8 holiday books on bubbles

With the holiday coming up, many fellow entrepreneurs and investors turn off their computers and read a book or two before coming back relaxed and ready for the new year. This year, the theme continued to be “Is there a startup bubble?” While I won’t attempt to answer that question directly, I’ve pulled together eight of my favorite books on bubbles that are worth reading.

Read at least the first two… but the top 5 are all a must from my bookshelf.

1. Devil Take the Hindmost: a History of Financial Speculation – Want a deeper understanding of financial speculation and the history of speculating on commodities, startups, mature businesses, and many other investments that have attracted speculation over the millenia. If you want a better sense for what a bubble looks and feels like… read this book.
2. Inside the Bubble – Fictionalized story, based on living every day inside the dotcom bubble of the late 90s.
3. Origins of the Crash: The Great Bubble and Its Undoing – Here’s a deeper dive specifically on the dotcom bubble.
4. Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder – Curious about how to build businesses with a high potential upside and not that much downside?
5. The Outsiders: Eight Unconventional CEOs and Their Radically Rational Blueprint for Success – As private market investors we focus on team a lot, here’s some great insight into how a great mature company CEO operates their business.
6. The Great Depression: A Diary – No, not founder depression – but a good read if you want to dig deeper into the social atmosphere post-bubble.
7. Manias, Panics and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises, Sixth Edition – More on the crash part – a great read though and highly recommended.
8. A Short History of Financial Euphoria – More on the euphoria part – this one reads really well so great to read if you’re not into reading.

Of course I have a bonus for you. If you’re not sure whether we’re in a tech/startup bubble or not these days, I want to offer you 50% off my bestselling book Startup Wealth. Learn how the best investors approach investing and use these insights to become a better investor yourself or raise money from investors more efficiently. If everyone had this knowledge we definitely wouldn’t be in a bubble… so maybe you should give this book to a few folks for the holidays since it’s on sale and we all could use it.

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