While in Corona lockdown, I chanced upon a website article about a college student – who raised capital to buy a bankrupt comic-book company with money borrowed from family and friends.
The article was actually a book excerpt and I wanted to know what happens next, so I bought the book on Amazon Kindle app for Rs.149 and in the next 6-8 hours read the book from beginning to end.
Irrationally Passionate by Jason Kothari – therefore is the book I’m reviewing today.
Here’s a link to the book (Price Rs.149 for Ebook on Amazon Kindle): https://amzn.to/2xY4KkA
There is also a book extract available for Amazon Kindle – and that is better and longer than the excerpt available as “Free Sneak-Peaks Download”– which is a shorter form of the free extract available when we visit the book’s Amazon Kindle Page.
I loved the it, because beyond the businesses and beyond Jason’s own story- the book spans across a range of locales from seedy back-lanes and youth gangs of Hong Kong to Rajkot in Gujarat to the bullying in a residential boarding school in USA to the ins and outs of New York and the comic book industry to a kick-boxing school in Thailand.
Compared to many other books by bloggers and entrepreneurs and compared to many business biographies – the book is fast moving and slickly edited and filled to the brim with descriptions and life experiences we can all not just learn business lessons from but can also relate to at an emotional levels as people.
Here are some of things I loved about the book:
(1) The Chapter on Jason’s trip to a Thai Kick-boxing academy to spend a few weeks learning from the best in the world, immediately after he passed out from Wharton is pure gold – the descriptions and the accounts of the training sessions; the pain and the teachers Apidej (fighter of the century) and Wooden-man- personalities he learnt from and also the philosophical lessons he learnt from martial arts are just beautiful.
(2) One of Jason’s achievements was to buy a bankrupt Valiant Entertainment – which produced the comics he loved during his childhood and teen years – and to turn that comic book company into the third biggest after Marvel Comics and DC.
The several chapters cataloguing his struggle and pains trying to turn the comic book manufacturer around are priceless. Especially the part when, while being emboiled in legal paperwork the company decided to print a comic – after many years of the comic book franchise being in suspended animation and how that totally changed their legal position and legal situation in the case- because as compared to he “patent troll” who was trying to hold them down, they were actually “doing stuff with the intellectual property”.
There are other lessons too in the struggle – and his ability to slickly capture and explain the nuances without getting bogged in details is both Jason’s achievement and a place where the editing team involved with this book seems to have done a great job.
Just for these few chapters, this book is worth many times it’s price.
(3) Jason’s descriptions of his time at Housing.com and how he switched their business model to focus on house sales too are amazing and I, as someone immersed in this industry totally loved it.
Though when I think of recommending the book to other laypersons, I wish at times he had included more context information – about the backstory of housing.com ; about the backstory of Softbank and of Softbank’s Masayoshi Son and Nikesh Arora and some of the other characters that feature in the mix.
Each of these characters, and backstories have the potential to be entire books if not series of books in themselves. And as someone who has in the past tried to share my own excitement about the events with friends and family and seen how little people sometimes know about the events and personalities in tech, think it may have been awesome if the book had 2 or 3 or 4 appendices talking of the backstory and news at the time around some of the people and stories he told in summary – so that lying in a bookshelf say 10 years later – people would still be able to make sense out of some of the stories and of the time in history that Jason so beautifully describes.
BTW, linking here (at bottom of Blog-Post) to a the youtube video of a talk by Housing.com co-founder IIT Bombay Alumnus originally from Jammu Advitya Sharma – who writes about the motivation and customer problem they tried to solve when they built Housing.com’s best-in technology; and of his extreme thrill – when for the first time, within hours of allowing people to buy houses online – a Non Resident Indian from USA bought a flat in Bangalore – online over Housing.com.
(4) The chapters on Jason’s experience with Snapdeal – where he was the Chief Strategy and Investment officer is superb in giving an insider’s view. It is educative to read about how the levers worked inside SnapDeal and FreeCharge which at the time was part of SnapDeal whose interim CEO role Jason accepted in a snap.
He talks about how he worked very hard to ensure not just the acquisition FreeCharge by a bank – but also to ensure a positive future for his former employees.
But here too, I feel that in interest of brevity and conciseness he misses a lot of the context about the market situation and the apparent craziness gripping the tech world at the time. I hope that future editions would have maybe an appendix or maybe snippets of extra information – that would help readers 5 or 10 years from now or maybe folks from Europe or Middle East – to get a better sense of the events and the context at the time.
(5) The book wraps up with chapters that talk of Jason’s induction into the board of directors at EMAAR – the middle-eastern construction giant. The book wraps up with some words of advice for entrepreneurs and startups – where he talks of what Jason considers the “7 pillars of startups” and “4 principles for life”.
All in all, this is a beautifully written book – and totally worth reading.
For the sake of readers not as closely immersed in the context of startup ecosystems in India and for the sake of readers reading 5 or 10 years from now, I hope and pray that just like the lean startup philosophy’s ideas of iteration and of continuous improvement, Jason too publishes a second edition or second iteration of the book that includes a little more context information about the people, personalities and the times he describes.
Here’s wishing Jason Kothari all the best ahead – and praying that his life decisions of move back from the USA to India and his love for his country and of a righteous balanced life – will touch the world and leave a permanent impression on humanity and on the universe!!!
Addendum:
(1) Here’s the video mentioned and promised earlier in the post, about Housing.com Co-Founder Advitya Sharma – and the pain-points housing.com tried to solve for.
(2) An interesting interview by Jason Kothari about how he rebuilt Housing.com – a lot of the book talks about how he had to shift away from some of the things like focus on rentals housing.com was built on – and this is an interview of Jason from the time he actually was in the thick of things.
(3) Here’s a TEDx Talk by Jason Kothari – Awesome Talk – but I think the books much much much better due to the colourful and descriptive in the way it weaves events together into a coherent narrative!