[Books of the Week] The People Who Invest First and More

The People Who Invest First

For individual investors accustomed to picking publicly listed stocks, the private market is usually shrouded in fog. Jang Dongjin, Han Jeongsu and Kim Daehwan begin clearing that fog not by looking for “the next blockbuster startup,” but by explaining how the market is structured. How are general partners (GPs) and limited partners (LPs) connected? Where do deals come from, and how does equity change from seed funding through Series A and eventually to an exit? The book separates what can be verified from financial statements from what must be assessed by meeting founders and their teams in person, then walks readers step by step through the investment process, from the J-curve, FOMO, and contract structures to follow-on investments, boards of directors, and put options. Particularly effective is the structure at the end of each chapter, where one investor’s journey from a seed investment through two exits is woven together like a novel, turning dry institutional details into scenes of money actually changing hands.

The title puts the emphasis on “first,” but by the time you finish reading, what matters more than getting in early is how to get out. As one line in the book puts it, “a company doing well” and “me realizing a return” are two different things. The advice in the final section—to build a portfolio that accounts for taxes, liquidity, and the possibility of losses rather than relying on one or two home runs—also brings early-stage investing out of the realm of adventure and into the domain of asset management. The explanations also benefit from the fact that the three authors have each worked in startup building, individual investing, and VC, IPO, and M&A operations. This book cannot eliminate the high failure rate and information asymmetry of private-market investing, but at the very least, it tempers romantic notions like “having the eye to spot a unicorn early” with the language of contracts and exit strategies. (Written by Jang Dongjin, Han Jeongsu and Kim Daehwan | Seongandang)

Buy Freedom with Money

For Dan Lok, money is measured less in won or dollars than in whether you can say no. He calls it F.U. Money: enough capital to walk away after telling an unpleasant job, person, or unfair situation exactly what you think of it. That is why this book is almost hostile to conventional personal-finance advice about cutting back on lattes and waiting for compound interest to work its magic. Drawing on his own journey from supermarket worker to online entrepreneur, Lok takes aim at the beliefs that small savings add up to a fortune, that you need a perfect plan, and that hard work over a long period is all it takes. In their place, he offers a “wealth triangle”: high-income skills, a scalable business, and high-return investments. He also provides fairly specific tactics, including high-ticket closing, online business, outsourcing routine tasks, and setting daily income targets.

His tone is unusually combative, even by the standards of success books. It can be effective in breaking through readers’ excuses, but it also risks attributing structural causes of poverty and financial insecurity to a lack of personal initiative. Passages that present high-income skills earning $10,000 a month and returns of 10% or more a year as parts of a single formula also need to be read with a clear distinction between goals and reality. Still, once you strip away the exaggeration, one idea remains: money is not a means to luxury but “capital that secures the right to say no.” Rather than making frugality a virtue, the book argues that you should raise the value of your time and reduce the work you have to endure for money—a message that fits the title precisely. It is a rough-edged book, best read selectively rather than taken at face value, but it makes you reconsider the relationship between money and freedom in strikingly blunt terms. (Written by Dan Lok | Translated by Park Youngjun | Seosamdok)

Moneywear

Kim Gyu-rang starts from the idea that everyone has a personal “default setting” when it comes to money. “You have to work hard to earn money.” “Having a lot of money is dangerous.” “This much is enough for me.” These beliefs never appear on a balance sheet, but they subtly shape decisions: shrinking back during salary negotiations, putting off investment opportunities, or spending money as soon as it comes in. The author says she earned an annual salary of over 100 million won in her twenties, founded an investment company, and spent about seven years meeting thousands of clients. Rather than focusing on investment techniques, she has observed people’s hesitation and avoidance when faced with money. That is why this 208-page book does not begin by asking “How much will you earn?” but instead asks, “How much have you allowed yourself to accept?”

Moving from Part 1’s “Getting Ready to Allow Money In” and “Having and Not Having” to Part 2’s “Money Stays with Those Who Don’t Waver,” the book ends at “A State in Which Money No Longer Gets in the Way of Life.” It is closer to a book about self-awareness, using money as its lens, than to a personal-finance guide. Lines such as “Money flows to places where it is welcomed” can veer into the self-help optimism of explaining even wealth inequality through one’s mindset. Still, the invitation to look at feelings beyond the numbers—fear of loss, guilt, and discomfort about receiving money—has value. As the epilogue puts it, “I-money, money that resembles me, the me contained in money”: in the end, money reveals what a person fears and what they value. It is a modest but demanding prompt to examine recurring choices before looking for a good investment. (Written by Kim Gyu-rang | Think Smart)

America, So Meticulously Designed

What is strange about America is how long it stays strange. Customers effectively shoulder part of workers’ wages through tips; supermarkets sell eggs by the dozen; and ads for cancer treatments and depression medication play casually on television. Kim Sangjo does not dismiss these scenes as “just the way Americans are.” Instead, he traces the institutional and market conditions that make these behaviors persist. Drawing on a decade of living in the United States and teaching American studies at a local university, he follows questions sparked by tip screens and pickup trucks into the CROWN Act and Black hair, Jewish diners at Chinese restaurants on Christmas, Koreatowns, and the integration of the U.S. military during the Korean War. The book’s appeal lies in the way everyday habits suddenly intersect with the histories of labor, race, and immigration.

The latter half’s discussion of “land” shows just how spatially designed the United States is. The discussion ranges from why Will in Good Will Hunting finds it difficult to leave his working-class Boston neighborhood to Black urban communities and “white suburbs,” the political anger of the Rust Belt, Huntsville and the rocket technology that flowed in from Nazi Germany, and Native American casinos and the issue of representation in Washington, D.C. The author writes, “Individuals make choices, but institutions and markets create the choices available to them.” That comes close to the central idea running through all 30 questions. At times, however, explaining every aspect of daily life through structural forces can flatten the role of chance and individual differences. Even so, the way the book reads a vast America through a single bill, a name, or an address is clever. Read it before a trip and you will see the reasons behind the scenery; read it while following U.S. news and you will see the blueprint that has long been there behind the events. (Written by Kim Sangjo | Paziit)

Design the Future of Food

A food crisis reaches us first in the price of groceries, long before it arrives as hunger in a distant country. Kim Minsu, an analyst of international grain markets, looks anew at that familiar meal as infrastructure for civilization. The book begins unexpectedly with movies. It sets food shortages in Soylent Green, the struggle for survival in Snowpiercer, resource monopolies in Mad Max, and the space potato in The Martian alongside the real-world climate crisis. From there, it looks back at Neolithic farming and crop rotation, agricultural machinery, fertilizer and the Green Revolution, and genetically modified crops, before turning to grain price shocks, major grain traders, export restrictions, and food security. Thanks to the author’s experience handling international grain purchases and market research at the Korea Feed Association and analyzing grain futures markets, the sweeping topic of “the future of food” stays grounded in the realities of prices and supply chains.

Drones and autonomous farm equipment, vertical farms and smart farms, plant-based and insect protein, cultivated foods and precision fermentation, cellular agriculture, and 3D and 4D food printing all appear in the latter half, unfolding like a preview of the future food market. The book does not present any one technology as a savior. Instead, it repeatedly reminds readers that simply increasing production cannot solve a complex crisis entangled with climate, energy, war, and trade. Given the breadth of the subject, it does not delve deeply into the costs and power dynamics associated with each technology. Even so, its central question is clear: more important than what we will eat is who will produce it, how they will do so, and who will control the system. It makes a persuasive case that the meal served every day is the final scene in a vast system where agriculture, diplomacy, security, and technology intersect. (Written by Kim Minsu | Midas Books (Little Midas))

Fools Don’t Know What I’ve Made

One day in 1879, in the French countryside, postman Ferdinand Cheval tripped over a strange stone while making his rounds. He was 43 when he picked it up. After delivering mail for about 30 kilometers a day, he began going back to collect more stones. At night, he stacked them by lamplight. He had no teacher, blueprint, or client. Thirty-three years later, a 26-meter-long and 12-meter-high “Ideal Palace” stood in his vegetable garden. Hindu temples, Swiss chalets, medieval castles, elephants, snakes, and pelicans all collided in a single structure. The villagers called him mad, and the French Commission for Historic Monuments later went so far as to classify the building as a matter of “psychopathology.” Yet André Malraux pushed for its designation as a cultural heritage site despite opposition from experts, while Picasso, Max Ernst, and Niki de Saint Phalle came to visit.

Nils Tavernier does not reduce this story to a success myth about an eccentric genius. In 2018, he made Cheval’s life into the film The Ideal Palace. Drawing on unpublished documents he found while preparing the film and Cheval’s personal notes, he reconstructs in 432 pages how labor and loss accumulated inside a single building. Alice, the daughter born the year Cheval began building the palace, did not live to see 16. His son and wife also died before him, one after the other. After being told that he could not bury his family in the palace, Cheval took up his wheelbarrow again at age 78 and spent eight years building his own tomb in the cemetery. His words, “Nature wants to sculpt,” read less like a romantic artist’s declaration than a laborer’s dogged command to himself. Who has the right to decide what qualifies as art? The “fools” in the title are the people who mocked Cheval, but by the time we finish the book, the label also turns back on institutions and critics—and on all of us who accept only what is easy to understand as art. (Written by Nils Tavernier | Translated by Lee Sewook | Open Books)

Who Knows the Fate of Their Own Bones?

In the mid-1650s, between 40 and 50 urns containing human remains were discovered in a field in Norfolk, England. Thomas Browne, a physician and naturalist, began by examining the urns, but his thoughts soon moved beyond archaeology to questions of death and time. Starting with “to bury or to burn,” he examines bones and ashes, combs and pins, before arriving at the final section, “Life Is a Pure Flame.” By then, the question is no longer whose remains belong to which era, but how human beings endure oblivion. This is the first complete Korean translation of Hydriotaphia, Urne-Buriall, published in 1658, and it includes a piece by Virginia Woolf and a recommendation by Jang Gang-myeong. The book’s place in this unfamiliar canon is suggested by the fact that Borges considered Browne a kind of “other self,” while Sebald paid tribute to him at the start of The Rings of Saturn.

Even when writing about human remains, Browne’s prose never becomes dry academic language. A physician’s observations, a believer’s reflections, and a poet’s exaggerations pull against one another within the same sentence, making death strangely resplendent. In the end, humans become a handful of ashes, yet through funerals, records, and memory, we keep leaning toward eternity. The book escapes the confines of a 17th-century curiosity because it regards both the futility of that gesture and the human dignity of refusing to abandon it. It neither consoles us about death nor magnifies it into a source of terror, but gazes beautifully, to the very end, at the fate of all things to disappear. (Written by Thomas Browne | Translated by Gong Jinho | Artichoke)

Because I Couldn’t Buy an Apgujeong Hyundai Apartment

Yoon Boin’s characters despair over housing prices, yet rarely consider stepping outside the real estate market. Across these 10 short stories are people who take auction classes after going bankrupt; people who live in monthly rentals in Yeoksam-dong while buying several properties through gap investment; people who, after serving time for embezzlement and gambling, start eyeing the Hannam 3 District as soon as they are released; and people who try to turn the tables again even after rising interest rates stall villa sales. They are less victims than people determined to become “players” by any means. In the title story, the narrator passes the Apgujeong Hyundai apartment he never managed to buy and teaches his ex-girlfriend’s son the logic of money and capitalism. For the narrator of “Real Estate Is Over, They Say—Dongbu Ichon-dong,” property auctions become almost a lifeline of hope. The released prisoner in “Hannam 3 District” and the 58-year-old fortune-teller in “Manchun” may have different faces of desire, but they arrive at a similar conclusion: even after a setback, they reach for the calculator again.

While Korean literature has long told stories of real estate from the perspective of people facing demolition, tenants, and those pushed out, Yoon turns the camera toward the inside of the market. As a result, this collection offers no easy division between innocent victims and greedy speculators. It captures desire in a glance at a Rolls-Royce, the habit of stopping at a bar after an auction, or a finger checking new auction listings in a restroom. Rather than condemn people obsessed with money, it shows why they keep returning to the game. “We’re going to become the Captain Ri of the 21st century,” one character says—a line that is funny and precise at once. In an era when owning a home in Seoul has become more than a matter of housing, serving as proof that you have not lost, desire is no longer something to be ashamed of; it has become a language of survival. (Written by Yoon Boin | Minumsa)

Day of Liberation

In George Saunders’s world, people are often imprisoned without realizing they are imprisoned. Jeremy, in the title story, “Day of Liberation,” has had his memory erased and is fastened to a wall, performing stories for a wealthy family while taking pride in his work. Brian, in “Ghoul,” plays a demon for the “visitors” who may one day arrive at an underground theme park where no one has ever seen the outside world; anyone who asks questions is punished in the name of the community. The narrator of “Elliott Spencer” has lost his memory and language, relearning a few words each day while being drawn into a political protest he does not understand. The nine stories seem to depict different dystopias, but beneath them all runs the same question: how does power take control of people’s language, memory, and even their capacity for independent action?

What makes Saunders frightening is that he does not portray dictatorship as nothing but a vast evil. In “Love Letter,” a grandfather in the year 202X writes to his grandson, saying that even the moment democracy collapses does not look as clear as a history textbook at the time. Institutions do not explode and vanish in a single day; they gradually tilt as people pursue convenience, remain silent, and faithfully perform their roles. Yet Saunders does not push the gloom all the way into cynicism. He hopes, as a line in “Ghoul” suggests, that words might play a role in “bringing down the old world,” and in “My House,” he leaves room for the human heart to endure fear amid the things falling apart. This is a collection of short stories that is both allegorical and a political novel of the present, with an ethical tension that lingers long after the twisted laughter fades. (Written by George Saunders | Translated by Jeong Youngmok | Munhakdongne)

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.