Jessica Livingston
Co-Founder of Y Combinator
Book Recommendations:
Recommended by Jessica Livingston
Written with full cooperation from top management, including cofounders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, this is the inside story behind Google, the most successful and most admired technology company of our time, told by one of our best technology writers. Few companies in history have ever been as successful and as admired as Google, the company that has transformed the Internet and become an indispensable part of our lives. How has Google done it? Veteran technology reporter Steven Levy was granted unprecedented access to the company, and in this revelatory book he takes readers inside Google headquarters—the Googleplex—to show how Google works. While they were still students at Stanford, Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin revolutionized Internet search. They followed this brilliant innovation with another, as two of Google’s earliest employees found a way to do what no one else had: make billions of dollars from Internet advertising. With this cash cow, Google was able to expand dramatically and take on other transformative projects: more efficient data centers, open-source cell phones, free Internet video (YouTube), cloud computing, digitizing books, and much more. The key to Google’s success in all these businesses, Levy reveals, is its engineering mind-set and adoption of such Internet values as speed, openness, experimentation, and risk taking. After its unapologetically elitist approach to hiring, Google pampers its engineers—free food and dry cleaning, on-site doctors and masseuses—and gives them all the resources they need to succeed. Even today, with a workforce of more than 23,000, Larry Page signs off on every hire. But has Google lost its innovative edge? With its newest initiative, social networking, Google is chasing a successful competitor for the first time. Some employees are leaving the company for smaller, nimbler start-ups. Can the company that famously decided not to be evil still compete? No other book has ever turned Google inside out as Levy does with In the Plex.
Recommended by Jessica Livingston
by Michael J. Mauboussin·You?
by Michael J. Mauboussin·You?
“Much of what we experience in life results from a combination of skill and luck.” — From the Introduction The trick, of course, is figuring out just how many of our successes (and failures) can be attributed to each—and how we can learn to tell the difference ahead of time. In most domains of life, skill and luck seem hopelessly entangled. Different levels of skill and varying degrees of good and bad luck are the realities that shape our lives—yet few of us are adept at accurately distinguishing between the two. Imagine what we could accomplish if we were able to tease out these two threads, examine them, and use the resulting knowledge to make better decisions. In this provocative book, Michael Mauboussin helps to untangle these intricate strands to offer the structure needed to analyze the relative importance of skill and luck. He offers concrete suggestions for making these insights work to your advantage. Once we understand the extent to which skill and luck contribute to our achievements, we can learn to deal with them in making decisions. The Success Equation helps us move toward this goal by: • Establishing a foundation so we better understand skill and luck, and can pinpoint where each is most relevant • Helping us develop the analytical tools necessary to understand skill and luck • Offering concrete suggestions about how to take these findings and put them to work Showcasing Mauboussin’s trademark wit, insight, and analytical genius, The Success Equation is a must-read for anyone seeking to make better decisions—in business and in life.
Recommended by Jessica Livingston
by P. G. Wodehouse, Mint Editions·You?
by P. G. Wodehouse, Mint Editions·You?
“Mr Wodehouse's idyllic world can never stale. He will continue to release future generations from captivity that may be more irksome than our own. He has made a world for us to live in and delight in.” -Evelyn Waugh “Wodehouse is one of the funniest and most productive men who ever wrote in English. He is far from being a mere jokesmith: he is an authentic craftsman, a wit and humorist of the first water, the inventor of a prose style which is a kind of comic poetry.” -Richard Voorhees First published in 1923, The Inimitable Jeeves follows young Bertie Wooster as he complicates every attempt to aid the easily confused Bingo Little’s pursuit of true love. Disaster surely awaits, unless they can trust in the intervention of Bertie’s serenely competent valet, Jeeves. The Inimitable Jeeves is a chain of short stories masterfully fused into a novel and one of the best-known books about the author’s most famous characters, Bertie Wooster and Jeeves. Well meaning, but often clueless, man-about-town Bertie narrates his adventures with assorted friends and relatives. These deal primarily with his chum Bingo Little’s astounding ability to fall instantly and randomly in love and then conceive of startlingly absurd methods of getting himself into his beloved’s good graces. Wodehouse’s joyous farce showcases his trademark vision of a timeless and comfortable England, a collection of generally less-than-perceptive characters, and most especially his sublime prose- deadpan, precise and ceaselessly inventive. The author’s vision and style have proven uniquely his own, resist any attempt at imitation and will continue to offer readers entrance into a world of charm and urbane hilarity. With an eye-catching new cover, and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of The Inimitable Jeeves is both modern and readable. Since our inception in 2020, Mint Editions has kept sustainability and innovation at the forefront of our mission. Each and every Mint Edition title gets a fresh, professionally typeset manuscript and a dazzling new cover, all while maintaining the integrity of the original book. With thousands of titles in our collection, we aim to spotlight diverse public domain works to help them find modern audiences. Mint Editions celebrates a breadth of literary works, curated from both canonical and overlooked classics from writers around the globe.