The Adventure Capitalist

A gripping tale of adventure, danger and humor, peppered with investment tips from a Wall Street legend The best-selling author of Investment Biker takes a fascinating journey through the world's economic situation in a convertible yellow Mercedes. This is the motivating story of entrepreneur Jim Rogers, dubbed "the Indiana Jones of finance" by Time magazine, who made his fortune playing the stock market and then embarked on his lifelong dream adventure. Together with his fiancee, Paige Parker, he set out on a three-year drive around the world that would ultimately set the Guinness world record for the longest continuous car journey. Their trip winds its way through 116 countries - through blizzards, deserts, epidemics and war zones - to discover failing economies and the new boom countries not from dry and potentially flawed statistics, but by experiencing life itself. This is a gripping tale of travel and adventure; along the way they encounter danger, love and farce. It is also a highly readable account of world economies: you won't find a more enjoyable way to be introduced to the investment potential of Bolivia, or the cultural changes afoot in North Korea. Finally it is also an inward journey in which Rogers moves from the restless traveler to husband and father, hoping one day to introduce his daughter to his own passion for travel. JIM ROGERS entered the investment business in 1968 with $600 dollars in his pocket. By 1980, at 37 years of age, he had left Wall Street with enough money to satisfy a lifelong appetite for adventure.

Imagine a capitalist paradise. An island utopia governed solely by the rules of the market and inspired by the fictions of Ayn Rand and Robinson Crusoe. Sound far-fetched? It may not be. The past half century is littered with the remains of such experiments in what Raymond Craib calls “libertarian exit.” Often dismissed as little more than the dreams of crazy, rich Caucasians, exit strategies have been tried out from the southwest Pacific to the Caribbean, from the North Sea to the high seas, often with dire consequences for local inhabitants. Based on research in archives in the US, the UK, and Vanuatu, as well as in FBI files acquired through the Freedom of Information Act, Craib explores in careful detail the ideology and practice of libertarian exit and its place in the histories of contemporary cap­italism, decolonization, empire, and oceans and islands. Adventure Capitalism is a global history that intersects with an array of figures: Fidel Castro and the Koch brothers, American segregationists and Melanesian socialists, Honolulu-based real estate speculators and British Special Branch spies, soldiers of fortune and English lords, Orange County engineers and Tongan navigators, CIA operatives and CBS news executives, and a new breed of techno-utopians and an old guard of Honduran coup leaders. This is not only a history of our time but, given the new iterations of privatized exit—seasteads, free private cities, and space colonization—it is also a history of our future.

An engaging guide to excelling in today's venture capital arena Beginning in 2005, Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson, managing directors at Foundry Group, wrote a long series of blog posts describing all the parts of a typical venture capital Term Sheet: a document which outlines key financial and other terms of a proposed investment. Since this time, they've seen the series used as the basis for a number of college courses, and have been thanked by thousands of people who have used the information to gain a better understanding of the venture capital field. Drawn from the past work Feld and Mendelson have written about in their blog and augmented with newer material, Venture Capital Financings puts this discipline in perspective and lays out the strategies that allow entrepreneurs to excel in their start-up companies. Page by page, this book discusses all facets of the venture capital fundraising process. Along the way, Feld and Mendelson touch on everything from how valuations are set to what externalities venture capitalists face that factor into entrepreneurs' businesses. Includes a breakdown analysis of the mechanics of a Term Sheet and the tactics needed to negotiate Details the different stages of the venture capital process, from starting a venture and seeing it through to the later stages Explores the entire venture capital ecosystem including those who invest in venture capitalist Contain standard documents that are used in these transactions Written by two highly regarded experts in the world of venture capital The venture capital arena is a complex and competitive place, but with this book as your guide, you'll discover what it takes to make your way through it.

Economist Conor Woodman has decided to test his negotiating skills, charm and eye for a bargain against some of the world's oldest trading cultures. He's sold his house to finance the trip, but if his hunches are right - trading Sudanese camels for Zambian coffee, coffee for South African red wine and then off to China to buy jade with the proceeds - he'll return six months later with a lot of money, some new friends and a whole raft of brilliant tall tales. Whether trading teak or tea, surfboards or seafood, Conor goes head-to-head with the best operators in the world's most hotly-contested markets. But will years of experience as a business analyst mean anything when he is suspected of being a spy? And can London's financial bear pit prepare him for a horde of vodka-fuelled horse traders on the plains of central Asia? Part Undercover Economist, part Apprentice challenge, Around the World in 80 Trades offers an exciting insight into the human story behind the money in our pockets, and reminds us that making a living is about exactly that - living.

Praise for MAO, MARX & THE MARKET "This is a gripping tale from start to finish, an extraordinary adventure told by a brilliant and idealistic businessman confronted by political disloyalty and chicanery on an epic scale. LeBaron tells his story with a punch, but his basic instincts of morality and decency shine throughout." --Peter L. Bernstein, President, Peter L. Bernstein, Inc., author of The Power of Gold: The History of an Obsession "An insight-packed thriller summarizing a brilliant contrarian investor s adventures in the two great dramas of our era Russia and China; chock-full of pithy lessons relevant for investors and observers alike." --Graham Allison, Director, Robert and Renee Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University "Dean LeBaron s book on his adventures in Russia and China is a fun read. I recommend it to anyone taking their first or second or third visit to either country for business or pleasure. LeBaron brings out the personal warmth of these countries in terms of their individuals, as well as the obvious complexities of dealing with them." --David Gill, Board Member of several companies involved with Russia, Retired International Finance Corporation Official "This is the fascinating story of Dean LeBaron in his quest to participate right from the start in the opening of China and Russia following the demise of their socialist/ communist regimes. It is the best account of what happened in the emerging market world in the nineties." --Marc Faber, Editor, The Gloom Boom & Doom Report,Managing Director, Marc Faber Limited "Adventure capitalist Dean LeBaron is the Indiana Jones of finance. Follow his escapades in emerging markets and get an insider s view of the birth of capitalism in Russia and China. You ll be amused, entertained, and instructed. Mao, Marx & the Market provides a fascinating insider s view of the creation of market economies with all their attendant travails. A must read." --Bill Miller, CFA, Chief Executive Officer, Legg Mason Funds Management, Inc.

Drive . . . and grow rich! The bestselling author of Investment Biker is back from the ultimate road trip: a three-year drive around the world that would ultimately set the Guinness record for the longest continuous car journey. In Adventure Capitalist, legendary investor Jim Rogers, dubbed “the Indiana Jones of finance” by Time magazine, proves that the best way to profit from the global situation is to see the world mile by mile. “While I have never patronized a prostitute,” he writes, “I know that one can learn more about a country from speaking to the madam of a brothel or a black marketeer than from meeting a foreign minister.” Behind the wheel of a sunburst-yellow, custom-built convertible Mercedes, Rogers and his fiancée, Paige Parker, began their “Millennium Adventure” on January 1, 1999, from Iceland. They traveled through 116 countries, including many where most have rarely ventured, such as Saudi Arabia, Myanmar, Angola, Sudan, Congo, Colombia, and East Timor. They drove through war zones, deserts, jungles, epidemics, and blizzards. They had many narrow escapes. They camped with nomads and camels in the western Sahara. They ate silkworms, iguanas, snakes, termites, guinea pigs, porcupines, crocodiles, and grasshoppers. Best of all, they saw the real world from the ground up—the only vantage point from which it can be truly understood—economically, politically, and socially. Here are just a few of the author’s conclusions: • The new commodity bull market has started. • The twenty-first century will belong to China. • There is a dramatic shortage of women developing in Asia. • Pakistan is on the verge of disintegrating. • India, like many other large nations, will break into several countries. • The Euro is doomed to fail. • There are fortunes to be made in Angola. • Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) are a scam. • Bolivia is a comer after decades of instability, thanks to gigantic amounts of natural gas. Adventure Capitalist is the most opinionated, sprawling, adventurous journey you’re likely to take within the pages of a book—the perfect read for armchair adventurers, global investors, car enthusiasts, and anyone interested in seeing the world and understanding it as it really is.

The Jameson Raid was a pivotal moment in the history of South Africa, linking events from the Anglo-Boer War to the declaration of the Union of South Africa in 1910. For more than a century, the failed revolution has been interpreted through the lens of British imperialism, with responsibility laid at the feet of Cecil Rhodes. Yet, the raid was less a serious attempt to overthrow a Boer government than a wild adventure with transnational roots in American filibustering. In The Cowboy Capitalist, renowned South African historian Charles van Onselen challenges a historiography of over 120 years, locating the raid in American rather than British history and forcing us to rethink the histories of at least three nations. Through a close look at the little-remembered figure of John Hays Hammond, a confidant of both Rhodes and Jameson, he discovers the American Old West on the South African Highveld. This radical reinterpretation challenges the commonly held belief that the Jameson Raid was quintessentially British and, in doing so, drives splinters into our understanding of events as far forward as South Africa’s critical 1948 general election, with which the foundations of Grand Apartheid were laid.

The surprising connections between the American frontier and empire in southern Africa, and the people who participated in both This book begins in an era when romantic notions of American frontiering overlapped with Gilded Age extractive capitalism. In the late nineteenth century, the U.S.-Mexican borderlands constituted one stop of many where Americans chased capitalist dreams beyond the United States. Crisscrossing the American West, southern Africa, and northern Mexico, Andrew Offenburger examines how these frontier spaces could glitter with grandiose visions, expose the flawed and immoral strategies of profiteers, and yet reveal the capacity for resistance and resilience that indigenous people summoned when threatened. Linking together a series of stories about Boer exiles who settled in Mexico, a global network of protestant missionaries, and adventurers involved in the parallel displacements of indigenous peoples in Rhodesia and the Yaqui Indians in Mexico, Offenburger situates the borderlands of the Mexican North and the American Southwest within a global system, bound by common actors who interpreted their lives through a shared frontier ideology.