5 Books Like The Network State

The Infinite Machine is the beach-read Ethereum book.

Ethereum is the second-largest blockchain out there. It’s the one that’s sometimes referred to as The World Computer, because it can function like an actual computer, but no one owns it. Thousands of people are running it.

If that sounds very abstract and weird, well: it is. Cami Russo walks readers through how that functionality got used in the early days, plus a couple of the really big screw-ups made with this complex global machine. 

It’s a fun book, for as abstract as it all is. She manages to go out and find a bunch of the relevant characters from those early events and bring them to life. 

Most of the talk about cryptocurrency in the mainstream is about Bitcoin, but, the truth is, most of the activity that drives that conversation happens on Ethereum. If you want to understand the weird… show more.

The Cryptopians covers basically the same ground as The Infinite Machine, but in much, much more detail. 

Shin very much sets out to dig the skeletons out of the closet from the earliest days of the Ethereum adventure. 

The thing you have to understand about how Ethereum started is this: A 19-year-old gawky immigrant kid who was completely conflict averse came up with the vision. A bunch of moderately rich guys and hacker types heard his ideas and saw money start to burst out of their eyeballs. They all moved into a house together and tried to build it and a lot of personal rivalries and drama ensued. 

Then there were a couple of gigantic early screw-ups that nearly sank the whole thing. 

Shin goes through it all blow by blow. There are a lot of “he said/she said” sort of moments in the book.

One of the wildest things… show more.

Crypto’s perhaps most important thinker is Vitalik Buterin, the 30-year-old founder of the blockchain Ethereum. Buterin is not only a technological savant but also a deft philosopher and political theorist; he is driven by the desire to improve not just financial systems but many other unjust structures in the world.

This collection of essays over a decade shows Buterin’s maturation as his ingenious ideas collide with harsh realities. 

Jonathan Taplin’s excellent book focuses on just four billionaires–Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, and Marc Andreessen. What I found special about this book is that it shows how these billionaires have created and sold utopian futures to the world, whether they come in the form of the metaverse, cryptocurrency, space travel, or transhumanism.

Even more disturbing is Taplin’s argument that under the pretense of these utopias, billionaires have been able to grow their wealth and power without interference from the government. Meanwhile, inequality continues to expand, nature is replaced with technology, and oligarchy gets more and more entrenched. In short, billionaire utopian visions are a distraction from the real and present danger of gross economic inequality.

Other books will teach you to focus on outcomes, but then the next question is what kind of outcomes are worth focusing on. This is where Lean Analytics comes in. The real gem from this book is the model of Five Stages of Growth, suggesting a typical progression of outcomes that product managers should follow when growing a product from an idea to a marketplace winner. It’s an invaluable thinking tool for new and experienced product managers alike. In addition, the book documents what kind of metrics various successful products tracked throughout growth, and provides some amazingly useful reference values for key business metrics for different categories of software products.

This book is great as an introduction to business metrics for new product managers, focusing specifically on software products. I recommend reading this before any other metrics book, as it’s very practical and relatable.