC written by Tom Nicholas and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2019-07-09 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “An incisive history of the venture-capital industry.” —New Yorker “An excellent and original economic history of venture capital.” —Tyler Cowen, Marginal Revolution “A detailed, fact-filled account of America’s most celebrated moneymen.” —New Republic “Extremely interesting, readable, and informative...Tom Nicholas tells you most everything you ever wanted to know about the history of venture capital, from the financing of the whaling industry to the present multibillion-dollar venture funds.” —Arthur Rock “In principle, venture capital is where the ordinarily conservative, cynical domain of big money touches dreamy, long-shot enterprise. In practice, it has become the distinguishing big-business engine of our time...[A] first-rate history.” —New Yorker VC tells the riveting story of how the venture capital industry arose from America’s longstanding identification with entrepreneurship and risk-taking. Whether the venture is a whaling voyage setting sail from New Bedford or the latest Silicon Valley startup, VC is a state of mind as much as a way of doing business, exemplified by an appetite for seeking extreme financial rewards, a tolerance for failure and experimentation, and a faith in the promise of innovation to generate new wealth. Tom Nicholas’s authoritative history takes us on a roller coaster of entrepreneurial successes and setbacks. It describes how iconic firms like Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia invested in Genentech and Apple even as it tells the larger story of VC’s birth and evolution, revealing along the way why venture capital is such a quintessentially American institution—one that has proven difficult to recreate elsewhere.
Download or read book Boom and Bust Banking written by David M. Beckworth and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Exploring the forceful renewal of the boom-and-bust cycle after several decades of economic stability, this book is a research-based review of the factors that caused the 2008 recession. It offers cutting-edge diagnoses of the recession and prescriptions on how to boost the economy from leading economists. The book concentrates on the Federal Reserve and its leading role in creating the economic boom and recession of the 2000s. Aimed at professional economists and readers well versed in the basic workings of the economy, it includes innovative proposals on how to avoid future boom-and-bust cycles.
Download or read book The New Secrets of CEOs written by Steve Tappin and published by Nicholas Brealey. This book was released on 2010-12-07 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Steve Tappin and Andrew Cave interview more than two hundred of the world's top CEOs to discover what matters to them, how they run their businesses today, and how they expect their leadership to change in the future. Tappin and Cave offer a glimpse into the business worlds and personal lives of some of the most influential people today.
Download or read book Billion Or Bust Growing a Tech Company in Texas written by Lanham Napier and published by . This book was released on 2019-05 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Billion or Bust! As president and then CEO of cloud provider Rackspace, Lanham Napier grew the company from $5 million to over $1 billion in revenues and $5 billion in market value while creating thousands of jobs. A lifelong Texan, he grew the company in his home state, overseeing the development of new headquarters in San Antonio and leading the company's IPO. When Microsoft, Amazon, and Google entered the industry in force, everything changed . . . including Lanham's relationship with Rackspace executives and the company's board of directors. Lanham Napier is an entrepreneur, innovator, and investor. He and his team at BuildGroup believe in providing smart capital to passionate entrepreneurs who want to build companies for the long haul. Lanham developed his ideas about risk capital through his work as CEO of Rackspace, a formerly public cloud company headquartered in San Antonio, Texas. He grew up a proud Texan, enamored with the state climate, history, diversity, friendliness, and traditions. In his adolescence, Lanham developed a driving desire to improve the world through creating jobs for people (especially Texans). On a date with the woman he would soon marry, he said about himself, "I want to create jobs." Lanham went to Rice University and then Harvard Business School, and he became knowledgeable about high finance through jobs at Merrill Lynch and a private equity fund. When the internet boom hit in the 1990s, Rackspace.com, a managed hosting company founded by several San Antonio innovators, came knocking at Lanham's door. He joined as CFO, with the main responsibility for taking the company public. He considered this the ideal opportunity to create jobs. Before the company could go public, however, the economic bubble burst. Instead of raising new capital to hire people, Lanham oversaw large-scale layoffs-not at all what he had envisioned. Lanham became president of Rackspace and helped Rackers focus on generating profits and making the company as financially self-sustaining as possible. Under his leadership, and with a dedicated and motivated team, the company gained dominance in its industry-leading Fanatical Support TM offering-a differentiated service that gained Rackspace thousands of small and large-business customers. After Lanham was promoted to CEO, the once-tiny cloud company grew so quickly, it converted a defunct mall into phenomenal new headquarters and underwent an IPO. By the time Lanham left in 2014, Rackspace served over 300,000 customers and had over a billion in revenues and $5 billion in market value. It also employed over 5,000 people, largely in the San Antonio area. Lanham details the replacement of one set of 'managed hosting' competitors (telecom companies) by a new set of cloud competitors-Microsoft, Google, and Amazon. Their aggressive entry into the cloud space beginning around 2006 forced Rackspace to continuously differentiate its high-quality offerings, doubling down on Fanatical Support and developing new products and services. The stresses of this tsunami of competition that collectively held cash stores unrivaled in business history caused a formerly strong partnership among Rackspace executives to pull at the seams. The deterioration of the partnership had repercussions at the board and investor levels, as well. Without leadership consensus, the pressing decisions Lanham needed to make as CEO (and board member) took longer and became harder. Lanham's ability to operate with urgency and clear direction became a daily battle, and he left the company.
Download or read book The Bottom Billion written by Paul Collier and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2008-10-02 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Bottom Billion is an elegant and impassioned synthesis from one of the world's leading experts on Africa and poverty. It was hailed as "the best non-fiction book so far this year" by Nicholas Kristoff of The New York Times.
Download or read book The Everything Store written by Brad Stone and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2013-10-15 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The authoritative account of the rise of Amazon and its intensely driven founder, Jeff Bezos, praised by the Seattle Times as "the definitive account of how a tech icon came to life." Amazon.com started off delivering books through the mail. But its visionary founder, Jeff Bezos, wasn't content with being a bookseller. He wanted Amazon to become the everything store, offering limitless selection and seductive convenience at disruptively low prices. To do so, he developed a corporate culture of relentless ambition and secrecy that's never been cracked. Until now. Brad Stone enjoyed unprecedented access to current and former Amazon employees and Bezos family members, giving readers the first in-depth, fly-on-the-wall account of life at Amazon. Compared to tech's other elite innovators -- Jobs, Gates, Zuckerberg -- Bezos is a private man. But he stands out for his restless pursuit of new markets, leading Amazon into risky new ventures like the Kindle and cloud computing, and transforming retail in the same way Henry Ford revolutionized manufacturing. The Everything Store is the revealing, definitive biography of the company that placed one of the first and largest bets on the Internet and forever changed the way we shop and read.
Download or read book Makers and Takers written by Rana Foroohar and published by Currency. This book was released on 2017-09-12 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is Wall Street bad for Main Street America? "A well-told exploration of why our current economy is leaving too many behind." —The New York Times In looking at the forces that shaped the 2016 presidential election, one thing is clear: much of the population believes that our economic system is rigged to enrich the privileged elites at the expense of hard-working Americans. This is a belief held equally on both sides of political spectrum, and it seems only to be gaining momentum. A key reason, says Financial Times columnist Rana Foroohar, is the fact that Wall Street is no longer supporting Main Street businesses that create the jobs for the middle and working class. She draws on in-depth reporting and interviews at the highest rungs of business and government to show how the “financialization of America”—the phenomenon by which finance and its way of thinking have come to dominate every corner of business—is threatening the American Dream. Now updated with new material explaining how our corrupted financial system propelled Donald Trump to power, Makers and Takers explores the confluence of forces that has led American businesses to favor balance-sheet engineering over the actual kind, greed over growth, and short-term profits over putting people to work. From the cozy relationship between Wall Street and Washington, to a tax code designed to benefit wealthy individuals and corporations, to forty years of bad policy decisions, she shows why so many Americans have lost trust in the system, and why it matters urgently to us all. Through colorful stories of both “Takers,” those stifling job creation while lining their own pockets, and “Makers,” businesses serving the real economy, Foroohar shows how we can reverse these trends for a better path forward.
Download or read book The New New Deal written by Michael Grunwald and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-08-14 with total page 545 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a riveting account based on new documents and interviews with more than 400 sources on both sides of the aisle, award-winning reporter Michael Grunwald reveals the vivid story behind President Obama’s $800 billion stimulus bill, one of the most important and least understood pieces of legislation in the history of the country. Grunwald’s meticulous reporting shows how the stimulus, though reviled on the right and the left, helped prevent a depression while jump-starting the president’s agenda for lasting change. As ambitious and far-reaching as FDR’s New Deal, the Recovery Act is a down payment on the nation’s economic and environmental future, the purest distillation of change in the Obama era. The stimulus has launched a transition to a clean-energy economy, doubled our renewable power, and financed unprecedented investments in energy efficiency, a smarter grid, electric cars, advanced biofuels, and green manufacturing. It is computerizing America’s pen-and-paper medical system. Its Race to the Top is the boldest education reform in U.S. history. It has put in place the biggest middle-class tax cuts in a generation, the largest research investments ever, and the most extensive infrastructure investments since Eisenhower’s interstate highway system. It includes the largest expansion of antipoverty programs since the Great Society, lifting millions of Americans above the poverty line, reducing homelessness, and modernizing unemployment insurance. Like the first New Deal, Obama’s stimulus has created legacies that last: the world’s largest wind and solar projects, a new battery industry, a fledgling high-speed rail network, and the world’s highest-speed Internet network. Michael Grunwald goes behind the scenes—sitting in on cabinet meetings, as well as recounting the secret strategy sessions where Republicans devised their resistance to Obama—to show how the stimulus was born, how it fueled a resurgence on the right, and how it is changing America. The New New Deal shatters the conventional Washington narrative and it will redefine the way Obama’s first term is perceived.
Download or read book Class written by Paul Fussell and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 1992 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book describes the living-room artifacts, clothing styles, and intellectual proclivities of American classes from top to bottom.
Download or read book More Money Than God written by Sebastian Mallaby and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2011-05-03 with total page 497 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wealthy, powerful, and potentially dangerous, hedge-find managers have emerged as the stars of twenty-first century capitalism. Based on unprecedented access to the industry, More Money Than God provides the first authoritative history of hedge funds. This is the inside story of their origins in the 1960s and 1970s, their explosive battles with central banks in the 1980s and 1990s, and finally their role in the financial crisis of 2007-9. Hedge funds reward risk takers, so they tend to attract larger-than-life personalities. Jim Simons began life as a code-breaker and mathematician, co-authoring a paper on theoretical geometry that led to breakthroughs in string theory. Ken Griffin started out trading convertible bonds from his Harvard dorm room. Paul Tudor Jones happily declared that a 1929-style crash would be 'total rock-and-roll' for him. Michael Steinhardt was capable of reducing underlings to sobs. 'All I want to do is kill myself,' one said. 'Can I watch?' Steinhardt responded. A saga of riches and rich egos, this is also a history of discovery. Drawing on insights from mathematics, economics and psychology to crack the mysteries of the market, hedge funds have transformed the world, spawning new markets in exotic financial instruments and rewriting the rules of capitalism. And while major banks, brokers, home lenders, insurers and money market funds failed or were bailed out during the crisis of 2007-9, the hedge-fund industry survived the test, proving that money can be successfully managed without taxpayer safety nets. Anybody pondering fixes to the financial system could usefully start here: the future of finance lies in the history of hedge funds.
