In this book, Ben Horowitz, cofounder of Andreessen Horowitz, draws on his own story of founding, running, selling, buying, managing, and investing in technology companies to offer essential advice and practical wisdom for navigating the toughest problems business schools don't cover. His blog has garnered a devoted following of millions of readers who have come to rely on him to help them run their businesses. A lifelong rap fan, Horowitz amplifies business lessons with lyrics from his favorite songs and tells it straight about everything from firing friends to poaching competitors, from cultivating and sustaining a CEO mentality to knowing the right time to cash in. His advice is grounded in anecdotes from his own rise -- from cofounding the early cloud service provider Loudcloud to building the successful Andreessen Horowitz venture capital firm, both with fellow tech superstar Marc Andreessen (inventor of Mosaic, the Internet's first popular Web browser). This is no polished victory lap; he analyzes issues with no easy answers through his trials, including demoting (or firing) a loyal friend; whether you should incorporate titles and promotions, and how to handle them; if it's OK to hire people from your friend's company; how to manage your own psychology while the whole company is relying on you; what to do when smart people are bad employees; why Andreessen Horowitz prefers founder CEOs, and how to become one; and whether you should sell your company and how to do it.

"The traits that make Sam Zell one of the world's most successful entrepreneurs also make him one of the most surprising, enigmatic, and entertaining mavericks in American business. Self-made billionaire Sam Zell consistently sees what others don't. From finding a market for overpriced Playboy magazines among his junior high classmates, to buying real estate on the cheap after a market crash, to investing in often unglamorous industries with long-term value, Zell acts boldly on supply and demand trends to grab the first-mover advantage. And he can find opportunity virtually anywhere--from an arcane piece of legislation to a desert meeting in Abu Dhabi. "If everyone is going left, look right," Zell often says. To him, conventional wisdom is nothing but a reference point. Year after year, deal after deal, he shuts out the noise of the crowd, gathers as much information as possible, then trusts his own instincts. He credits much of his independent thinking to his parents, who were Jewish refugees from World War II. Talk to any two people and you might get wild swings in their descriptions of Zell. A media firestorm ensued when the Tribune Company went into bankruptcy a year after he agreed to steward the enterprise. At the same time, his razor-sharp instincts are legendary on Wall Street, and he has sponsored over a dozen IPOs. He's known as the Grave Dancer for his strategy of targeting troubled assets, yet he's created thousands of jobs. Within his own organization, he has an inordinate number of employees at every level who are fiercely loyal and have worked for him for decades. Zell's got a big personality; he is often contrarian, blunt, and irreverent, and always curious and hardworking. This is the guy who started wearing jeans to work in the 1960s, when offices were a sea of gray suits. He's the guy who told The Wall Street Journal in 1985, "If it ain't fun, we don't do it." He rides motorcycles with his friends, the Zell's Angels, around the world and he keeps ducks on the deck outside his office. As he writes: "I simply don't buy into many of the made-up rules of social convention. The bottom line is: If you're really good at what you do, you have the freedom to be who you really are." Am I Being Too Subtle?--a reference to Zell's favorite way to underscore a point--takes readers on a ride across his business terrain, sharing with honesty and humor stories of the times he got it right, when he didn't, and most important, what he learned in the process. This is an indispensable guide for the next generation of disrupters, entrepreneurs, and investors"--

Want to know what it really takes to get to the top? Seymour Schulich is one of the most astute, savvy, colourful-and controversial-businessmen in North America. Having amassed a spectacular self-made fortune worth more than a billion dollars, Schulich is better known for his generous philanthropic work: such as his endowment of the Schulich School of Business at York University and, more recently, his $25 million donation to the Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry at the University of Western Ontario. In the summer of 2005, Mr. Schulich donated $25 million to the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Calgary-renamed The Schulich School of Engineering in honour of his donation-followed by a further $20 million donation to the Faculty of Music at McGill University (now known as The Schulich School of Music). Get Smarter is a lifetime's worth of wisdom and insight distilled into a straight-talking, no-nonsense, blunt and often very funny "roadmap" to success. It is meant primarily as a mentoring tool for 20- to 40-year-olds with entrepreneurial aspirations. Why? At age 20-reflecting upon his own experience-Schulich realized he knew very little about the way the world worked. And that's fine. He had lots of years to find out. The problem begins around age 30, he writes, when the average person begins to think he has acquired wisdom. It is only much later that one comes to understand just how little one actually knew. This book attempts to impart the lessons learned by a materially and, more important, relationship-successful older person to today's youth. In fifty short, stand-alone chapters such universal issues as - how to make a decision, manage all types of relationships, choose a career, deal with adversity, plus key business and investing issues are explored. The objective, he writes, paraphrasing Oliver Wendall Holmes, is to stretch young people's minds with new ideas, age-old truths and insights such that they never return to their original dimensions. There are lots of books and manuals out there about how to get rich. This is the only one about how to get smarter. In business...and in life. Praise for Get Smarter : "A marvelous little book..." - Diane Francis, Financial Post "It could be one of the most important business books of the year." - Canadian Business

Eli Broad?s embrace of "unreasonable thinking" has helped him build two Fortune 500 companies, amass personal billions, and use his wealth to create a new approach to philanthropy. He has helped to fund scientific research institutes, K-12 education reform, and some of the world?s greatest contemporary art museums. By contrast, "reasonable" people come up with all the reasons something new and different can?t be done, because, after all, no one else has done it that way. This book shares the "unreasonable" principles-from negotiating to risk-taking, from investing to hiring-that have made Eli Broad such a success.