Remarkable Reading # 30: Adam L. Penenberg's VIRAL LOOP: From Facebook to Twitter, How Today's Smartest Businesses Grow Themselves and WORTHLESS, IMPOSSIBLE AND STUPID: How Contrarian Entrepreneurs Create and Capture Extraordinary Value by Daniel Isenberg

The aim of this section Remarkable Reading is pay a tribute to the books that taught, share trends & insights into where our world in the 21st century is heading in a technology enabled world, and ask the right questions.

Bolded and italics quotes and references do not belong to myself  and belong directly to the author.  The focus is to share valuable insights and teachings from the book to win business for the authors.

Two trends we’ll be touching on are:

1. The Impact of a Viral Internet on Mass Media (carrying on further from here, and here)
2. Further illuminations about entrepreneurialism (carrying on further from here, here & here)

Adam L. Penenbergs VIRAL LOOP: From Facebook to Twitter, How Today's Smartest Businesses Grow Themselves is one of the most crucial and significant books about understanding the nature of the Internet, and what makes things viral. It is my second time re-visiting Adam L. Penenbergs VIRAL LOOP: From Facebook to Twitter, How Today's Smartest Businesses Grow Themselves, and I believe it is the sort of book that should act as a refresher and benchmark every 5 years to keep perspective of what the prominent secrets are in creating viral ideas, products and businesses.

VIRAL LOOP is a thoroughly and carefully researched business book, with relevant examples of modern events, and a precise understanding of historical events.  His ability to shift from a historical narrative to a modern one is fluid and fluent.  A book to revisit many times!

WORTHLESS, IMPOSSIBLE AND STUPID: How Contrarian Entrepreneurs Create and Capture Extraordinary Value by Daniel Isenberg is an exclusive and unique take on what traits and habits successful entrepreneurs have, what the difference is between innovation and entrepreneurialism, and why is it imperative that we do continue to create more entrepreneurial success in uncertain economic conditions in the twenty first century.

Daniel Isenberg has a factual and descriptive writing style, and he manages to convey the same message across in many ways throughout the book without being repetitive at all.  We live in uncertain economic times, and entrepreneurialism and innovation provides extra security & satisfaction in this era.  The essence of understanding entrepreneurialism and innovation is what Daniel Isenberg does acutely & powerfully well.

His thorough research is evident, as is his passion for the topic he’s writing about.  For those with an avid passion and interest in entrepreneurialism, innovation, marketing and start-up’s, WORTHLESS, IMPOSSIBLE AND STUPID: How Contrarian Entrepreneurs Create and Capture Extraordinary Value by Daniel Isenberg is a knock-out!

Take-out’s from VIRAL LOOP:

Introduction, Page 13 - “Although the word “viral” has been co-opted from epidemiology to explain how things spread from user to user over the Internet, there is a stark difference between virality online and what is found in nature.”

Intro, page 14 - “Viral strategies aren't strictly for businesses.  They are also seeping into other arenas - like politics.  And no one was more success in imprinting a viral loop into a campaign than Barack Obama.  “One of my fundamental beliefs from my days at a community organizer is that real change comes from the bottom up,” Obama said in a statement.  “And there’s no more powerful tool for grassroots organizing than the Internet”.

Page 19 - “Over the last decade and a half some of the world’s most successful businesses started from scratch and then rode a viral loop.  Never before in human history has there been the potential to create wealth this fast, on this scale, and starting with so little”

Page 70 - “All have inherent growth traits and, when combined, unleash spectacular multiplier effects.  Each not only spreads; it helps the others to spread.  Email points users to photo share sites, which end up on social network pages to accompany videos, their existence shared via instant messages ands disseminated via peer-to-peer networks, and so on.  Virality is as much a digital imperative as propagating the species is a biological imperative in nature.  It also takes advantage of our very human need to connect with one another”

Page 76 - “Our online habits are prolific, diverse,and virtually instantaneous.  Many of us are media consumers, creators, distributors, and critics, often simultaneously.  But skimming blogs and news sites, downloading music and videos, cruising MySpace, creating and maintaining blogs, and participating in video-games virtual worlds take time.  Posting  videos to YouTube requires drive and determination.  Getting to the next  level of a favourite video game requires persistence. All the time we make choices.  We sift, filter, and ignore.  Even turning it all off is an option. Today marketeers use words like “fractured”, or “fragmented” to describe this new media landscape, where there are hundreds of channels, thousands of publications, websites, and blogs, and a million places to put ads”

Page 79 - “Intel views the netbook as a disruptive technology that could create whole new markets.  China and India offer tremendous opportunity as the Internet becomes a staple of life there.  What’s more, this new generation of chips will be driving everything from handheld gaming machines to GPS gizmos, e-books, readers, Internet tablets, and pocket video and music devices, all juiced with mobile Internet capability.  It makes possible social networking at your deck or on the run”

Page 84 - “the ubiquitous Internet means that anyone, anywhere, can tap into this mobile informational grid, with million of members, spreading from screen to screen to screen.  Entertainment, news, email, texting and phone conversations will be held at 60 miles per hour.  What you do at home --- watching TV, viewing movies, listening to the radio or your iPod, downloading music, accessing MapQuest or global positioning systems, surfing blogs and posting updates to your Facebook profile - you'll be able to do on a bus, in your car, or walking down the street.  Odds are you’ll do it on a smartphone or other small mobile device and this yields almost limitless levels of virality”

Page 158 - “One way to look at the history of the Web is to view it through the prism of viral synergy.  The precipitating event twas the release of the Mosaic and Netscape browsers, which encouraged the creation of sites.  More sites, more reason to venture online, which yielded more sites.  But this collection of seemingly disparate sites weren’t, when taken together, a single network.  Not was Hotmail, ICQ, our Napster, tools built atop the Internet’s viral plain”

Key takeouts from  WORTHLESS, IMPOSSIBLE AND STUPID:

Preface: “In almost every nation on every continent, presidents and prime ministers have the word entrepreneurship on their lips, usually in the same breath as job creation”

Preface ix “I have come to believe that entrepreneurship is part of the human experience, like art, music, theater, and literature.  Although it may be statistically unusual (like the statistical rarity of the good artist), entrepreneurship can and does occur in virtually every society, not just the mythical hot spots (e.g., Silicon Valley).

Introduction, Page 3 - “Thus, in this book, I present entrepreneurship as the contrarian perception, creation, and capture of extraordinary value.”

Page 3- “Entrepreneurship - perceiving, creating, and capturing extraordinary value - is part of the human experience. In this respect, it is similar to art, poetry, music, and storytelling.  Every society’s people have developed unique ways of expressing themselves; entrepreneurship is also a form of self-expression”

Page 4 - “Worthless, Impossible, and Stupid emerged from the ground up from my own thirty-year immersion in the real-life phenomenon of entrepreneurship, as entrepreneur, consultant, partner to entrepreneurs, entrepreneur educator, venture capitalist, and as a private (angel) investor in entrepreneurial ventures”

Chapter 1, page 11 - “Furthermore, much value can be created with what I have called minnovation - that unexpected twist on an existing idea, the incessant, often counterintuitive tweaks of the business model, the minor product adaptation, or even “just” the ability to put together and lead a fantastic team that is supremely resourceful in overcoming obstacles and driving the tweaked idea to market, that is, creating extraordinary value”

Page 22 - “Deservedly so.  Innovation is an important social good, and economic research shows that innovations (especially technical breakthroughs) have been consistent, long-term drivers of economic  and social prosperity over the ages.  Innovation is crucial to societal advance.”

Page 59 - “Entrepreneurs pursue, create and capture extraordinary value in spite of overwhelming negative feedback from the best professionals, the tops in their fields, not to mention “helpful” friends who know with certainty that the idea will never work”

Page 59 - “It requires an enormous leaps of faith by the entrepreneur that he or she has seen something others miss”

Both are worthy contributions to the thriving world of business authors dedicated to uncovering the entrepreneurial and viral nature of the Internet.

You can purchase a copy of Adam L. Penenberg's VIRAL LOOP: From Facebook to Twitter, How Today's Smartest Businesses Grow Themselves on Amazon here, connect with Adam L. Penenberg on Twitter here, and visit his website here.

You can purchase a copy of WORTHLESS, IMPOSSIBLE AND STUPID: How Contrarian Entrepreneurs Create and Capture Extraordinary Value by Daniel Isenberg here, follow him on Twitter here, and visit his website entrepreneurial revolution here.

Thank You!

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