Brad Feld

Month: May 2016


If you are interested in understanding the business implications of blockchain technology, William Mougayar‘s new book – The Business Blockchain: Promise, Practice, and Application of the Next Internet Technology – is a must read.

I’ve known William for about five years. I almost invested in his company Engagio (there’s now a different company by that name) but decided not to. However, our friendship developed and he’s been an amazing host anytime I’ve been in Toronto.

Several years ago William became obsessed with Bitcoin and then the Blockchain. In January 2016 he launched his new book effort around the Blockchain on Kickstarter and I quickly backed him at the GENEROUS Supporter level.

GENEROUS Supporter
++ 50 E-BOOKs of The Business Blockchain.
++ 50 E-BOOKs of Centerless.
++ 50 Print copies of Centerless.
++ Your Name in the Acknowledgements for BOTH books, and on the website.
++ Invitation to Slack private channel
++ 45 mins Conference Call Discussion with your team to discuss your Blockchain strategy.
You will receive the digital copies of the first book in March 2016, and the second book in June 2016.

I love Kickstarter. I have such a delicious habit that allows me to exercise my poor impulse control whenever I feel like it, which if you think about it too hard, is a little contradictory.

William ended up getting a publishing deal with Wiley (through the same editor that I work with and had connected with William a while ago.) Wiley did a great job cranking things out extremely quickly, breaking all the normal publishing time frames, and the book comes out in a week (you can pre-order it on Amazon now.)

I read a draft a month or so ago and gave William a blurb for the book, something I rarely do anymore and only when I’ve read and commented on a draft. But when a friend asks and I’ve had a chance to read the draft, I’m game to do this, like I did for Steve Case’s recent excellent book The Third Wave: An Entrepreneur’s Vision of the Future.

On Sunday, after my two hour run, I laid on the couch and read the production copy of William’s book. He’d cleaned it up a lot since the draft version I’d read and it flowed quickly. While I know plenty about the blockchain – both technically and from a business perspective – I read it with beginners mind, assuming I knew nothing about Bitcoin and the blockchain, other than how to spell them.

It’s a quick read, but has a lot of depth. William is a good writer so it’s easy to read, especially for a book around a topic that is hard to get into. As a bonus, the footnotes and bibliography are solid, giving you lots of places to go if you want to explore more.

If you want to understand the blockchain from a business perspective, this is the book for you.


I read Bill Walton‘s autobiography Back from the Dead on Saturday after my long run. It was a good one and does a great job of capturing a complicated life filled with super high peaks and extremely low valleys.

I was into basketball as a pre-teen. I played forward for a little while but really settled into my role as a guard. I played until junior high school when I stopped playing soccer and basketball and focused entirely on tennis, which lasted until high school when I smashed my last wood racquet on the court. After that, I ran track and cross country and really began my love of long distance running.

I dug Bill Walton when he played for the Trail Blazers. My team as a little kid was the Dallas Chaparrals until the ABA blew up. I didn’t really have a team again until I moved to Boston to go to college, so I just liked individual players. When I eventually stopped paying attention to basketball in high school, even though the Dallas Mavericks were now my home town team (and I won a Dallas Mavericks college scholarship for $1,000 for some reason I can’t remember), I lost touch with pretty much all the players. So it was fun to see Walton re-appear in my junior year at MIT on the Boston Celtics, which re-energized my interest in basketball a tiny bit (it didn’t hurt that the Celtics were completely dominant in 1986.)

In Back from the Dead Walton covers his years playing at UCLA, Phoenix, and Boston in great detail. He also talks about his time on the San Diego – and then LA Clippers – which includes some scathing commentary on the craziness and misery that was the team under Donald Sterling in its early years.

The basketball stories, especially some of the detailed history, is fun to read. I’ve always enjoyed sports history from a first person point of view of a player, and Walton doesn’t disappoint. But that’s simply the foundation for the book.

Walton’s basketball brilliance is interspersed with endless injuries. He talks about them in detail – initially the physical struggles, but then the mental struggles as the pain as well as the time recovering and rebuilding grows. He doesn’t complain, but shows a vulnerable side in his description of his struggles. For a period of time, he’s at the top and bottom of the game at almost the same time, fighting through the injuries until they overwhelm his ability to recover and he finally retires.

He then goes through his career as a sportscaster. Mixed throughout is his love for and journeys with the Grateful Dead. And then his spine breaks, ESPN fires him gratuitously (they eventually rehire him under new management, but he skims over this), and a very long recovery begins.

At this point, you can feel Walton’s pain. Sure – the physical pain is there, but the emotional pain is profound. And his writing about it is powerful. And clean. And clear.

He gets through it and ends the book filled with love and joy and the energy that bubbles throughout his early playing days. Overall, the book is a powerful reminder of this complicated thing we call life and how hard it can be, even when you are at the top.