BlogSat

This post has a backstory, and needs a little bit of setup so bear with me. :-) I recently found out that an acquaintance was leaving the company. Let's call him PersonA . I met PersonA just twice, saw a couple of emails from him to some common email lists and had exactly one long conversation with him about product strategy.  PersonA was young and I suspect this was his first job though he was here for a couple of years when we had this chat .  I saw his goodbye email and I could tell there was some angst there - he seemed to leave because he thought he didn't quite fit. I remember thinking, when I had my one long conversation with him, that he was exactly like a good friend of mine - let's call this person  PersonB . PersonB I know well from before both of us joined this company. PersonB didn't quite fit the template of a Google PM, but did well here for a while and enjoyed himself... until a change of managers and circumstances meant that he didn't. He

Its Week 3 of the Book-a-Week project. The bad news is that I'm behind. The good news is that I'm not that behind :-), so should be able to catch up. I'm about 2.4 books in at the end of Week 3. I'm expecting to keep the pattern of non-fiction followed by fiction going. Thanks everyone for all the suggestions. It means my list of what-to-read-next is pretty set. Quick reviews of the first couple of books I read below, and I'm going to keep updating them at Goodreads as well. The Hard Thing about Hard Things : A couple of people actually pinged me to ask why the heck I hadn't rated the book higher - I gave it 4 stars. But I'd actually given it 3 first before changing my rating. I should clarify. If you haven't read Ben Horowitz's stuff before, this book is just gold. Just "Good PM, Bad PM" and "Wartime/Peacetime CEO" deserve a 5-star rating. However if you follow his blog already, you are really looking for more co

Well - let's give one more shot to reviving the blog. :-) The usual - work craziness and now the dude in the picture - have meant that I've been neglecting the blog even longer than usual. I'm hoping to fix that. Three months into the year, I've failed miserably at one of the resolutions I was hoping to keep - to read many more books. So I'm trying the public declaration trick. I'm hoping sharing the resolution will add some pressure on me to keep it. I want to read a book a week going forward for the rest of the year. A 50-ish books/year lets me plan for reading a lot of both fiction and non-fiction, and take a bunch of chances i.e. read some books that may not be generally reviewed well but I think I'm likely to find interesting. I started this week with Ben Horowitz's   The Hard Thing about Hard Things . I'm a quarter of the way through - so far its pretty good. If you have suggestions for other books I should look at for the rest of the