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Alibaba: The House that Jack Ma Built” .  As an insider, Duncan details how Jack Ma founded Alibaba as a response to seeing more and more Chinese coming online, and then building it into a global conglomerate. One of the first things that first jumps at you in the book is the sheer volume of daily delivery on Alibaba sites. While Amazon ships 3 million packages a day, Alibaba ships 12 million; almost two-thirds of all parcel deliveries in China. Over 400 million people, more than the population of the United States, make purchases on Alibaba’s websites each year. During the period of its IPO, Alibaba became the most valuable Internet company in the world after Google, its shares worth more than Amazon and eBay combined. Do You Know: On Alibaba, the superrich can browse lists of entire islands for sale in Canada, Fiji, or Greece. How did Jack pull this off? Whatever he did to become a business magnate, it’s to be noted that he failed in his first two businesses. In his first ...

Thinking in Bets : Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All The Facts  A bet: a decision about an uncertain future. The implications of treating decisions as bets made it possible for me to find learning opportunities in uncertain environments. Treating decisions as bets, I discovered, helped me avoid common decision traps, learn from results in a more rational way, and keep emotions out of the process as much as possible. Thinking in bets starts with recognizing that there are exactly two things that determine how our lives turn out: the quality of our decisions and luck. Learning to recognize the difference between the two is what thinking in bets is all about. Chapter 1: Life is Poker, Not Chess Pete Carroll was a victim of our tendency to equate the quality of a decision with the quality of its outcome. Poker players have a word for this: “resulting”. When I started playing poker, more experienced players warned me about the dangers of resulting, cautioning me...