I received numerous requests for book recommendations in the last few weeks. The rise in the mercury clearly correlates with an increase in reading under umbrellas on the beach.

Here are a few books I really enjoyed over the last few years. Note that my tastes are far ranging and eclectic and cover everything from sci-fi soap operas to behavioral economics.

Beach Reads and Page Turners

• A Year in Provence by Peter Mayle
• Bill the Vampire by Rick Gualtieri
• Circling the Sun by Paula McLain
• Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
• Infinity Born by Douglas E. Richards
• Last Days of Night by Graham Moore
• Murder as a Fine Art by David Morrell
• Old Man’s War by John Scalzi
• Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
• Star Force (Book Series) by BV Larson
• The Art of Racing in the Rain: A Novel by Garth Stein
• The Martian by Andy Weir
• The Utterly Uninteresting and Unadventurous Tales of Fred, the Vampire Accountant by Drew Hayes
• We are Legion (We are Bob) by Dennis Taylor

Non-Fiction

• A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson
• Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow
• Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism by Bhu Srinivasan
• Elon Musk by Ashlee Vance
• How to live: a life of Montaigne by Sarah Bakewell
• Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer
• Letters to a Young Contrarian by Christopher Hitchens
• Modern Romance by Aziz Ansari and Eric Klinenberg
• Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell
• Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari
• Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson
• SuperFreakonomics by Levitt & Dubner
• Surely you’re joking, Mr. Feynman by Richard P. Feynman and Ralph Leighton
• The Big Short by Michael Lewis
• The Black Swan by Nassim Taleb
• The Greatest Trade Ever by Gregory Zuckerman
• The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck by Mark Manson
• The Undercover Economist: Exposing Why the Rich Are Rich, the Poor Are Poor–and Why You Can Never Buy a Decent Used Car! by Tim Hartford
• The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home by Dan Ariely
• What if by Randall Munroe

मुझे बहुत दुःख हुआ कि मेरे प्रिय बघीरा का एक वर्ष पूर्व निधन हो गया । मैं यह श्रद्धांजलि उस प्यार और खुशी के साथ साझा करना चाहता था जो उसने मेरे जीवन में लाई।

मैं तुमसे प्यार करता हूं और तुम्हारी याद आती है बघीरा!

They counted publicly recorded investments and exits to make their ranking. Admittedly they are not
the best metrics. Number of investments only shows how prolific I am, not how good an investor I am.
Likewise many of those exits might be unsuccessful. That said, actual performance is hard to figure out
from Crunchbase and Angelist data, so this is a reasonable proxy. Besides if you are an entrepreneur
looking for money, you probably want to approach a prolific investor 🙂

This is giving me an incentive to keep my Crunchbase and Angelist profiles up to date because the data
they have is completely out of date. I have now made around 400 investments, with 150 exits. Of those
150 exits, I made money on around half and my realized IRR (on actual cash on cash exits) is 67%
(including all the investments on which I lost money).

It’s good to be the king! Now if only my ego and I could still fit in the same room 🙂

You can read the article at:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/alejandrocremades/2018/08/05/top-50-angel-investors-based-on-investment-volume-and-successful-exits/#72fc2dca7748