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

На превеликий жаль, моя кохана Багіра померла рік тому. Я хотів поділитися цією даниною любові та щастю, які вона принесла в моє життя.

Я люблю тебе і сумую за тобою, Багіро!

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