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Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future

In the spirit of Steve Jobs and Moneyball, Elon Musk is both an illuminating and authorized look at the extraordinary life of one of Silicon Valley’s most exciting, unpredictable, and ambitious entrepreneurs—a real-life Tony Stark—and a fascinating exploration of the renewal of American invention and its new “makers.”

Elon Musk spotlights the technology and vision of Elon Musk, the renowned entrepreneur and innovator behind SpaceX, Tesla, and SolarCity, who sold one of his Internet companies, PayPal, for $1.5 billion. Ashlee Vance captures the full spectacle and arc of the genius’s life and work, from his tumultuous upbringing in South Africa and flight to the United States to his dramatic technical innovations and entrepreneurial pursuits.

Vance uses Musk’s story to explore one of the pressing questions of our age: can the nation of inventors and creators who led the modern world for a century still compete in an age of fierce global competition? He argues that Musk—one of the most unusual and striking figures in American business history—is a contemporary, visionary amalgam of legendary inventors and industrialists including Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, Howard Hughes, and Steve Jobs. More than any other entrepreneur today, Musk has dedicated his energies and his own vast fortune to inventing a future that is as rich and far-reaching as the visionaries of the golden age of science-fiction fantasy.

Thorough and insightful, Elon Musk brings to life a technology industry that is rapidly and dramatically changing by examining the life of one of its most powerful and influential titans.

Google I/O 2014 – The design sprint: from Google Ventures to Google[x]

The design sprint is a process for prototyping and testing any product in 5 days. Using real-world examples, we’ll show how to move faster and increase the overall effectiveness (and happiness!) of your whole team. And we’ll offer techniques for teams of any size, from two-person startup to giant enterprise.

The Power of Building the Best Product in Your Market with SiteGround’s Tenko Nikolov

Foundr Magazine Podcast EP136: The Power of Building the Best Product in Your Market with SiteGround’s Tenko Nikolov

For as long as he can remember, Tenko Nikolov has been obsessed with computers. From his very first computer at the age of 7, he fell in love with the simple green and black screen and was fascinated with all that this technology could offer.

Of course, he also got into some trouble, even accidentally hacking into a large US corporation’s network with a friend at the age of 13. After a few days of fun messing with their systems and bragging to their friends, the duo eventually sent an email to the company letting them know what they did and how they did it.

The next few days were agonizing as they waited for a response, petrified that an FBI agent would be showing up to his doorstep in Bulgaria. To his surprise, however, the company reached out, thanked them for finding a security loophole and even asked them how much they’d like to be paid for finding it in the first place.

“I realized that I can actually be paid for the thing that I love to do most,” Nikolov says.

Instead of asking for payment, Nikolov asked for his own server that he could play around with. After getting his first taste of entrepreneurship, he began seeing how far he could push the limits of computer technology. Looking back at it now, Nikolov pinpoints this as the exact moment that led him to develop SiteGround, a web-hosting server and provider.

But what makes SiteGround stand out from the thousands of competitors out there, is Nikolov’s dedication to innovating.