The One Book You Need for Starting a Company
Bullish crypto leader who has a knack for understanding technology. That’s a quick summarization of who Balaji is. He’s a technologist with tons of wisdom, but his views on blockchain and cryptocurrency can be a lot at times for those not within the field.
Eric Jorgenson’s “The Anthology of Balaji” consolidates a lot of this wisdom into one insurmountable tome of wisdom.
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Who is Balaji Srinivasan?
“I suppose what I really am is the id of technology.” – 15
Balaji Srinivasan is an early investor of Bitcoin, co-founded a clinical genomics company, an angel investor, and acted as the CTO of Coinbase.
Throughout his anthology we get a closer look into areas he views regarding technology, truth, and building the future. We’ll dive into each section highlighting some key points before wrapping up with a final review.
Part I: Technology
My least favorite section overall. This section summarizes how he sees the future market and life as a whole:
“Universal healthcare is not enough. We need eternal life.” – 80
Granted Balaji was the CTO of Coinbase, these views are a bit extreme to say the least; however, there are nuggets of wisdom on blockchain and data throughout. These views are less on the extreme side and do salvage this section a bit with some relevance:
“The last era was big data. The next era is verifiable data.” – 68
Part II: Truth
A well-made section. The content covered a wide breadth of media: how to verify truth and the typical trends, the evolution of companies into, and the future of media.
“I see a strong correlation between lack of technical ability and naive trust in social authority. THe only true authority is raw data.” – 99
“Every citizen is becoming a journalist, and every company is becoming a media company.” – 161
It summarizes the ever-changing media landscape and is great foresight on navigating this era of media.
Part III: Building the Future
My favorite section! In fact, the sections on founding a company & evolution were one of the favorites of the book. Lots of good insights and Balaji distills a lot of entrepreneurial content into easy to understand messaging:
“Creating frontiers is important. Frontiers give pioneers space to innovate without affecting those who don’t consent to the experiment.” – 177
“You have 168 hours per week, ~112 awake. Substitute capital for time, technology for both. Avoid travel. Cancel meetings. Focus on doing.” – 244
“Build your wealth, then help others build theirs.” – 257
Extra!
A final wrap up with recommendations for reading to dive deeper. This one quote wrapped it up fondly:
“The more history you read, the more you realize that the past is as surprising as the future.” – 270
Rating
Ratings will now be from 5 tiers. Each tier will be either 0 (sucks), 0.5 (ok), or 1 (fascinating – surpasses).
Entertainment: 0.5 (includes graphics)
Insights: 1 (media & founding information ++)
Storytelling: 0 (tells most of the time, not showing)
Relevance: 1 (tech progression + media consumption)
Clarity: 1 (very clear messaging throughout. Little to no fluff)
Interested in a similar book?
Check out my review on The Almanack of Naval Ravikant.
