"This picture of him isn’t understood," says Cook. "I thought the [Walter] Isaacson book did him a tremendous disservice. It was just a rehash of a bunch of stuff that had already been written, and focused on small parts of his personality. You get the feeling that [Steve’s] a greedy, selfish egomaniac. It didn’t capture the person. The person I read about there is somebody I would never have wanted to work with over all this time. Life is too short.
"Steve cared," Cook continues. "He cared deeply about things. Yes, he was very passionate about things, and he wanted things to be perfect. And that was what was great about him. A lot of people mistook that passion for arrogance. He wasn’t a saint. I’m not saying that. None of us are. But it’s emphatically untrue that he wasn’t a great human being, and that is totally not understood.
"The Steve that I met in early ’98 was brash and confident and passionate and all of those things. But there was a soft side of him as well, and that soft side became a larger portion of him over the next 13 years. You’d see that show up in different ways. There were different employees and spouses here that had health issues, and he would go out of his way to turn heaven and earth to make sure they had proper medical attention. He did that in a major way, not in a minor, ‘Call me and get back to me if you need my help’ kind of way.
"He had the courage to admit he was wrong, and to change, a quality which many people at that level, who have accomplished that much, lack. You don’t see many people at that level who will change directions even though they should. He wasn’t beholden to anything except a set of core values. Anything else he could walk away from. He could do it faster than anyone I’d ever seen before. It was an absolute gift. He always changed. Steve had this ability to go through a learning curve quickly, more quickly than anybody I’ve known, about such a wide variety of things.
Bill Gates: Warren Buffett Just Wrote His Best Annual Letter Ever (LINK)
Robert Shiller: How Scary Is the Bond Market? (LINK)
Related book: 3rd edition of Irrational ExuberanceRay Dalio Sees End Of Supercycle, Issues A Dire Warning (LINK)
Albert Edwards: Excerpts From The First TV Interview In 20 Years (LINK)
Peter Diamandis: Disrupting Real Estate (LINK)
Hans Rosling Discusses Pre-Conceived Notions and a Fact-Based World View (video) [H/T @TimHarford] (LINK)
Tim Harford: Man v machine (again) (LINK)
Sequoia Fund's Annual Report [H/T Santangel's Review] (LINK)
GMO White Paper - De-risking Goes Beyond Interest Rate Risk: The Case for Dynamic Asset Allocation in an LDI Solution (LINK) [Free registration required.]
In this white paper, Catherine LeGraw, a member of GMO's Asset Allocation team, suggests that corporate pension plans currently in the process of de-risking by reducing interest rate risk may also want to evaluate other investment risks they bear, most particularly, valuation risk.Brad Feld: Three Startup Books To Buy Today (LINK) [The books: Startup Opportunities: Know When to Quit Your Day Job, Bend The Curve: Accelerate Your Startup's Success, and The Leader's Guide.]
Out of Kony’s Shadow (LINK)
Related book: Mama Koko and the Hundred Gunmen