Finance Biography

The early years of venture capital were a far cry from today’s very public dealings. Alan Patricof, one of the pioneers of the venture arena, offers a behind-the-scenes look at the past 50 years of the industry. From buying stock in Apple when its market valuation was only $60 million to founding New York Magazine to investing in AOL, Audible, and more recently, Axios, his discerning approach to finding companies is almost peerless.

Here is a bold new history of economics, the dramatic story of how the great economic thinkers built a rigorous social science without peer.

During Wall Street's last big bull market, there were brokers in $3,000 suits, billion-dollar IPO's, and 30-year-olds making $100,000 a month. And then there was Louis Pasciuto, who came from Staten Island at the age of 19 and discovered one indelible truth about himself: He was born to steal. This is the astounding, true story of the rise and fall of this fast-talking, street-smart wiseguy, as well as the insidious ways the Mob infiltrates, then controls, Wall Street.

There is the Bitcoin story of the headlines, but there is a more important one behind them: tangled plots sprawling like roots deep underground, entire worlds in which we are just passersby. In Once a Bitcoin Miner, journalist and author Ethan Lou takes listeners on a richly told first-person narrative through the proverbial cryptocurrency Wild West.

Cohen shows how smart guys like Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel, and Mark Zuckerberg fell in love with a radically individualistic ideal and then mainstreamed it. With these very rich men leading the way, unions, libraries, public schools, common courtesy, and even government itself have been pushed aside to make way for supposedly efficient market-based encounters via the Internet. Donald Trump's election victory was an inadvertent triumph of the "disruption" that Silicon Valley has been pushing. A society that belittles civility, empathy, and collaboration can easily be led astray.

Here's a biographical profile of Henry J. Kaiser, a great industrialist and philanthropist who had a profound impact on America's ability to prevail in World War II. People tend to regard the great American titans of the past as robber barons, men who made their fortunes off the backs of the oppressed, flaunting laws and living like nabobs while others had to scratch for a living.

Part memoir, part manifesto, NFTs Are a Scam is the story of Bobby Hundreds’s journey into NFTs, Web3, and the Metaverse from 2020 to 2022. Hundreds’s first memoir, This is Not a T-Shirt, told his streetwear brand’s story of community, commerce, and style. Now, he wants to tell the story of when a community itself builds the brand. In NFTs Are a Scam, Hundreds’s shares his thoughts and philosophy around a decentralized digital revolution. Are NFTs a cult or a religion? And who do their followers pray to?

In Alpha Girls, award-winning journalist Julian Guthrie takes listeners behind the closed doors of venture capital, an industry that transforms economies and shapes how we live. We follow the lives and careers of four women who were largely written out of history - until now. These women, juggling work and family, shaped the tech landscape we know today while overcoming unequal pay, actual punches, betrayals, and the sexist attitudes prevalent in Silicon Valley and in male-dominated industries everywhere.

The story of a student who went to extraordinary lengths - including living in a van on a campus parking lot - to complete his education without sacrificing his financial future. In a frank and self-deprecating voice, memoirist Ken Ilgunas writes about the existential terror of graduating from college with $32,000 in student debt. Inspired by Thoreau, Ilgunas set himself a mission: get out of debt as soon as humanly possible. To that end, he undertook an extraordinary three-year transcontinental journey.

It was a time when anything seemed possible, instant wealth, glittering fame, fabulous luxury, and for a run of magical weeks in the spring and summer of 1920, Charles Ponzi made it all come true. Promising to double investors' money in three months, the dapper, charming Ponzi raised the "rob Peter to pay Paul" scam to an art form and raked in millions at his office in downtown Boston.

There is only one CEO in recent times who has faced ¿ and succeeded at ¿ the extraordinary challenges of leading three major companies ¿ Gillette, Nabisco, and Kraft ¿ into prosperous futures by doing what matters on the fundamentals. That CEO is Jim Kilts. In this vivid first-person account he reveals his system for success that is both cutting-edge and back-to-basics.

In September 2011, sheriff’s deputies in Iowa encountered three ethnic Chinese men near a field where a farmer was growing corn seed under contract with Monsanto. What began as a simple trespassing inquiry mushroomed into a two-year FBI operation in which investigators bugged the men’s rental cars, used a warrant intended for foreign terrorists and spies, and flew surveillance planes over corn country - all in the name of protecting trade secrets of corporate giants Monsanto and DuPont Pioneer.

As Alexis Ohanian learned when he helped to co-found the immensely popular reddit.com, the internet is the most powerful and democratic tool for disseminating information in human history. And when that power is harnessed to create new communities, technologies, businesses or charities, the results can be absolutely stunning. In this audiobook, Alexis will share his ideas, tips and even his own doodles about harnessing the power of the web for good, and along the way, he will share his philosophy with young entrepreneurs all over the globe.

Someone in the U.S. is an identity-theft victim every four seconds. It is extremely easy for anyone from anywhere in the world to assume your identity and, in a matter of hours, devastate your life in ways that can take years to recover from. Stealing Your Life is the reference everyone needs, by an unsurpassed authority on the latest identity-theft schemes.

You would have to live under a rock not to know who Alan Greenspan is. But that's probably about as much as you know. Leave it to investigative reporter Bob Woodward to uncover the story of Greenspan and the power he wields as head of the Federal Reserve.

In March 2006, the world’s richest men sipped champagne in an opulent New York hotel. They were preparing to compete in a poker tournament with ­million-dollar stakes. At the card table that night was Peter Muller, who managed a fabulously successful hedge fund called PDT. With him was Ken Griffin, who was the tough-as-nails head of Citadel Investment Group. There, too, were Cliff Asness, the sharp-tongued, mercurial founder of the hedge fund AQR Capital Management, and Boaz Weinstein, chess “life master” and king of the credit-default swap.

In the 30 years after the Civil War, the United States blew by Great Britain to become the greatest economic power in world history. That is a well-known period in history, when titans like Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, and J. P. Morgan walked the earth. But as Charles R. Morris shows us, the platform for that spectacular growth spurt was built in the first half of the century. By the 1820s, America was already the world's most productive manufacturer and the most intensely commercialized society in history.

In 2008, when the Bitcoin Whitepaper was published online, the technology world changed forever. Hero / Villain: Satoshi: The Man Who Built Bitcoin tells the story of how an awkward Australian security specialist first created something revolutionary under the moniker “Satoshi Nakamoto” and how he spent every moment thereafter either in self-imposed hiding or in court trying to protect his invention.

Britain's rise to global dominance from the 16th century owed as much to the vision and creativity of traders, industrialists and bankers as it did to wars of conquest fought by military men. Dragons tells the story of British business endeavours through the lives of ten titans of commerce. Beginning with the Tudor merchants who transformed England's economy via trade with the New World, Liam Byrne traces a fascinating and eye-opening entrepreneurial line.

In December 2008, the world watched as master financier Bernard L. Madoff was taken away from his posh Manhattan apartment in handcuffs, accused of swindling thousands of innocent victims - including friends and family - out of billions of dollars in the world's largest Ponzi scheme. Madoff went to jail; he will spend the rest of his life there. But what happened to his devoted wife and sons?