7gc summer reading list
As many of our colleagues are taking a much-deserved break this time of year, we share some of our favorite beach reads that we hope you enjoy. Rest assured, this is a great time of year to give your mind a break from technology, finance, and venture capital, and this should hopefully be a selection of topics with a bit more breadth than the daily deal analysis. We hope you enjoy it.
The snowball - warren Buffet and the business of life
Alice Schroeder
This book was written in 2008 by former Morgan Stanley Equity Research Analyst Alice Schroeder. She covered the insurance space and got unprecedented access to the Oracle from Omaha in the only ever-authorized biography of Warren Buffett.
The book shares meaningful details of the full chronology of his life as well as a well-rounded take on the world’s most famous investor’s personal, academic, family, and philanthropic life—alongside great detail of his investments, investment vehicles, the evolution of selling race track horse programs to Buffett partners, and ultimately the acquisition and growth of Berkshire Hathaway from what he called his worst M&A deal to a global investment juggernaut.
The book does an excellent job of giving a real insight into how his mind works across all vectors. He is a deeply complex man with the rare skill of achieving outstanding accomplishments and making them seem simple in description.
Ben Graham deeply shaped his investment training, including the concepts of a margin of safety over book value, extreme price discipline, and the nature of partnership with management teams. The transition from stock picking combined with what we would call today active or a friendly flavor of activist investing all had to evolve with scale into control acquisitions, which was no small feat.
Towards the end of the book, there is a great discussion of how he famously shunned technology investing (due to lack of sector expertise) yet forged one of his most influential bonds, largely over philanthropy, but also shared intellectual curiosity with Bill Gates. He gives an infamous speech at the annual Allen & Co Sun Valley conference during the height of the dot com boom, reminding the audience that the market can only function as a voting machine for so long before reverting to its fundamental need to be a weighing machine (of intrinsic value).
In the fifteen years since its printing, he ultimately held Apple as their largest position (which just last week was reduced by over 50%), parted ways with the Gates Foundation, and following the death of his longtime partner Charlie Munger has moved far more actively into succession planning at Berkshire Hathaway. A constantly evolving mind.
nuclear war
Annie Jacobsen
In Nuclear War, Annie Jacobsen takes readers on a simulated minute-by-minute war game journey detailing the events triggering, escalating, and experiencing the onslaught of a global nuclear conflict.
The book is told from the point of view of a US-based situation room that is executing the United States playbook of nuclear deterrence and interpreting other sovereign states’ actions in real time. It is enthralling to follow along as she informs the reader of the publicly known systems, locations, procedures, and protocols that would be implored. She draws from direct interviews with former defense officials, stories of former false alarms, and other anecdotes specific to each government’s true capabilities (vs. some of the nonsense that is stated by politicians).
The book chronologically simulates each measure and the impacts of attack with the scientific, ecological, and human toll at each stage as well as the repercussion. It is a chilling account of what would happen in what could be a hair-trigger event with ripple effects of the highest order.
hits, flops, and other illusions : my forty years in Hollywood
Ed Zwick
Ed Zwick shares a colorful memoir of his life as a Hollywood Director and often writer/producer. From the onset, he promises not to pull punches and share the good, the bad, and the ugly about the many personalities he directed over 40 years on film and TV.
While an introduction like that seems to promise some salacious details of the movie star’s bad behavior, the book ultimately is really a love letter to all his colleagues and collaborators. There are some gossipy anecdotes, which add a little bit of drama, but it is largely sanguine tiffs and small disagreements that add to the credibility of his story as a top creative talent.
His work received 18 Oscar and 67 Emmy nominations over four decades. He worked with household names like Brad Pitt, Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Cruise, and Denzel Washington, making classic films such as Traffic, Blood Diamond, The Last Samurai, and Legends of the Fall.
His memoir recounts the fascinating details of the creative people who made the work possible and continuously credits his longtime writing partner, Marshall Herskovitz, and his wife, Lynn Liberty Godshall.
Witness to a Prosecution: The Myth of Michael Milken
Richard Sandler
Richard Sandler is the childhood best friend of famed financier Michael Milken. This book dissects the prosecution, punishment, and second act from the point of view of a dear friend who also served as Milken’s personal lawyer throughout his legal difficulties.
While many are familiar with Milken and his massive rise to prominence in the 1980s for effectively democratizing access to capital via junk bonds, his personal story and ultimate prosecution are much more involved. He is credited with discovering that the high-yield market was effectively mispricing risk, and with the right portfolio management, the investments were safer than perceived. This newfound boom in high-yield investing was responsible for the proliferation of leveraged buyouts and arguably created the modern-day private equity industry.
That said, due to his prosecution, indictment, and ultimate guilty plea of securities fraud, his legacy is marred with the excesses of the 1980s. This book walks readers through intimate details of the legal proceedings from the point of view of the head counsel and the armies of specialty legal defense teams employed during the trial. It takes the view that Milken was really a fall guy in the cross hairs of the SEC who would not cooperate with incriminating colleagues and insisted on his innocence, who was primed to take the fall for everyone.
Readers can form their own opinions of his guilt or innocence, and the author does a good job of attempting to paint a balanced picture of the charges and defenses used.
Milken was pardoned by President Trump in 2020, has championed philanthropy for cancer research at an institutional scale, and remains a respected voice in the corporate world. The book is an illuminating view of the white-collar criminal justice system.
Too Big for a Single Mind: How the Greatest Generation of Physicists Uncovered the Quantum World
Tobias Hürter
Tobias Hürter provides a personal and factual account of the amazing story of the collaboration and relationship between the world’s foremost physicists who established the basis for quantum theory in the wake of World War II.
The book follows a generation of scientists and contemporaries, including Einstein, Niels Bohr, Ernst Schrödinger, and Marie Curie, as they independently and collaboratively tackled some of physics’s most complex and existential questions.
The group, rather than the individual, is responsible for what we call modern quantum mechanics and did so largely before, during, and after the propagation of nuclear weapons development. War upended all of their lives, both in their academic and personal pursuits, which informs each of their backgrounds and breakthroughs.
The author does a great job humanizing the brilliant individuals with some of their individual faults on display, as well as the personal dynamics of the group. As the title suggests, the work completed was too impressive to derive from one genius.
