I know that was a mouthful, but if you want a little taste, just read the Wikipedia page for Sergei Magnitsky which is central to the second half of the book, where Browder shifts from successful financier to international human rights activist. It then shifted into an incredibly complex story of intrigue, corruption, lawlessness, injustice, and murder all at the hands of the Russian political system. It starts out as the autobiography of Bill Browder and his creation of a massively successful hedge fund ( Hermitage Capital Management) that was one of the first non-Russian investors in Russia in the mid to late 1990s. It reads like a John le Carré novel, except it is non-fiction.

Bill Browder’s Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man’s Fight for Justice is one of the best books I’ve read this year. In the past 24 hours I’ve read a must read. One of the primary ways I develop this frame of reference is by reading books (for the current list of what I’m reading you can always take a look at my Goodreads page.) I’m not a particularly good book ranker – so I just give five stars for “must reads”, four stars for “read if you like the topic”, and three stars for “meh – some interesting stuff here.” If I start something that I find completely uninteresting, I stop reading it and don’t post it. I’ve used the past month to refocus myself on areas that I feel like I can impact. And, I’ve started on my next book, Give First, which should come out in Q417 (again published by my friends at Wiley.) I’m working on a second edition of Startup Opportunities, which will come out sometime in Q117 and be published by Wiley since FG Press is defunct. The third edition of Venture Deals comes out on December 12th and I feel like Jason and I made some strong updates to it.

Some of that writing has appeared on this blog – and will continue to appear here and on two other blogs – Venture Deals and Startup Revolution, both of which have lain fallow for a while. So, I went back to writing and reading books during all the time that I had previously occupied myself with what passes in 2016 for real time news and current events. I needed some emotional distance from the election and decided I wanted some intellectual distance as well. Prior to this election cycle I rarely read online news and almost never watched news on TV, so that was easy to stop as well. After the election, I took a break from social media.

Rednotice book